Lily shot a look into the rearview mirror that stopped Braden’s sentence short, and he blushed. That was a good sign, in her book. At least he wasn’t so hardened that he couldn’t turn red when he was about to say a dirty word.

“We’ll be in the place we’re ‘falling into’ in about thirty minutes, tops. You’ll have the same bedrooms that you always had when your grandparents were still with us. I don’t expect the place to look much different than it did when we came for your grandmother’s funeral five years ago,” she said.

“That means the historical marker is still in the front yard. The porch swing still squeaks, and the most exciting part of the whole day is when you hear a second car go by out on the road.” Holly sighed again, this time with lots of self-pity.

“Because the house is so far back on the lane, you damn . . . darn sure can’t see the cars going by.” Braden blushed again.

“Ain’t life grand?” Lily looked up in the rearview mirror at the reflection of her son in the back seat. “Only now, we’ll be sharing the house with Mack Cooper, the vo-ag teacher at the high school, and the pasture is full of goats.”

Holly threw her hands over her eyes. “This gets worse and worse.”

“Goats? You mean real animal goats we saw at the petting zoo when we were little kids? I kind of liked them,” Braden said.

Holly whipped around to glare at him. “Traitor.”

“Well, I did.” He shrugged.