“I am,” she said as she tucked her hand into his. “I’m ready for more than just today, Mack. I’m going to let Wyatt have that apartment, but I’m going to add the furniture into the rent, heavily. I’m happy here working at the shop with Sally and living at the house with you. Life is”—she paused and cupped his face in her hand—“I’m not sure the right word is peaceful when we have two kids that bicker about everything, and after that scorching-hot time in your bedroom, but that’s what comes to mind. The other thing is happiness. I didn’t realize how much I missed that in my life until I found it again.”

“Me, too, on all of what you just said,” Mack told her.

“But before we take another step, I want you to think long and hard about something, and that’s children. We’re not too old to have a child between us, but do we want to do that? We need to give it a lot of thought and maybe even pray about it,” she said.

“Honey, we have two beautiful children. I’d just as soon not plan any more, but if an accident should happen, we won’t be upset. We’ll just figure . . .” He hesitated. “We didn’t use protection the other night.”

“I’m on the pill, not so much for protection, but for irregularity at my age,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”

He led her back toward his truck about the time the gravediggers lowered Granny Hayes’s casket into the ground. Lily stopped and watched them, then walked over to the grave, picked up a handful of dirt, and sprinkled it on the wooden box. “Thank you for what you meant to us, Granny. Rest in peace.”

“She would have liked that,” Mack said.

“I feel like my eyes have been opened after I’d been in a deep sleep since I came home to Comfort,” she said as she brushed her hands together to remove the last of the dirt. “First finding the journal with all my ancestors in it, and then reuniting with my friends and realizing how much they mean to me, and then there’s you.”

“I came in last?” he teased.

“No, I just saved the best for last,” she told him.

He opened the truck door for her, put his big hands around her waist, picked her up, and set her in the passenger seat. “I’ll take being last all the time if that’s the case.”

“Let’s go home,” she said, and she meant it as home—permanently.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

Thirteen months later