Lucy had a few ideas about that, but she kept them to herself.

BREE LOCKED UP THE FARM stand for the night. The frames in the hives were heavy with honey. Earlier today, she’d cleaned Myra’s old hand-cranked extruder, and at dawn tomorrow, she’d start this year’s harvest. The work would be backbreaking, but that didn’t bother her as much as the implications of harvesting honey for next summer. She’d accepted the fact that she had to stay on the island, but she was far from sure she had enough money saved to survive the winter until she could sell this new crop.

She gazed around at what she’d created—her little fairy castle farm stand with its carousel ribbon trim and Easter egg Adirondack chairs. It shocked her how happy this world she’d created made her. She liked watching her customers settle into the painted chairs and enjoy samples of her honey. She enjoyed seeing them testing her lotions, sniffing her soaps, and pondering her candles. If only she could live in a perpetual summer, with no threat of winter, no obsessing over money, no worries about Toby. She sighed, gazed at what she could see of the sunset through the trees, and headed for the house.

The first thing she noticed as she stepped inside was that the kitchen smelled delicious, like real food. “Toby?”

He wore his favorite jeans and T-shirt along with a baseball cap and a pair of red oven mitts with the batting coming out of one thumb. He took a casserole dish from the oven and set it on the stove next to a pair of wrinkled baked potatoes. “I made dinner,” he said.

“By yourself? I didn’t know you could cook.”

“Gram taught me some stuff.” Steam rose from the casserole as he pulled off the aluminum foil. “I wanted Mike to come eat with us, but he had business.”

“He has a lot to do,” she managed, without sarcasm. “What did you fix?”

“Cowboy casserole, noodles, and baked potatoes. Plus we have the bread Lucy made today.”

Not exactly carb light, but she wasn’t going to criticize. She washed her hands, avoiding the pan of cold, soggy noodles in the sink, then took two plates from the cupboard. She pushed aside a copy of Black Soldiers in the Civil War to set them on the table. “It smells delicious.”

The cowboy casserole turned out to be a concoction of ground beef, onion, pinto beans, and, judging from the empty can on the counter, tomato soup. Six months ago, she’d never have eaten anything like this, but despite some undercooked onions and overbrowned ground beef, she had seconds. “A great meal, Chef,” she said when she finally put down her fork. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Anytime you feel like cooking, you go right ahead.”

Toby liked having his work appreciated. “Maybe. How come you don’t cook?”