I laughed. “Nick isn’t that bad,” I said, and she turned to me. My eyes flicked to the truck we were about to rear-end at a stoplight, and I braced myself against the dash.

“I said he loved you. I didn’t say he trusted you,” she said, her eyes on me as she braked smoothly to a halt ending with our grille six inches from his bumper.

My stomach clenched. “You don’t think he trusts me?”

“Rachel,” she cajoled, inching forward as the light changed but the truck didn’t move. “He leaves town without telling you? Then doesn’t tell you when he’s coming back? I don’t think someone has come between you, I think something has. You scared the hell out of him, and he’s not enough of a man to admit it, deal with it, and get over it.”

I said nothing, glad when we started moving again. I hadn’t just scared him, I had made him seize. It must have been awful. No wonder he left. Great, now I’d feel guilty all day.

Ivy jerked the wheel and shifted lanes. A horn blew, and she eyed the driver in the rearview mirror. Slowly the car put space between us, pushed back by the force of her gaze. “Do you mind if we stop at my folks’ house for a minute? It’s on the way.”

“Sure.” I stifled a gasp when she cut a right in front of the truck we’d just passed. “Ivy, you may have lightning reflexes, but the guy driving that truck just had kittens.”

She snorted, dropping back two whole feet off the bumper of the car now ahead of us.

Ivy made an obvious effort to drive normally through the busier areas of the Hollows, and slowly I relaxed my death grip on my bag. It was the first time we’d been together and away from Jenks in about a week, and neither one of us knew what to get him for the solstice. Ivy was tending to the heated doghouse she had seen in a catalog; anything to get him and his brood out of the church. I’d settle for a lockbox we could cover with a rug and pretend was an end table.

As Ivy drove, slowly the yards grew larger and the trees taller. The houses began moving back from the street until only their roofs showed from behind stands of evergreens. We were just inside the city limits, right next to the river. It really wasn’t on the way to the mall, but the interstate wasn’t far, and with that, the city was wide-open.

Ivy pulled unhesitatingly into a gated drive. Twin tracks made a black trail on the dusting of snow that had fallen since it had been plowed. I leaned to look out the window, never having seen her parents’ house. The car slowed to a halt before an old, romantic-looking three-story home painted white with hunter green shutters. A little red two-seater was parked out front, dry and free of snow.