Hearing those two words helped Nessa more than reading one of the dozens of self-help books that filled the bookcase in her bedroom back in Turkey. She pulled her feet up out of the water and let them air-dry. “Too bad those ancestor tests that are so popular these days can’t tell us the why as well as the who we are related to.”

“That could get sticky with folks who’ve been unfaithful to their spouses, couldn’t it?” Jackson asked. “As it is, cousins can pop up and folks have no idea how they’re related. If there was a record that said, ‘You are kin to this person because your great-grandfather had an affair with her great-grandmother,’ just think of the repercussions.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Nessa shook her head slowly. Either of her grandparents ever doing anything immoral was something that, in her mind, simply wouldn’t happen. “I don’t think we’ve got a thing to worry about. Nanny Lucy was too religious to ever have an affair, and she would have killed Grandpa if he did.”

Jackson swatted a mosquito on his arm, leaving a smear of blood where the little varmint had been. “That’s my cue to go home. They seem to come out worse in the evening. You staying a while longer?” He extended a hand.

She put her hand in his and let him pull her up to a standing position. “Not if those bugs are coming around to suck my blood.”

“I’ll walk with you to the fork in the path.” He dropped her hand. “You said you quilted this morning. Did you enjoy it?”

Nessa wished that he had kept her hand in his, but maybe he wasn’t feeling the sparks that she was. They were so real to her that she could see them almost as clearly as she could the fireflies flitting out ahead of them.

“I don’t see many of those out in the Texas Panhandle,” she muttered.

“What?” Jackson asked.

“Lightning bugs,” she answered. “When we were kids, I thought the only place that had them or a waterfall was Blossom, Texas. It wasn’t until I was older that I figured out this place wasn’t as magical as I thought when we were little.”

“Today’s kids are so glued to their phones and tablets that nothing much would be magical to them,” Jackson said.

“When and if I ever have kids, I want to let them be kids as long as they can. Once we’re grown up, we can’t ever go back and recover all those simple feelings that lightning bugs and waterfalls and a new dress for the first day of school bring us,” she said.

“If you bring up your kids right here on this dead-end road, you just might be able to pull that off.” Jackson stopped at the fork in the road.