“I bet it was right before we got the court decision on this place, right?” Nessa butted in before Flynn could say a word.

“Nope, a month before,” Flynn answered. “I moped around for a couple of weeks and finally decided that I needed some space to get my head on right and my life back together. If it takes a year, that’s all right by me.”

“Did you talk to your dad about what happened?” April asked.

“He would have just laughed at me. Two things he always told me were to stay away from married women and never go out of the house without protection.” Flynn buttered a biscuit. “And for the record, I don’t want you to leave, either, Nessa. Sitting down to family supper, and sometimes breakfast, has been pretty great. So thank you for doing this for us.”

“No problem,” Nessa said. “Your turn, April.”

“My turn for what?” April wouldn’t even know where to start untangling all her problems.

“Men that have let you down,” Nessa said. “You told us that you’d made bad choices with bad people. Fess up.”

April’s hands got clammy. She had put all the past into a box, taped it shut, and then buried it in the back of her mind. She wanted to keep it tucked away and never talk about it, but evidently tonight was confession night for the three of them. “I’m on the other end of that stick that Flynn was talking about. I was the one left behind with a broken heart, and for some insane reason, I kept making the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome. Some guy would say that he loved me, and suddenly I would do anything to keep him. He could lay on my sofa and drink beer all day and take my hard-earned paycheck at the end of the week to go out with his friends and have a good time and leave me at home. But hey, he loved me, right?” She shrugged and went back to eating.

“You didn’t have much of a home life here with Nanny Lucy, so you didn’t know what to expect out of a relationship,” Nessa said, realizing that she had pretty much been in the same kind of boat. She didn’t want a relationship like her folks had and had steered toward the wrong kind of men.

“Neither did you.” April shrugged again. “We were all wrong about each other. Did either of you ever go to counseling?”

“Not me,” Flynn answered. “I probably should have had therapy after my mom died, but Dad was too busy with all his stuff to even think about the grief I was shouldering.”