“I love that waterfall, and the time we spent there—except for the last day.” Flynn fastened his seat belt.

“That was the highlight of my visit when we were all here. How could you not like the last day?” Nessa frowned. “That was when Nanny Lucy fixed a picnic and spent the day with us. I always thought it was a perfect ending to the time we got to spend here in Blossom. At the end of that day, Mama either picked me up here or at the café when I got a little older.”

“I liked swimming, but I didn’t like that picnic,” Flynn admitted. “It meant our time here was over, and I had to go back to Dallas to live in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment. I missed the open space and the waterfall, having y’all to talk to even on the days when we bickered and argued. Every time I climbed the steps, I wished I was back here in the country.”

April hadn’t liked the day that her cousins left the place, either. Once a year, in the summer, then maybe again on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas, were the only times she got to be with them, and those were special days for her. She and the cousins might argue and fuss the whole time they were there, but when they were gone, she was all alone for the rest of the summer with only one of the Waylons for company. Just thinking of the loneliness of living out in the country on a dead-end road made her stomach hurt like it had when she was a kid and her cousins left.

In those days, if Nanny Lucy wasn’t packing up patterns and quilt kits to mail off to her customers, she was either sewing up a quilt top in the house or doing the hand-quilting out in the shed. April quickly learned to stay out of her way and to entertain herself.

A vision of Nanny Lucy standing in the middle of the living room came to mind. April had just graduated and had a decision to make about going to college or getting out on her own. It was one of her grandmother’s bad days, when she was mean and hateful.

“You can either live here and commute to college,” Nanny Lucy had told her, “or I’ll give you the amount of money that the first semester would cost me, and you can have what you’ve saved through the years to go with it. But if you take the money, don’t ever ask me for another dime.”

She’d taken the money and blown every bit of it by Christmas. No matter how down and out April had been, Nanny Lucy had stayed true to her word and never offered to help her out again.

That’s no excuse for the decisions I’ve made, April thought as she watched the scrub oak trees and the mesquite thickets go by at seventy-five miles an hour. I didn’t have to mess up my life, but I did.