The time that she had taken a deep breath, gone under, and let it out slowly came back to her mind. When her lungs had begun to burn, she had surfaced and wished that she’d had any mother in the world other than Rachel. Why did she have to die? Even though she was just a teenager, she might have loved April. April would have even taken super-religious Aunt Cora, but her favorite would have been her aunt Gabby. She had thought that Flynn was the luckiest boy in the whole world.

You have the chance to start over, the voice inside her head said. Now it’s up to you to make the most of it. Don’t ruin it like you’ve done in the past.

Nessa snagged a parking spot close to the door at Walmart and turned off the engine. “Flynn, do you want to go to Home Depot for what you need? We should be done in half an hour at the most.” She tossed him the keys.

“Yeah, right!” Flynn chuckled. “A woman in Walmart for only thirty minutes. That would be a miracle.”

“Maybe one of your women would take two hours, but Nessa and I have a list, and I don’t have money to blow on junk. What cash I’ve got has to last for a whole month while we finish a quilt.” April unfastened her seat belt and opened the back door of the SUV. “And then I have to look for a job.”

A job with no skills needed except waitressing, tending bar, or selling plants in a greenhouse, she thought as she stepped out of the cool vehicle and into the sweltering summer heat that seemed to suck the life out of a person.

Kind of like being stuck under a quilt frame in the middle of the hot summer, she thought.

“You can use Nanny Lucy’s car anytime you want,” Nessa said. “It belongs to all of us, so you’ve got as much right to it as we do.”

Flynn rounded the front of the SUV, slid in behind the wheel, and restarted the engine. “I’ll be right here waiting for you in thirty minutes. If you aren’t out in an hour, I’m going to steal your vehicle and go home.”

“I will track you down, and you’ll be sorry that you took something that belonged to me,” Nessa told him without cracking a smile.

Flynn chuckled as he put the vehicle in gear and left the two women standing beside the place where folks returned their carts.

“I guess we’d better hustle,” April said, “or he’ll never let us live it down.”

“He wouldn’t dare leave us.” Nessa started toward the entrance. “Hey, look, it says that Walmart is hiring. You want to work here?”