“Do any of us really want it bad enough to get married?” Flynn’s memories of the time he’d had with his mother and the weeks he’d spent with Nanny Lucy in the summers were good. But over there on the other side, after he had gone to live with his father, were some painful times that he’d just as soon keep locked away in the back of his mind until he figured out how to deal with them.

“Remember the summer”—April kept stitching as she talked—“that I pulled my first baby tooth? Y’all were here, and Flynn was so mad because I was the youngest one of us and lost the first tooth.”

“I was jealous, too,” Nessa admitted. “The tooth fairy left you two quarters that night.”

“Nanny Lucy made me put one of them in my piggy bank for my college fund,” April said. “But I got to keep the other one. I bought a snow cone with it after y’all left.”

“You had a college fund at six years old?” Flynn hadn’t had a college fund when he graduated from high school. He’d had to work forty hours a week and take night courses to get his degree. “What happened to you, April?”

She shrugged. “Nanny Lucy said she would match my savings, dime for dime, until I graduated. The deal was if I had enough to pay for most of my first semester and I passed all my courses, then she would pay for the rest of the years until I got my degree. If I took the money and didn’t go to school, she wouldn’t pay a single penny on my education or help me out of any binds I might get into. But I couldn’t stay here anymore. The rest is history. You already know most of it.”

“Not the details.” Flynn glanced down the row to see that she was at least two squares behind him on the morning job.

“Those aren’t important.” April’s voice was as haunted as the look Flynn had seen in her eyes when she first arrived.

Flynn wondered if his tone was like that or if his eyes took on that same look when he talked about the past. Did the pain come through as plainly as it did with April? He had no doubt that she’d returned to Blossom to find closure for all the things that had made her the way she was. He’d come back to find peace, but was there really peace in this place, or was he chasing an illusion?

Nessa nudged his shoulder. “You sure got quiet.”