CHAPTER SEVENTEEN COLE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN PALMER

CHAPTER NINETEEN PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY COLE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR COLE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX COLE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT PALMER

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE COLE

CHAPTER THIRTY PALMER

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE PALMER

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO COLE

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE PALMER

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR COLE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE PALMER

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX COLE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN PALMER

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT COLE

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE PALMER

CHAPTER FORTY COLE

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE PALMER

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO COLE

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE PALMER

EPILOGUE PALMER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

PALMER

You’ve been warned.”

I plop on a barstool across from my best friend, Val. She wipes her hands on a white dishrag and side-eyes my situation. Because I’m clearly a situation.

My mascara doesn’t look as neat as it did when I applied it . . . yesterday morning. But that’s what happens when you stay up late matching socks and wake up to a hungry twelve-year-old who’s already missed the bus. Still, it might’ve been okay if I hadn’t rubbed my eyes during a bout of allergies after bebopping through the bus yard at work like I own the damned place.

I sigh.

Early-afternoon sunlight streams in the windows of Fletcher’s, the only restaurant in a ten-mile radius. The aroma of my favorite Friday lunch, open-faced beef manhattan sandwiches, perfumes the air. Before I can order one to go, I notice the line drawn through it on the menu board.

Of course.

“I’m afraid to ask . . . ,” Val says, handing me a glass of tea. God bless this woman.

“If I didn’t enjoy my job so much, I’d quit.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You need the money, and Kirk pays you too much to walk away.”

“Fine.” I sigh, swirling the straw around the glass. “If I didn’t enjoy my job so much and Kirk didn’t pay me well, I’d quit.”

Val giggles.

“I had a customer call for a radiator surge tank today,” I say.

“A radiator what?”

“Surge tank. I’ll spare you the details. It’s a very specific bus part that we usually keep in stock. That’s all you need to know.”

“Okay. Noted.”

“So, I get the order for the tank, and I call the shop to see if we have one. Burt insisted we didn’t. Like, he was ready to fight me over it. But the whole time we were talking, I could hear the little farming game he plays on his phone mooing and clucking.”

“Ooh, this isn’t going to end well,” Val says, her eyes sparkling.

“I have two choices, right? I can take Burt’s word for it, since he is the shop manager, and just call the customer back and relay the information. Or I can do what’s right by Kirk, since I am the assistant general manager, and go see if there’s a bus with the tank in the yard—because I know there is. I know it.”

Val bites her lip. “You had one, didn’t you?”

“Three!” My blood pressure shoots up again. “I wasn’t going to go look. I was just going to call the customer back and tell them we were out of stock, but it ate at my soul. So I put my boots on and marched into the bus yard—through the mud from the last five days of rain—and found them my damn self.” I take a quick breath and blow it out. “I then proceeded to have a brilliant come-apart worthy of a night in the hospital, but we’re not talking about that.”