“It belonged to my husband and me. I took over the running of it after he died. As for Blessings, it’s one of those places that you can’t believe still exists. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but Blessings has my heart.”

While family was being reunited and old friends were reminiscing, Melissa left Sully in the midst of a horde of Adamos men and made her way into the kitchen.

As they began to visit, June mentioned the recent loss of her husband, and Melissa felt an immediate rapport.

“I lost my husband when we were young. He’s been gone for a good twenty years. I consider myself blessed to have reconnected with Sully.”

June’s eyes widened. “Reconnected? You mean…you two knew each other before…like Marc and Jane?”

“Yes, I grew up in Kansas City, too. Sully and I went to the same school. He was my first love, and the first boy I kissed. We spent one year as boyfriend and girlfriend, and then they moved.” She laughed. “I thought my life was over.”

June kept shaking her head. “This is powerful. Two Adamos men…reconnecting in this way with their first loves, and in the same small town.”

“Pretty strong karma, for sure,” Melissa said. “So what can I help you do? I’m used to staying busy. Give me a job.”

June beamed. Without knowing it, Melissa had just earned a place in the family before she even bore the name.

Marc and Sully were in the den, talking to more family, when one of them asked, “Hey Sully. You said you live here… What do you do?”

“I’ve been a firefighter with the Kansas City Fire Department all of my adult life. I just recently retired and moved to Blessings. Melissa has a business there, and I fell in love with the place.”

Always ready to brag, Marc jumped in to add what he would have called color commentary to the story.

“When I was searching for Sully online, I saw evidence of his heroism before I ever met him. But then I met him, and one of the first things I learned was that he saved Melissa’s life from a burning car less than an hour after his arrival in town.”

The quiet murmurs of disbelief, followed by a solemn silence, said more than words could have expressed, but everyone in the family was eyeing him with new respect.

“Once a fireman, always a fireman,” Sully said. “I’ve carried a lot of people I didn’t know out of fires, so you can imagine my shock in the ER when I realized she was a girl I’d grown up with.”

“Straight out of one of my wife’s romance books,” David said.

Sully looked at Marc and then casually put a hand on his shoulder when he added, “The biggest shock was finding out I was adopted, which I did not know until a couple of months ago when my adoptive mother passed. But as I told Dad, it finally made sense out of something that had bothered me all my life.”