I almost didn’t bother taking the car down Amelia’s driveway and into mine. It would have been shorter to walk through the side gate. But I drove anyway. And just as I thought, my mom was sitting on the front porch.

“Well, there you are, darlin’,” she said as I walked up the steps, as though I had wandered down to the store for some milk. She handed me a glass as I leaned down to kiss her cheek.

I took a big gulp of what I thought was sweet tea; it was sweet tea and bourbon. I coughed.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here unannounced,” she said, “but I figured whatever it was, you probably needed a drink.”

My mother had never treated me like a little boy. From the time I could walk, I was a man. I was supposed to open doors for her and help with yard work and, when I got old enough, drink bourbon.

I sat down beside her, looking out over the driveway. Our Georgian-style house wasn’t mammoth like the Saxtons. But it was where the Christmas tree sat and where all my friends spent the night and where I played basketball in the driveway. And, while some people moved to the big city and scorned their small-town upbringings, I was the opposite. I appreciated mine even more.

From the brief time I’d spent in New York, I felt like I knew a little of the city that never sleeps. And I was grateful that I’d been raised in a town that slept all the time—especially after the full lunch we had every day.

“You want to go to the church softball game this afternoon?” Mom asked.

I smiled at her. “Do I have a choice?”

She didn’t answer, just turned back toward the driveway and kept rocking. This was another way my mother had taught me to be a man. She didn’t tell me what to do, and she let me tell her what was on my mind when I was ready. It was an unspoken rule in our world that whatever Mama said was what we did. And when Mama didn’t say, we did what she wanted us to anyway. Because there was nothing that could tear me up quite like being out of that woman’s good graces.

It had trained me well to be married to the one and only Greer McCann.

I held up my glass. “I’m gonna need another one of these.”

I walked in the house, its dark paneling and floors made bright by the sunlight reflecting off the water and through the windows. I took a deep breath. Cinnamon buns. My favorite. I would never tell my mother, but, even though her cinnamon buns were good, nothing was as delicious as Aunt Tilley’s pie. I set down my glass to refill it just in time. My brother, Mason, was running through the hall, tackling me to the floor before I could even say hello. Widower CEO Parker Thaysden thought this was ridiculous tomfoolery. Little brother Parker Thaysden got Mason in a headlock. I vaguely heard the front door slam and my mother sigh and say, “Boys, please go outside if you’re going to do that. I don’t want any blood on the new rug. It’s impossible to clean.”