“Mom!” she shouted. “Have you ever ridden in this? It’s amazing. Mike took me all the way up to the top of the hill by the waterfalls, and then we came down the hill so fast...”

Mike leaned forward, still sitting at the wheel. “Not that fast...”

But Hazel was still going. “We went by Falls Legend Winery so fast it was a blur!”

Mike was still in the car, shaking his head. “Not a blur.”

“It was a blur!” Hazel insisted. She ran up the steps and gave Zoey a quick hug. “It was fun.”

“I’m glad. How did your talk go?”

Hazel paused, as if the car ride had erased her memory of the apology meeting that should have happened before it.

“Oh, that. It was good.”

When Zoey just kept staring at her, waiting for more, Hazel rolled her eyes and heaved a tortured sigh. “It was fine. I apologized. He apologized. I cried a little, but he dealt.”

Zoey looked at Mike. He couldn’t possibly hear them over the rumbling car engine, and he tipped his head as if wondering what she was thinking. He had probably not dealt that well with Hazel’s tears. He’d told Zoey years ago that he had an auto-response to tears and wanted to cry with the person, which he considered to be horrifyingly humiliating. He didn’t seem to be near tears now, though. He was smiling, even though she could see concern in his eyes. She turned back to her daughter.

“Why did you cry?”

Hazel shrugged. “I felt bad. And he felt bad, which made me feel bad, and then we talked about the video and I really felt bad.”

“He shouldn’t have made you feel bad about that.”

That video had nearly given Zoey a heart attack when she first saw it. And she didn’t see it until Tani called her and said all the kids were watching it. Her first reaction had been white-hot rage, but she’d quickly cooled off. Hazel was thirteen. She’d needed to express her feelings about what happened, and that silly video seemed to have done that for her. She’d been more settled since she’d done it. But anyone local who saw it knew exactly who she was talking about. Everyone now knew that Hazel’s mom, Zoey, and her attorney boytoy, Mike McKinnon, had been naked together. That couldn’t have been great for Mike.

“He didn’t make me feel bad, Mom. I just do feel bad. But I told him I came up with a way to fix it.” Hazel had a suspiciously gleeful look in her eyes.

“What do you mean, fix it?”

“Never mind. Just an idea I had.”

Mike turned off the car and got out, but he stayed on the far side of the Mustang. “Can we talk, Zoey?”

She remembered why she’d come out there to greet them in the first place.