She spoke his name in no more than a whisper, but at the sound of her voice, he jerked his hands away as if he’d just touched a white-hot flame.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice instantly like ice.

As if she were a stranger, he shoved past her to make his way to the front of the church. No, she corrected, if she’d been a stranger, he would have been less rude, more solicitous.

Trembling from the unexpected face-to-face meeting, Melissa watched him stride up the aisle to join his father and his brothers in the first pew. In that single quick glimpse, she had seen new lines in his face. His sun-streaked, normally untamed hair had been trimmed neatly in the way his mother had always wanted it to be.

It was his eyes, though, that had stunned her. Once they’d been filled with so much laughter. Naturally she had expected to find sorrow today in the dark-as-coffee depths. What she hadn’t anticipated was the cold antipathy when he recognized her, followed by an emptiness that was worse than hatred.

Well, she thought despondently, now she knew. Cody hadn’t forgiven her. He’d looked straight through her as if he’d never known her, as if he’d never teased her or made love to her or shared his deepest, darkest secrets with her.

“Oh, God,” she murmured in what could have been the beginning of a prayer, but instead simply died before completion. Their relationship was clearly beyond even divine intervention. She’d known it all along, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it. The last flicker of hope in her heart died like a candle flame in a chilly wind.

Though a part of her wanted to flee, she moved into the deepest shadows and stayed through the service, grieving not just for the woman lying in the flower-draped casket, but for the death of her own dreams.

“You went to the funeral, didn’t you?” Velma Horton asked the minute Melissa walked through her mother’s doorway to pick up her daughter after work.

“How did you know?” she asked, though it was easy enough to guess. The grapevine had probably been buzzing all afternoon and her mother was definitely tapped into that.

Her mother sniffed. “You think I didn’t know why you wore that dress today. I know what you said, some nonsense about all your jeans being in the laundry, but I’m not a fool, girl. I knew you wouldn’t miss a chance to catch sight of Cody. So, did you see him?”

“Briefly,” Melissa admitted.

“And?”

“And what? We didn’t talk.”

“Then you didn’t tell him about Sharon Lynn.”

Melissa shook her head. “He wouldn’t care,” she said with absolute certainty that was based on the way he’d looked straight through her for the second time in their lives.