I’d moved into the tiny garage apartment above my grandmother’s house two weeks before I was due to start my new job at the Winding Way Inn. The back side of the inn abutted my grandmother’s property, and I’d been quick to make the inn’s grounds my summertime haunt whenever I’d visited Granny Grace. I’d wandered through the gardens, sat on the giant porch swing, and read in the limbs of the blossoming cherry tree on the east end of the rose garden. I’d never spent any time inside—I wasn’t a guest, so I wasn’t allowed—but I still felt like the inn was mine. Like some cosmic force understood that simply loving a place was enough to make it my own. Which was why I’d been so excited when Granny Grace had called me to tell me about the job opening. She’d seen it in the local paper and called me right away. “You always said you wanted to run the place one day, Lane. Now’s your chance.”

It wasn’t really running the entire inn. Just the special events. But still. Winding Way was infused with all the magic and charm of my childhood summers, with the added enticement of being back on the East Coast and closer to my family.

The Saturday before my first day at work, I stood at the foot of my apartment stairs and stretched my long arms over my head. I needed to run. Was dressed for it and everything. But it was hot. I was used to North Carolina’s humidity. I’d grown up in Asheville, a city four hours west, but Chapel Hill was flat and relatively breezeless—too far east to benefit from the mountains and too far west to benefit from the coast.

“It’s too hot to be running, Miss Lane.” Granny Grace stepped out onto the porch and leaned on the paint-chipped railing, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun.

“It’s June. It’s too hot for everything.”

“Not drinking sweet tea.” She held up her glass. “Never too hot for that.”

I didn’t love stereotypes. I was a Mormon, a Southerner, and biracial—my mother was Puerto Rican, and my father was black—which meant I had all kinds of reasons to resent people categorizing me based on what they thought I was before they knew anything else about me. But as far as Southern women went, my grandmother on my father’s side, Grace Ann Bishop, was quintessential. If you take everything I love about the South—the kindness, the gentleness, the food—and roll it into one person, you have my grandmother.

“You have something to drink?” Granny called. “You’ll need it.”

I held up my water bottle. “Just filled it up.” I retied my left shoe. I was stalling, but the heat was brutal.