PROLOGUE
Sylvie
Two weeks ago
The letter came on a late summer day, when the air was thick enough to cut with a knife, the sticky sort of heat that has you craving ice the minute you pull the curtain back.The humidity made the fact that I’d just been laid off from my job as an assistant librarian even worse because I simply couldn’t afford to crank up the AC anymore.
Not that I really could afford it in the first place.
I walked down to the little mailbox I shared with my neighbor, already soaked in sweat from merely considering going outside, and pulled it out, just like it was any other junk mail or credit card offer or random catalogue.
Lumped in with the normal haphazard assortment, though, was something very out of the ordinary.
The letter—or more accurately, what the letter told me—changed everything.
I had inherited a property in East Texas, and enough money that I could fix it up, according to the documents.
On the condition that I live there for one year before selling it, if I so chose.
There was a number at the bottom of the letter, for some lawyer in Houston I’d never heard of, and I dialed it with shaking fingers as the sun beat down on me.
I’d never been one for unexpected adventures, or trips without itineraries, or to-do lists.
Life just gave me a new plan, though, and I wasn’t going to ignore it.
Especially when this kind of financial help meant I could use as much AC as I wanted.
1
Sylvie
Present Day, September
The shock hasn’t worn off yet.
Even now, with a weekend’s worth of clothes stuffed into the bag beside me, I can’t believe it.Everything else I own is in a moving truck hopefully already at my new place, what looks to be an adorable—if run down—apartment over the bookshop I’ve inherited.
Two weeks since a simple letter changed everything, punctuated by a very official and very stuffy meeting with a lot of lawyers, and then another meeting with a very unamused financial advisor, and here I am, driving into New Hopewell, Texas.
It still feels too good to be true.
The green mile markers fly by, a sign just up ahead claiming the next exit’s the one I need to take, and it’s a relief and nerve-wracking all at once to be this close to my new life.I turn down the blaring music just so I can listen harder to the GPS telling me where to go.
My phone rings through the speakers and I jump at the incoming call, nearly jerking the wheel in my alarm.
There’s only a handful of people that would call me instead of texting, especially once I got let go from my librarian job, and a quick glance at the screen has me tapping the wheel to answer the call.
“Ivy,” I say in a chastising tone.“I told you I’d call when I got there.”
“Hello to you too, you goober,” Ivy responds easily, but there’s a note of tension in the familiar and ridiculous insult.
“What’s wrong?”I ask immediately, putting the blinker on to signal to the empty highway that I’m exiting.Better safe than sorry!
“I don’t want to bum you out,” she says cautiously.
“Is it Hazel?”Ivy’s youngest sister is always getting into trouble of one sort or another.“Is she hurt?I can turn around.”
“No, Hazel is fine.And don’t be ridiculous, I read the terms of that probate or whatever it’s called just like you did—I know you have to stick it out there for at least one year, right?I bet you don’t though.I bet you want to stay there and the what’s-it-called… whatever, you get the full access to that thing.”
