To the man with eyes like empty houses, who watched me work like he didn’t believe in miracles butwanted to.
I narrowed my eyes in the direction of my mother’s tombstone, brow furrowed. “Did you do this?” I asked.
No answer.
Until my phone, once again, said, “Head east on I-10 for five hundred and ten miles.”
And this time, I let it guide me.
CHAPTER 2
Silas
I’d seen too much notto believe in ghosts…but I knew for a fact that ghosts didn’t write letters.
Which meant this letter was from a living, breathing person who should have been dead.
I stood outside of the old Willow Grove Remnant Fellowship, peering down at the letter in my hand: a legal memo, freshly postmarked, the envelope crisp and white. Yeah…this wasn’t ghost shit; this was from a goddamn attorney stepping intomy townandmy business.
And it was pissing me the fuck off.
To Mr. Silas Ward?—
RE: Notice of Property Reclamation—Willow Grove Remnant Fellowship
Effective immediately, the undersigned parties hereby notify you that your possession of the church located at 113 Grove Avenue is considered unauthorized. As surviving members of the founding ecclesiastical body, we intend to resume stewardship of the property in accordance with its original covenant charter, filed 1994, and reactivatedunder emergency reinstatement clause (Sect. 3B) as of June 1, 2025.
No real signature…just a typed attorney’s name, plus a second name that made my blood boil.
Reverend Abel Trent.
Motherfucker.
My dead fiancée’s brother…the brother who’d skipped town a year before she died, leaving her high and dry. He hadn’t so much as sent a card when she passed, and then the church fell to me.
And now he wanted it back?
There was no fucking way.
I balled the letter up and shoved it into my pocket with a growl, pulling out my keys with my other hand to unlock my truck. My brother Rhett needed some help out at the farmhouse today—he was raising a greenhouse for Willow, a two-person job that his wife wasn’t ready to manage so soon after giving birth to my niece. Our other brother Beau was already there, probably with his excitable golden retriever in tow…
…and I was nowhere near ready to deal with that goddamn energy.
I slammed the truck door harder than necessary and sat for a second, hands gripping the wheel, knuckles white. The heat was stifling, the cab like an oven, but I didn’t start the engine or turn on the AC.
I just…sat there. Breathing through my teeth. Counting backward from ten.
AbelfuckingTrent.
It wasn’t just that he wanted the church back—it was that he thought he still had the right after everything they’d done…after the people of Willow Grove had run every Trent but Amelia out of town.
And even though the church was a blight on downtown,old, ugly, falling apart…it was the only thing Amelia had left me when she passed.
I started the truck.
If I was gonna survive the day, I needed a hammer in my hand and my brothers nearby.
Preferably with coffee.
