The silver Audi pulls into the parking lot of The Rusty Spur on a Tuesday afternoon, looking as out of place as I did two months ago.
I'm behind the bar, restocking glasses, when I see it through the window. And when the doors open and Cynthia steps out, followed by Archie, my stomach drops to my boots.
Thank goodness Wyatt isn’t here. I don’t think he’d like either one of them very much.
They pick their way across the gravel as if it might damage their shoes. Cynthia wears a cream silk blouse and tailored pants, her blonde hair blown out to perfection. Archie wears the navy blazer he always wears on weekends, the one that costs more than most people's rent.
They look like an advertisement for the life I used to live.
The door swings open, and Cynthia's face cycles through about four expressions—confusion, horror, amusement, and something that settles into pitying concern.
"Oh, Eleanor." She rushes toward me, arms outstretched. "Oh, honey. It's worse than I thought."
"What are you doing here?"
"We came to rescue you, of course." She pulls back and holds me at arm's length, examining me like I'm a patient. "Look at you. You're wearing flannel. And are those cowboy boots?"
"They're comfortable,” I say, looking down at my feet.
"They're tragic." She glances around the bar—at the mounted deer heads, the neon signs, the disco ball, the mechanical bull in the corner. "This place is... It's very... rustic."
"It's a honky-tonk."
"I don't even know what that means."
Archie has been standing by the door, surveying the room with the expression he usually reserves for opposing counsel's weak arguments. Now he approaches, hands in his pockets, shaking his head slowly.
"Eleanor, we need to talk."
"About what?"
"About this." He gestures vaguely at everything. "About the fact that you've been stuck in this backwater town for two months and haven't once asked me to look into breaking the will."
"Because I don't want to break the will."
He laughs as if I've made a joke. "Right. You want to spend six months running a bar in—where even are we? I couldn't find this place on GPS. I had to ask a man on a tractor for directions."
"Copper Creek. It's called Copper Creek."
"It's called nowhere." He pulls out a chair and sits without being invited, crossing his ankle over his knee. “Listen, I’ve done some preliminary research. The terms of this will are unusual, but they’re not ironclad. We could argue undue influence or diminished capacity—your great-aunt was clearly not thinking straight when she wrote this."
"Mavis was perfectly lucid."
"She left you a bar, Eleanor. A bar in the middle of the mountains with a—" he squints at the corner "—is that a mechanical bull?"
"Yes."
"She left you a bar with a mechanical bull and expected you to run it for six months. That's not the decision of a sound mind. That's a cruel joke."
Something hot flares in my chest. "It wasn't a joke. It was a gift."
Cynthia sits down beside Archie, reaching for my hand across the table. "Sweetie, we're worried about you. You stopped answering my texts. You missed Miranda's engagement party. And when I finally got you on the phone last week, you talked for ten minutes about someone named Dolly and how she makes the best fried chicken you've ever had."
"She does make the best fried chicken I've ever had."
Cynthia and Archie exchange a look. The kind of look that says she's lost it.
"Eleanor." Archie leans forward, his voice dropping into the patient tone he uses with difficult clients. "You don't belong here. You know that, right? This isn't your world. These people—" he waves his hand dismissively, "they're perfectly nice, I'm sure, but they're not your people. You're Eleanor Whitfield. Your mother built one of the most respected etiquette schools in the Southeast. You trained diplomats' children. You belonged to the Junior League."
