She Had $17 and a Baby on the Way When Her Ex Waved Cash in Her Face — Then the Most Feared Man in Town Walked In and Kissed Her
Chapter 1: Seventeen Dollars and a Carton of Milk
I had seventeen dollars and forty-two cents, and I had already done the math three times.
Prenatal vitamins, eleven ninety-nine. A loaf of bread, two-fifty. That left enough for a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs, but not both. So there I stood in the dairy aisle of Haverly's Market in Briarwood Falls with my hand on the cooler door, trying to decide which one my baby needed more.
I was five months along. My ankles were swollen, my back ached from the cot in my cousin's spare room, and I hadn't bought anything for myself that wasn't strictly necessary since the day Trent Vollmer walked out of our apartment carrying his golf clubs and my whole future.
I put the eggs back. Milk had calcium. I'd read that somewhere.
"Well. Look what the cat dragged in."
My whole body went cold. I knew that voice the way you know a song you used to love before someone ruined it.
Trent stood at the end of the aisle in a camel-colored coat that probably cost three months of my rent. His hair was shorter now and slicked back the way the bankers wore theirs. Hanging off his arm, all blond waves and white cashmere, was Sloane Pryor. Her father owned Pryor Savings & Trust, and she was the woman Trent had been texting at two in the morning while I picked out wedding napkins.
Her ring caught the fluorescent light. It was enormous, and it was almost identical to the one Trent had slid onto my finger at the gazebo in Lantern Park, back when he still bothered pretending.
Trent's eyes dropped to my stomach, and his mouth curled.
"Wow, Holly. Motherhood's really taking a toll."
I tightened my grip on the basket. "Excuse me. I just need to get by."
He didn't move. Instead, he pulled a slim leather wallet from his coat and fanned out four crisp hundred-dollar bills. He waved them slowly, inches from my nose, the way you'd wave a treat at a dog.
"Here. Go on. Buy yourself something real. Maybe a vegetable. The kid could use it, whoever's kid it is."
A woman with a shopping cart stopped dead beside the yogurt. Behind her, a younger woman with a messenger bag and a pencil tucked behind one ear slid out her phone and raised it.
She was recording.
My face burned. The worst part, the part I'd never say out loud, was that four hundred dollars would have covered my electric bill and a doctor's copay. My body wanted that money. My pride wanted to set it on fire.
"No, thank you," I said quietly.
Sloane laughed, high and bright, like ice clinking in a glass.
"Oh, sweetie. Pride's so cute when you're paying in coins."
"I'm not asking either of you for anything," I said. "I never have."
Trent leaned in close enough that I could smell his cologne. It was the expensive kind, the bottle I'd bought him for his thirtieth birthday with four months of overtime.
"That's always been your problem, Holly," he murmured. "You had an old lady sitting on two hundred acres eating out of your hand, and you were too precious to say one word to her. That orchard's going to be mine by spring anyway. You could've had half."
I stared at him. "What are you talking about?"
He straightened up and smiled for the people watching. "I'm talking about how some people are just born broke."
Sloane tugged his sleeve. "Babe, let her go. She's about to cry on the cheese."
"I'm not going to cry," I said. My voice cracked right down the middle and made me a liar.
"You're in no position to raise a child," Trent said, loud enough for the whole aisle to hear. "Everybody in this town knows it."
I pressed my palm flat against my belly. The baby kicked, one hard little thump, like she was arguing back.
"My daughter," I said, "is never going to believe that being cruel makes a man important."
His face went flat and ugly. He took a step toward me.
Then the automatic doors at the front of the store hissed open.
Nobody in Briarwood Falls needed to turn around to know who had walked in. The checkout girl stopped scanning. The stock boy froze with a crate of oranges on his shoulder. Conversation died aisle by aisle, like lights switching off down a long hallway.
Beckett Lockhart.
He was six-foot-four, in a flannel jacket and work boots still dusty from the orchard, with a jaw like a locked gate. He held the notes on half the farms in Dunmore County. People said he once made a sitting mayor apologize in public for a lie.
His gray eyes swept the store and found me. Then they found Trent, the money, the phone, and my wet face.
He didn't say a word. He walked straight down the aisle, took my face gently in one rough hand, pulled me against his chest, and kissed me.
When he finally let go, Trent had gone the color of skim milk.
Chapter 2: Play Along
For a long moment, nobody in Haverly's Market moved.
Beckett kept one arm around my waist, steady as a fence post, and turned to face Trent. He didn't raise his voice. He never did. That was the frightening thing about him.
"Go ahead," he said. "Say it again. The part about her not being fit to raise a child."
Trent's mouth opened and closed. The hundred-dollar bills drooped in his hand like wilted lettuce.
"Beckett. Hey, man. I didn't — we were just catching up. Holly and I go way back."
"I know exactly how far back you go."
Beckett glanced at the young woman with the phone. She froze, clearly expecting him to tell her to stop.
"Keep it running," he said. "Please."
Sloane let out a nervous little laugh. "Okay, this is weird. Trent, let's go. The caterer's waiting."
But Trent couldn't take his eyes off Beckett's hand on my waist. I watched him run the numbers behind his eyes the way he always did, adding and subtracting, trying to figure out how much he'd just lost.
"So, what, you two are together now?" he sputtered. "That's — wow, Holly. You really did trade up fast."
Beckett bent down, picked up the carton of eggs I'd put back, and set it gently in my basket. Then he added a block of cheddar, a bag of oranges, and a jar of the peanut butter I used to eat with a spoon at Vera's kitchen table.
"Put your money away, Vollmer," he said. "Before you embarrass yourself any further."
He paid at the register without looking at the total. I tried to protest. He shook his head.
"Grandma's orders. You can argue with her."
Out in the parking lot, the October wind cut right through my thin sweater. Beckett opened the passenger door of his old green pickup, and I climbed in because my knees had stopped working properly.
When he got in beside me, I finally found my voice.
"Why did you kiss me?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. Up close, the most feared man in the county looked oddly sheepish.
"Because he was looking at you like you were alone. I needed him to understand you're not." He paused. "I should've asked first. I'm sorry."
"You've never said more than ten words to me in two years."
"I said plenty. You just weren't listening, because you were busy reading Grandma the farm report in that ridiculous radio-announcer voice."
Despite everything, a laugh escaped me. Then it turned into something wetter, and I pressed my sleeve against my eyes.
"How did you even know I was in there?"
"I was across the street at the feed store. Saw you through the window. I've been looking for you for three weeks, Holly." His jaw tightened. "I've been in Oregon since spring, setting up the cold-storage deal. Came home and found Grandma alone in that big house with Cousin Dwight running everything. He told her you quit without notice. Said you took Granddad's pocket watch on your way out."
My stomach dropped. "I would never —"
"She knew that. She didn't believe a word of it." He looked at me carefully. "But I need to know what really happened. All of it."
So I told him.
I told him how Trent had pushed me for months to "mention" his housing development to Vera, and how I'd refused because she was my patient and my friend, not an investment opportunity. I told him about the night in July when Trent showed up at the farmhouse after Vera had gone to sleep, with Dwight right behind him carrying a leather folder.
"They had a stack of papers," I said. "Vera's signature was already on them. But she'd been asleep since eight o'clock. I'd tucked her in myself. Trent wanted me to sign a page saying I'd watched her sign. He said it was a formality."
"And you said no."
"I said no. They argued in the hallway, and he dropped one of the pages. The witness page. I picked it up, and I didn't give it back."
Beckett went very still.
"A week later, Trent broke off our engagement. He told everyone I'd cheated, that the baby wasn't his. The same day, Dwight fired me." My voice shook. "I thought I was going crazy."
Beckett stared through the windshield for a long time.
"On Monday," he said finally, "Dwight filed a petition in Dunmore County to be named Grandma's legal guardian. He says she's confused and can't manage her own affairs. And last Thursday, a deed transferring the east hundred acres to something called Vollmer Commons LLC got recorded at the courthouse."
"By spring," I whispered. "That's what he meant."
"Holly. That page you kept. Do you still have it?"
I nodded slowly. "It's in my mother's Bible. In a freezer bag."
For the first time since he'd walked into that store, Beckett Lockhart smiled.
"Then we're going to need that page," he said. "And we're going to need that woman's video."
Chapter 3: The Woman With the Phone
The next morning, Beckett drove me up Quill Hill Road to the farmhouse I hadn't been allowed to set foot in since July.
The orchard rolled out on both sides of the truck, row after row of Honeycrisp and Winesap heavy with fruit. My chest ached at the sight of it. I had loved this place, and I had loved the stubborn eighty-one-year-old woman inside it.
Vera Lockhart was waiting on the porch in her housecoat and a hat, leaning on her cane like it had personally insulted her.
"Holly Anne Brennan," she said. "Get up these steps before I come down them."
I climbed the steps, and she wrapped both arms around me, belly and all, and held on.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered into my hair. "I should've made more noise. I let Dwight tell me you'd gone, and I sat in this house feeling sorry for myself like a fool."
"You're not a fool, Vera."
"No. I'm old, which is worse, because people believe you're a fool." She pulled back and squinted past me at her grandson. "And you. I hear you kissed this girl in the dairy aisle without asking."
Beckett turned red to the tips of his ears. "Who told you that?"
"The internet, Beckett. Half a million people told me."
She wasn't exaggerating. Inside, at the kitchen table, she turned her tablet toward me. The video had been shared everywhere. Most comments were kind: Protect her at all costs. That ex is a walking red flag. But Sloane had posted her own version, a still frame of the kiss with the caption: Some gold diggers just switch mines. 💅
Underneath it, dozens of strangers were debating whether my baby was Beckett's.
I pushed the tablet away. My hands were trembling.
A knock came at the door.
It was the young woman from the store, messenger bag on her shoulder, pencil still behind her ear.
"I'm sorry to just show up," she said. "My name's Tamsin Rourke. I write for the Briarwood Ledger. I think there's something on my video you haven't heard."
She set her laptop on the table and turned the volume all the way up. Then she played the moment Trent leaned toward me, the moment I'd thought nobody else could hear.
"You had an old lady sitting on two hundred acres eating out of your hand... That orchard's going to be mine by spring anyway. You could've had half."
The kitchen went silent.
Vera set down her coffee cup very carefully. "Play that again, honey."
Tamsin played it again.
"I've been digging into Vollmer Commons for a month," Tamsin said. "The deed was notarized by a woman named Marla Quinby. Marla filed a police report on July twelfth saying her notary stamp was stolen from her office."
"What date is on the deed?" Vera asked.
Beckett pulled up the courthouse copy on his phone. "July fourteenth."
Vera began to laugh, a dry, delighted cackle.
"July fourteenth, I was standing at a pulpit in Fernhollow, two states away, burying my sister Edith. I gave the eulogy. I cried in front of three hundred people and a church photographer. Dwight drove me there himself. The boy is dumber than a sack of hammers."
Beckett leaned forward. "Trent's holding a groundbreaking on the east acres Saturday. The mayor's coming. Lyle Pryor's coming. His bank financed the whole thing."
"Then let them dig," Vera said, lifting her chin. "And we'll do the burying."
That evening my phone buzzed with a text from Trent.
Enjoy your sugar daddy. I'm filing for a paternity test so this whole town can see the brat isn't mine.
I showed it to Beckett without a word.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"Let him file," I said. "I've got nothing to hide. He's the one who should be scared."
Later, I sat on the porch steps wrapped in one of Vera's quilts, watching the sun sink behind the apple rows. Beckett came out with two mugs of cocoa and sat a careful distance away.
"About the kiss," he said.
"You don't have to explain."
"I want to. It wasn't only for show, Holly." He stared at his mug. "I've been in love with you since the first time you read Grandma the cattle prices like you were calling the Kentucky Derby. I didn't say anything because you were engaged, and then you were gone."
My throat closed up. "Beckett, I'm five months pregnant with another man's baby. My whole life is on fire."
"I know." He handed me the cocoa. "I'm not asking for anything right now. I'll wait. I'm good at waiting. I grow apples for a living."
Chapter 4: The Golden Shovel
Saturday morning dawned bright and cold, the kind of blue-sky October day Trent would have called "perfect for photos."
He'd spared no expense. A white tent stood on the east acres, where Vera's late husband had once planted his first hundred trees. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from the poles. A banner the length of a school bus read VOLLMER COMMONS — Luxury Living Among the Orchards. Beside the stage sat a row of gold-painted shovels and a huge screen showing glossy renderings of townhouses where the apple trees now stood.
At the edge of the lot, a bright green hydroseeding truck idled, its hose coiled like a sleeping snake. Trent had hired it to spray instant grass over the model lot so the cameras would get a lush green lawn behind him.
The plan was for me to arrive first, alone.
"Let him see you without me," Beckett had said. "Let him get comfortable."
So I walked in by myself, in my one decent maternity dress, my mother's Bible tucked under my arm. Heads turned, then came the whispers. I heard my name, and I heard Lockhart.
Sloane spotted me before Trent did. She marched over in a white wool coat and pearls, holding a silver tray of shrimp puffs.
"Oh my gosh, you came!" she said, loud enough to draw a crowd. "The caterers are short-staffed. Here, you're used to waiting on people."
She shoved the tray into my hands. A shrimp puff rolled off and bounced against my belly.
A few people laughed. Most of them didn't, and that mattered more to me than I expected.
"I'm not here to work, Sloane."
"Then why are you here? To find another rich man to cry on?" She leaned closer, smiling with her teeth. "He's not coming, you know. Beckett. Men like that kiss girls like you for the cameras. Then they go home."
I set the tray down on a folding chair and said nothing. My heart was pounding so hard the baby fluttered in protest.
Up on the stage, Trent tapped the microphone.
"Friends! Neighbors! Welcome to the future of Briarwood Falls!"
The crowd clapped politely. Mayor Patrice Odom smiled beside him. Next to her stood Lyle Pryor, silver-haired and stiff in his overcoat, the man whose bank had lent Trent every dollar.
And at the end of the row, grinning like a cat with cream on its whiskers, was Dwight Lockhart.
"Before we break ground," Trent went on, "I want to acknowledge my partner, Dwight, whose family has farmed this land for generations. As many of you know, his aunt Vera is in decline. It's heartbreaking. Dwight is making sure her legacy lives on in a way she'd be proud of."
Dwight pressed a hand to his heart. "She'd want this. If she could still understand it."
Then Trent's eyes found me in the crowd, and his smile sharpened.
"And I see we have a special guest. Some of you saw a little grocery-store drama this week." Laughter rippled through the crowd. "Holly, I wish you the best. Truly. With whoever the father turns out to be."
The laughter got louder. My cheeks burned. I gripped the Bible so hard my knuckles went white, and I stayed exactly where I was.
"Let's dig in!" Trent said, raising a golden shovel.
That's when we heard it: a deep, coughing rumble coming up the dirt road.
A 1962 Ford pickup, sky blue with rust on the fenders, rolled across the field and stopped right in front of the stage. Beckett climbed out of the driver's side. He walked around and opened the passenger door.
Vera Lockhart stepped down in her Sunday hat and her good gray coat, leaning on her cane. She looked out at the crowd like a general reviewing troops.
The whole field fell silent.
"Morning, Patrice," she said to the mayor. "Morning, Lyle. I hear I've lost my marbles. I came out to see if anybody found them."
Somebody in the back snorted with laughter.
Dwight was off the stage in a flash. "Aunt Vera! You shouldn't be out here. You get confused, remember? Beckett, take her home before she embarrasses herself."
"Confused?" Vera tilted her head. "Dwight, honey, I know you owe Buckley's Tavern four thousand dollars and your boat payment's three months late. My memory's just fine. It's your bookkeeping that's in decline."
The crowd laughed out loud this time.
Trent stepped forward, smooth as oil, and held up a framed copy of the deed.
"Mrs. Lockhart, with respect, this land was legally transferred. Your signature is right here. Notarized and recorded."
Vera held out a gloved hand. "May I see it?"
He hesitated, then passed it down.
She put on her reading glasses, slowly and deliberately, and studied the page.
"July fourteenth," she read aloud. "Well. Isn't that interesting."
Chapter 5: Green Is a Good Color on You
Vera lowered the frame and looked out over her glasses at the crowd.
"On July fourteenth," she said, her voice carrying to the back row, "I was standing at the pulpit of First Methodist in Fernhollow, burying my sister Edith. Three hundred people heard me speak. Dwight drove me there himself. He sat in the second pew and ate four deviled eggs at the luncheon."
Tamsin stepped out of the crowd and held up a funeral program and a copy of the Fernhollow Gazette. The front page showed a photo of Vera at the pulpit, with the date printed clearly underneath.
A murmur rolled through the tent.
Trent's smile wobbled, but he recovered fast. "So she got the date wrong. She signed it later. Old people mix up dates all the time."
"She didn't sign it at all," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I expected. I walked up the aisle between the folding chairs, and every head turned to follow me.
I opened my mother's Bible and drew out the freezer bag.
"The night of July nineteenth, you and Dwight came to the farmhouse while Vera was asleep. You wanted me to sign as a witness. Her signature was already on the page. I refused. You dropped this."
I held it up. It was a witness page with Vera M. Lockhart written in a shaky, careful imitation, and the witness line was blank. Stuck to the corner was a yellow sticky note in Trent's cramped handwriting, the same handwriting that used to leave me love you notes on the fridge.
D — use Marla's stamp. H will sign. She does what I tell her.
Mayor Odom leaned in to read it, and her face hardened.
A plump woman in a purple raincoat pushed to the front. "I'm Marla Quinby," she said, out of breath. "My notary stamp went missing the same week Dwight Lockhart came into my office to renew his boat registration. I filed a report with the sheriff. Nobody ever followed up."
Dwight had gone gray. "That's — she's lying, they're all lying —"
"Tamsin," Beckett said quietly. "The screen."
Tamsin plugged her laptop into the projector cable. The townhouse renderings vanished. In their place appeared the dairy aisle of Haverly's Market, and Trent, larger than life, leaning toward me.
"That orchard's going to be mine by spring anyway. You could've had half."
His own voice boomed through the speakers he'd paid for.
The silence afterward was so complete I heard a crow call from the apple rows.
Lyle Pryor turned to Trent very slowly.
"My bank," he said, "lent you two point one million dollars against that deed."
"Lyle, I can explain —"
"You'll explain it to my attorneys. As of this moment, that loan is called." He turned to the mayor. "Patrice, I'd like a word with the sheriff's office."
Sloane stared at Trent. Then she pulled the enormous diamond off her finger.
"You told me she was a gold digger," she said, her voice shaking. "You told me she trapped you."
She threw the ring. It bounced off Trent's chest and landed in the freshly turned dirt.
Then Trent snapped. He lunged off the stage toward Tamsin's laptop, arms out, to rip the cable free. Beckett simply stepped into his path like a wall, and Trent bounced off him, staggered sideways, and stumbled across the grass toward the idling hydroseeder.
He ended up right in front of me, red-faced, panting, dirt on his designer loafers.
"You did this," he hissed. "You ruined everything."
I looked at him. Then I looked down at the big yellow lever on the back of the hydroseeding truck, the one the operator had cheerfully shown me how to use while I waited for Vera to arrive.
"You wanted a nice green lawn for the cameras, Trent," I said. "Smile."
I pulled the lever.
The hose jerked to life with a mighty FWOOMP. A thick blast of bright green grass-seed slurry hit Trent square in the chest, then climbed to his face, his slicked-back hair, and his camel coat. He flailed, slipped, and sat down hard in the mud.
Sloane shrieked and ran forward on her knees, digging for her ring in the dirt, right into the spray. In two seconds her white wool coat looked like a putting green.
Dwight tried to sneak off behind the tent. The hose swung after him on its own and caught him across the backside, painting his khakis a vivid shade of lime.
For a moment nobody made a sound. Then a little boy in the front row shouted,
"Mama, they look like Christmas trees!"
The whole field burst out laughing. People doubled over, phones came out, and the mayor covered her mouth. Even stiff old Lyle Pryor coughed something that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle.
I shut off the lever. Trent sat in the mud, dripping green, spitting seed, glaring at me through a mask of slurry.
Two sheriff's deputies were already walking across the field.
Vera tapped her cane on the stage.
"Somebody give that boy a towel," she said. "And then give him a lawyer."
Chapter 6: What the Ground Gives Back
The weeks after the groundbreaking felt like watching a house of cards fall one card at a time.
The county clerk voided the deed within ten days. A handwriting expert compared the signature on Trent's framed copy with the one on my witness page and found they'd been traced from the same original, a birthday card Vera had sent Dwight years ago. Dwight and Trent were both charged with forgery and attempted fraud. Dwight's guardianship petition was thrown out of court after Vera's doctor submitted a letter stating that his patient was "sharper than most of the attorneys in this county." The judge read it aloud and smiled.
Pryor Savings & Trust sued Vollmer Commons LLC for every penny. Trent's condo, his leased Mercedes, and his membership at the country club were all gone by Thanksgiving. Sloane posted one final photo from an airport lounge, captioned New chapter, and then deleted every account she had.
The paternity hearing came in early December.
Trent had demanded it himself. He'd told half the town he couldn't wait to prove my baby wasn't his. He showed up in a borrowed suit with a lawyer who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. When the judge read the result out loud in a courtroom packed with people from Briarwood Falls, the number was 99.98 percent.
The judge set down the paper and looked over her glasses at him.
"Mr. Vollmer, you told this court, and apparently a great many people in town, that this child could not possibly be yours. Did you not?"
Trent shifted in his seat. "I may have been mistaken, Your Honor."
"You were. You'll pay child support starting this month, along with Ms. Brennan's medical expenses since July, and the full cost of this test."
Behind me, someone in the gallery whispered, "Serves him right." Nobody shushed her.
Out in the courthouse hallway, Trent caught up with me by the water fountain. He looked smaller somehow. Up close, there was still a faint green tint under his fingernails. The slurry dye had been stubborn.
"Holly. Can we talk? I made mistakes. I'd like to see her. When she's born."
I studied him for a long time. Part of me waited for the old ache, the one that used to rise up whenever he looked at me like that. It never came.
"You can see her," I said, "when you've become a man she'd be proud to know. Until then, the support checks will speak for you."
I walked away, and he didn't follow.
Vera didn't waste a second. She hired me back that same week, not as a caregiver but as the orchard's full-time bookkeeper, with a real salary, health insurance, and the little stone cottage at the bottom of the hill that her husband had built in 1958.
"I need somebody in charge of the money who doesn't steal it," she said, pressing the key into my palm. "It's a low bar in this family, but you clear it."
Dwight was cut out of her will entirely. She did it in front of her lawyer, Beckett, and me, and she signed it with a flourish.
"Let him trace that," she said.
Beckett kept his word. He waited. He fixed the cottage's leaky faucet without being asked. He drove me to every doctor's appointment and sat in the waiting room reading parenting magazines with a scowl of deep concentration. He never once pushed.
One snowy evening in January, he stood on my porch holding a casserole Vera had made him deliver. Snow was collecting in his hair.
"Holly," he said. "I'd like to take you to dinner. A real one. With a menu and cloth napkins. If you're ready. And if you're not, I'll just leave the casserole."
I looked at this big, quiet, stubborn man who had walked down a grocery aisle and stood between me and the whole world without asking a single question.
"Leave the casserole," I said. "And pick me up at seven."
The smile that spread across his face could have melted every inch of snow on Quill Hill Road.
Epilogue: The First Harvest
The baby came on the first warm night of May, while the whole orchard was in blossom. Every tree on the hill was white and pink, and the air smelled like honey.
I named her Willa Edith Brennan, after the sister Vera had buried and the trees that had saved us both.
By October she was five months old, the same age I'd been carrying her that terrible day in the dairy aisle. She rode through the Lockhart Orchards harvest festival in a sling on Beckett's chest, swatting at apples as they swung past, while half of Briarwood Falls stopped to coo at her.
Vera held court from a hay bale by the cider press, still in her Sunday hat.
"Give her here," she demanded, and Beckett handed Willa over. Vera held her up to the light.
"Look at that chin," she said. "That's a girl who'll never let anybody wave money in her face."
Tamsin Rourke came by with a camera and a notebook. Her series on the Vollmer Commons fraud had won a state press award, and she'd been invited to join a newspaper two counties over. She'd turned it down.
"Briarwood's got more stories in it," she told me, grinning. "Somebody has to keep recording."
Trent pleaded guilty in August and received probation and community service. Word around town was that he'd been assigned to the county parks department, where his job included operating the hydroseeding truck along the highway medians. I didn't ask for confirmation. Some gifts from the universe you just accept.
At sunset, Beckett took my hand and walked me down to the east acres. The bunting and the banner were long gone, and the soil had been turned and smoothed again.
Planted in the center of the field, where the golden shovels had once stood, was a single young apple tree with a wooden marker tied to it in twine.
Willa's Tree.
"Granddad planted the first hundred trees here when he married Grandma," Beckett said quietly. "I figured it was time somebody started the next hundred."
He reached into his jacket pocket. My heart stopped.
But he only pulled out a small, battered pocket watch, the one Dwight once swore I'd stolen.
"Grandma found it in Dwight's glove box when the sheriff searched his truck," he said. "She wants you to have it. She says it belongs with the people who tell the truth."
I closed my hand around it and leaned into his shoulder. Willa slept between us, warm and heavy, while the last light turned the orchard gold.
May you like
Seventeen dollars, I thought. That was all I'd had a year ago.
It turned out I had everything that mattered all along. I just needed someone to stand next to me long enough for me to see it.
