“Sorry, darlin’. You’ll just have to get out your nerd shirts and your geek jeans.” Lily turned on the radio and found her favorite country station.

“Are we going to have to listen to that the whole way?” Braden whined from the back seat.

“Can’t we just have our Nintendos until we get there?” Holly begged.

Lily shrugged. “They’re packed in a box, and it’s in the moving van.”

“This is too much punishment for just smoking one joint,” Holly fumed.

“You think so?” Lily asked. “Just imagine what would have happened if the police had caught you, especially since you had a little bag of the stuff stashed in the lining of your purse.”

“You went through my purse?” Holly raised her voice.

Lily turned up the volume on the radio. “Yes, darlin’, I did, and we’ll have random checks of your purse and your room until you earn back the trust I’ve given you all these years.”

“God! All over one joint! What if you’d found . . .” Holly stopped and glared at her mother.

“Did I miss something in your purse, sweetheart? Do I need to unpack all your boxes and make sure there’s nothing tucked away with your cute little bikini underbritches?” Lily asked.

“No, Mama,” Holly sighed. “It’s just that pot is such a minor thing. My friends do all kinds of worse things.”

“Then it’s time to get away from those friends. I’m not your friends’ mother. I don’t watch my children ruin their lives. Sit back. Enjoy the ride. And listen to some good old country music,” Lily said.

“No, you ruin our lives for us,” Braden said from the back seat.

Lily ignored both of them. When she had left Comfort to go to college, she’d vowed that she would never live there again. Small-town life wasn’t for her, especially in a historic little town that catered to tourists looking for a trip back in time. She had wanted to go forward with her life, not live forever in the past, with historical markers everywhere. That was twenty years ago. Now the idea of historical markers didn’t seem so bad.

The kids remained silent until she turned south in Fredericksburg. That’s when Holly moaned dramatically. “We’re dropping off the edge of the world.”

“And falling into—”

Lily shot a look into the rearview mirror that stopped Braden’s sentence short, and he blushed. That was a good sign, in her book. At least he wasn’t so hardened that he couldn’t turn red when he was about to say a dirty word.

“We’ll be in the place we’re ‘falling into’ in about thirty minutes, tops. You’ll have the same bedrooms that you always had when your grandparents were still with us. I don’t expect the place to look much different than it did when we came for your grandmother’s funeral five years ago,” she said.

“That means the historical marker is still in the front yard. The porch swing still squeaks, and the most exciting part of the whole day is when you hear a second car go by out on the road.” Holly sighed again, this time with lots of self-pity.

“Because the house is so far back on the lane, you damn . . . darn sure can’t see the cars going by.” Braden blushed again.

“Ain’t life grand?” Lily looked up in the rearview mirror at the reflection of her son in the back seat. “Only now, we’ll be sharing the house with Mack Cooper, the vo-ag teacher at the high school, and the pasture is full of goats.”

Holly threw her hands over her eyes. “This gets worse and worse.”

“Goats? You mean real animal goats we saw at the petting zoo when we were little kids? I kind of liked them,” Braden said.

Holly whipped around to glare at him. “Traitor.”

“Well, I did.” He shrugged.

Lily wasn’t looking forward to being back in the house that held so many memories, or living with Mack, either, but that was the price she was willing to pay to keep her kids out of jail. The last time she’d been home was for her mother’s funeral. She’d planned on driving back over to Comfort every weekend until she got the place cleaned out and put up for sale, but she’d been so busy with the divorce and the move to the apartment soon after that she just let that business slide. Thinking of the divorce still made her angry, even after all these years. Right after she’d buried her mother, Wyatt revealed that he’d fallen in love with one of his clients, oil baroness Victoria Banfield—he had told her in a tone that sounded like he was discussing the weather. He was willing to give Lily the house they lived in at the time, but there was no way that her salary as a work-at-home mom could ever make the mortgage payments. So they’d sold it. She’d put her part of the equity into a college fund for the kids and paid the first year’s rent on an apartment that was really too expensive for her budget, but it gave the kids their own bathroom and privacy. They deserved that much when their sorry father didn’t even want normal custodial rights.

Wyatt was married within days of the divorce, in another state or another country. She had moved herself and the kids into the apartment, and life went on. The house in Comfort had been on the back burner. She had seldom thought about it. With everything going on in her life at that time with the pain of a divorce, she just couldn’t put herself through the heartbreak of sorting out her mother’s things. Two months went by, and Mack Cooper called to ask if she’d be interested in renting it—as is—with everything inside the place included in the rent. As the new teacher in Comfort, he needed a place outside town with a few acres to run his goats. They’d agreed that he would move the furniture from her parents’ bedroom to the empty room upstairs.

Lily remembered Mack from her high school days. He had a twin brother who was downright sexy and always had a harem around him, but Mack was withdrawn and shy. Adam had been the football hero. Mack had been into the ag program. They sure didn’t act or look like twins. Even so, she’d checked out all his references and settled on an amount for the rent. He’d never been late on a single payment, and Lord only knew how much the money helped her get by.

She’d been a high school counselor before Holly was born, but Wyatt had wanted her to stay home with the baby, so she’d given up her job and run a counseling service out of the house. They’d had a sweet little guesthouse that worked great for that business, and then when she moved to the apartment, she managed to keep up the work out of the tiny office she’d fixed up in the guesthouse. As she neared Comfort, she slapped the steering wheel in anger. She’d been blind to the way her own children were getting out of hand. Looking back, the signs had been there, but she’d had her head buried in the sand so deep that she’d ignored them. Things were sure enough going to be different from here on out.

“Almost there.” She made a sharp right-hand turn onto her old homestead, where she’d grown up back before she’d married and when she was Lily Miller. “We’re actually on your grandparents’ property right now. It looked a little different the last time y’all were here. If you look to y’all’s left, you’ll see the goats. To the right, well, darlin’s, that’s more goats.”

“Kind of cute,” Braden said.