Betrayed by the One She Trusted Most

There are two matching lockets in the world, a heart on a chain, one for each of Coralee Crews' girls, given the year she died. Hazel has worn hers for eighteen years. Sylvie has never once taken hers off. So when Hazel's hand closes around a locket that isn't hers — down in the seam of her husband's truck, warm, familiar, wrong — she knows whose it is before she's even lifted it into the light. And she understands, in one long airless second, the two things that just ended: her marriage, and her only sister. You can leave a husband. There's paperwork for that. There is no paperwork for un-sistering a sister — especially not the one you half-raised, whose hair you braided, who you sat up with through every fever after your mother was gone. Mac and Sylvie made Hazel an only child and a widow of her whole history in a single afternoon. And the cruelest part isn't even the affair. It's that now every good memory is suspect — every holiday, every ordinary happy year — because she doesn't know when it started, so she doesn't know which of them were ever real. Mac Deering knows there is no version of sorry big enough for this. He also knows, once he stops running from it, the ugly truth underneath: he didn't fall for Sylvie. He resented needing a wife strong enough never to need him back — and Sylvie was the only other person as un-needed by capable, load-bearing Hazel as he felt. He burned down the one who held him up because he couldn't stand being held. Naming that is where the grovel starts. It is nowhere near where it ends. This is the hardest second chance there is — not because the apology is hard to say, but because some things a sorry can't reach, and a good man has to learn the difference between putting a family back together and letting the woman he broke grieve it on her own terms. Hazel will decide what she keeps and what she closes the door on. By her own hand. On her own terms. And nobody — not the town, not the family, not even the two little girls smiling inside those lockets — gets to rush her.