The Quiet Girl of Wickline Road

Fern Okonkwo has spent four years at the end of Wickline Road, keeping her grandmother's house in order and her own life small enough to fit around it. She is twenty-three, still untouched, and she has never once spoken to the man who mows the lawn. Ash Delacroix runs the body shop four doors down and does dangerous work for the Warbirds MC, and every second Tuesday he cuts her grass without being asked. When a developer slips her grandmother a paper she does not understand, Ash is the only person in the county who can read it. They spend a summer on it, and by August she's pregnant and by September he's gone — Nevada, an old debt, eleven months of payphone calls that never quite reach her. She does the rest alone: the injunction, the hospital, the birth certificate, the name she writes on it anyway. When he finally comes home, it's to a court date and a one-year-old and a woman who has already done the hard parts without him.