Whiskey and Wildflowers

Marisol Beck left Bell Hollow at nineteen and didn't come back for fifteen years — not when her mother got sick, not for the funeral's planning, not once. She's here now to clear the house and sell it, and she plans to be gone before the dogwoods drop. Rhodes Kirkland never left. He runs his family's distillery on fumes and pride, and he has one sentence he's been carrying since the night she drove out of town. She's sorting her mother's things. He's hauling. There's a room neither of them will open, a buyer who wants both their parcels, and fifteen years of letters that say what her mother never could. Some homecomings are a visit. This one has a whiskey barrel with her name on it.