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shelter from the world. She was grateful she had the foresight to rent it, in spite of paying too much rent for what was basically a box with no soul.
    Aiden and Seth turning up in the very town she’d chosen to live in as she tried to escape her past seemed cruelly ironic. Sure, they weren’t the problem she was hiding from, but their appearance proved to be a painful reminder that she could never totally forget who she was or where she’d been.
    Her mom told her much the same last time they spoke on the phone. ‘Tracy, you need to sort this thing out with Wade once and for all. Running away never solved anything.’
    She’d grimaced when she’d heard the name that no longer seemed her own. Her mother refused to call her ‘Misty,’ even though she’d been the first to use it. Whenever Tracy Tucker acted a little too uppity for her mother’s liking, she shortened her name to ‘Miss T’ as a joking chastisement. The rest of the family picked it up, and it stuck ever since.
    By the time she cleaned up the apartment, did some laundry, and fell into bed, she felt worse than she had earlier. Why had she treated them so badly? In her defense, she hadn’t known until they opened their mouths what they wanted from her. She’d been on the road too long and with Wade for far too many years, to simply believe that they just wanted to rekindle a friendship. Yes, their relationship had become a sexual one, but they’d started out friends. And she missed them for a long time after she’d abandoned them in Nashville. More than once she toyed with the idea of looking them up, but her route never took her close enough to where they’d told her they lived. But then she met Wade, fell in love—or whatever she wanted to call the temporary insanity that had rid her of her senses whenever she got around him.
    Misty didn’t want Wade to be the last thing on her mind tonight, as he was so many nights, so she allowed herself to remember her time with Aiden and Seth. Not the sexual part—the part she rarely allowed herself to think about—especially if she wanted to stick to her resolution never to do that again with anyone. No. Misty wanted to think about the fun and feel again the optimism singing in Nashville the first time had given her. She’d been so sure her life was going places back then. Oh yes, it was going places all right. Straight down the pan.
    Determined to shake her blues by morning, Misty turned her pillow over to the cool side, gave it a thump, and settled down to sleep.
    When she woke, she lay quietly in bed, trying to guess the time by the noises outside of her window, but the street stayed quiet. The thin streak of light crawling across the ceiling, where it seeped in at the edges of the blind, told her the sun hadn’t come up yet, so she closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep. When she gave up on that, Misty tried to put a name to the way she felt.
    A little embarrassed? Sure. Maybe even a little sad
. But the bubble of excitement she got in the pit of her stomach when she thought of them worried her. What was the point of getting excited about their being here? They probably hated her now anyway.
    Despite her belief that staying away from them was for the best, when Misty walked out on stage later that night, she couldn’t help but hope they’d show up and give her a chance to apologize. But they didn’t show. Not that night nor the next two. By the end of the week, she knew she would never see Aiden or Seth again unless she made the effort and reached out to them. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life regretting the way she treated the men who had only ever been kind to her.
    The following afternoon, she donned an old pair of boots, a T-shirt, and some jeans. She scraped her hair back off her face before she went down to the stables to find them. The night before, she’d bought some drinks for a few of the guys in the bar, and they’d told her where to find Aiden and Seth. Hearing