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asked. “Because he was so sexy-looking?”

    “No, of course not,” Dana Sue said nobly. “He was sweet and smart and funny, too.”

    Her daughter grinned. “I always thought it was because every other girl in school wanted him and you wanted to prove you could get him.”

    Dana Sue laughed. “Did your father tell you that?”

    “Nope. Maddie did. She said you were so single-minded when it came to getting Dad to notice you.”

    “Yeah, I probably was,” Dana Sue confessed. “He was the first boy who wouldn’t even give me a second look. Naturally, that made him an irresistible challenge. And I knew he would make my folks a little crazy.” She leaned closer and confided, “He had a tattoo, you know.”

    Annie giggled. “Maddie said he gave you a tough time on purpose, because if he’d made it easy, you’d have lost interest.”

    Dana Sue thought back and tried to imagine losing interest in Ronnie. She couldn’t. Her feelings for him had been all-consuming for a long time. Not even nearly eighteen years of marriage had turned down the heat between them. An affair and two years of separation had only driven her to bury the attraction.

    “I don’t know,” she told Annie. “I fell pretty hard, pretty fast.”

    “And you never regretted it, did you?” her daughter asked. “I mean, not till the end, when he was with that other woman.”

    Dana Sue didn’t like even thinking about the day she’d found out about Ronnie’s affair, much less reminiscing about it, but it was evident that Annie had been wanting to ask these questions for a long time. It was as if she’d been saving them up for the right moment. It was also evident she’d been turning to Maddie to find some of the answers she wanted. Dana Sue felt incredibly guilty that Annie hadn’t been able to ask her own mother for the details of her parents’ courtship.

    “No, until the day he cheated on me—or the day I found out about it, anyway—I never regretted a single second with your dad.” She felt Annie deserved total honesty, not an answer colored by far more recent bitterness and resentment.

    “So, he made, like, this one huge mistake and that was it?” Annie said, frowning. “None of the rest mattered anymore?”

    “That’s the way I saw it,” Dana Sue said. “Some betrayals are just too huge.”

    “Do you still feel that way?”

    Dana Sue regarded her daughter with a puzzled look. “Why do you ask?”

    “I just wondered how you’d feel if Dad came back to town. Could you forgive him now?”

    It was the second time in one day that people Dana Sue loved had suggested it might be time for her to get over the past and move on, maybe even with that scum-of-the-earth, cheating ex of hers. She told herself that could only happen if she let her heart—or her hormones—overrule her head. Once Burned, Twice Shy was her motto.

    “Sorry, baby. I know you’d like that, but it’s not going to happen,” she said. “When you’re a little older and have fallen in love, maybe you’ll understand why some things are simply unforgivable.”

    Before Annie could press her on it, she stood up. “You need to get some sleep, young lady. So do I.”

    She brushed a kiss across Annie’s forehead. “Lights out, okay?”

    To her surprise, her daughter’s arms came around her waist. “I love you, Mom.”

    “Oh, sweetie, I love you, too,” Dana Sue whispered, tears in her eyes. “And wherever he is, I know your dad loves you, as well. More than anything.”

    “I know,” Annie said with a sniff. “Sometimes, I just wish he was here, you know?”

    Dana Sue bit back a sigh. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I do know.”

    There were times when she felt as if someone had carved out her heart and left her aching and empty inside. But that feeling paled compared to the anger she’d felt when she’d found out about his fling with some woman whose name he didn’t even remember. Weighing the two emotions and adding in a