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Nick was outside the restaurant, breathing in the chilled night air, his mind fuzzy from the effort to sit beside his brother without starting an argument. He and Becca climbed into his BMW and he set off down the road, the quiet giving way to thoughts he didn’t want to have—questions he didn’t want to answer. Because at the end of the day, maybe Trip was right. Maybe it was time to sell.
    “You okay?” Becca asked once they pulled down her driveway and were parked outside her house.
    “Yeah, just thinking.” Nick rolled his head toward her, and Becca opened her mouth to ask him something, but Nick’s brain couldn’t handle any more questions, any more thoughts. “See you tomorrow?”
    Her mouth snapped closed and she glanced out the windshield. “Right. See you tomorrow, Nick.”

Chapter Four
    B ecca woke to the sound of someone or something banging around in her kitchen. Immediately, she grabbed the baseball bat she kept beside her bed and started out the door. Thank God she hadn’t woken up thirty minutes before to exercise like she’d planned or she might have been killed by the intruder.
    She edged down the still-dark hall because the sun wasn’t fully awake either, and then jumped into the kitchen, only to scream and then listen as the person in her fridge screamed, and then the baby on said person’s hip began to cry. Loudly.
    “Reagan? What in the hell—?”
    “Shhh!” her sister reprimanded, then pointed to the child sitting at Becca’s kitchen table, her hands over her ears like earmuffs. Her light brown hair was parted down the middle and pulled up into two high pigtails that hung in curls, and she had the same olive complexion as most of the Starks.
    “Oops, sorry, Anna banana.” Becca dropped the bat on her couch and walked over to peck her niece’s chipmunk cheek, then glared at her sister. “What are you doing here this early in the morning?”
    “We’re out of milk and Anna wanted cereal.”
    “Why are you out of milk?” Becca grabbed the gallon jug from her fridge, poured it over her niece’s cereal, and then replaced it before turning on her sister, who was suddenly very interested in the kitchen sink. “Reagan?”
    The sun’s rays cast in through the window over the sink, highlighting shimmery tears, and Becca’s heart sank. “What happened?”
    “I can’t talk about it here.”
    Becca motioned to the family room, which, with the open floor plan, wasn’t much better, but it was a small house, what could she do? “Ty lost his job again, and my credit card was declined at the market yesterday. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
    Reagan dried her tears with the back of her hand, then ran a hand over baby Cade’s head, and the sucker in Becca sighed. “How much do you need?”
    Reagan’s face lit. “Seriously? You’ll help us?”
    As though Becca hadn’t been the one to bail them out every single time Ty lost his job, which was pretty much every other week. Ty was the perfect example of why high school superstars don’t matter. He was quarterback of Triple Run High, every girl in the school wanted him, and Reagan snagged him. But then, when Ty realized that his talents in a small town didn’t translate to college and he was placed on special teams, then benched, he moved back home and drank his sorrows away.
    What made it all worse was that Ty still thought of himself as a superstar and told stories of his best games to anyone who would listen. And Becca might feel bad for him, if it weren’t that he treated her sister like it was all her fault and his children like they were nuisances.
    Becca’s mother had warned her against helping her sister, saying Ty put Reagan up to asking Becca and would take her for all she had if she wasn’t careful, but Becca loved her niece and nephew. How could she let them suffer? It wasn’t their fault they had crappy parents.
    Though she only worked at the diner, Becca saved every dollar she made, so she had quite a