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look good,” Aunt Nettie said. “It only takes a couple of rolls to get them round. You don’t have to handle them a lot. Now you can start rolling them in chocolate.”
    Dolly took a metal bowl over to the vat of dark chocolate. She used the spigot at the bottom of the vat to drain chocolate into the bowl, then turned to Aunt Nettie, looking quizzical.
    “A little more chocolate will make it easier to work with,” Aunt Nettie said.
    I walked over to them. “Where’d you disappear to, Dolly? I got up to talk to Maggie McNutt, and when I came back you were gone.”
    Dolly’s face turned even redder than it usually is. “I had to get back to work,” she said. For once her voice didn’t boom. In fact, I could hardly hear her. “Just wanted to meet Maia Michaelson.”
    “What did you think of her?”
    Dolly shrugged. “Glad I’m not part of her family,” she said.
    “Yeah, being related to Maia is a scary thought,” I said.
    Dolly didn’t seem inclined to make any further comment, so I left Aunt Nettie showing Dolly how to roll truffles and went into my office. My office is a glass cubicle between the shop and the workroom. It’s not as homey as the rest of TenHuis Chocolade, I guess, but during the pre-Christmas rush I almost live there. I glanced at the framed picture of Joe standing beside his favorite antique wooden boat. I wasn’t going to think about Joe that afternoon, so I laid it facedown.
    The chocolate business is seasonal, and the seasons start with Halloween and end with Mother’s Day. With October a third gone, we were past Halloween preparations, almost through with Thanksgiving, and well into Christmas. Dolly might be learning to roll truffles, but most of the other employees were molding Santa Claus figures and filling chocolate Christmas tree ornaments with tiny chocolate toys. Toward the back of the room, eight women were standing around a big stainless steel table, wrapping cubes of molded chocolate in gorgeous foils to produce chocolates that looked like tiny little gift boxes.
    The scene was giving me the dose of comfort that I needed. I sat at my desk and counted my blessings for a minute. When I’d left Dallas a year and a half earlier, I’d been recovering from a lousy marriage and a mean-spirited divorce. I had finally finished my degree in accounting, but it had been a struggle. TenHuis Chocolade hadn’t been in very good shape, either. My uncle Phil had always handled the business side. When he was killed by a drunk driver, the whole thing had been dumped on Aunt Nettie, who made wonderful chocolates, but hated to balance her checkbook. After I’d taken over as business manager, I’d discovered unpaid bills, lousy customer relations, and poor shipping schedules.
    Now Aunt Nettie’s unconditional love had given me a new sense of my own worth. I’d formed a circle of friends I felt I could rely on—even if my boyfriend was acting like a jerk right at the moment. TenHuis was back on a firm financial foundation, with chocolates shipped on time and all the bills paid. I could honestly say I’d accomplished a lot.
    Then I caught sight of our fall display of molded chocolates on the shelf behind the cash register. Aunt Nettie called it “Pet Parade.” It featured tiny figures of puppies and kittens in dark, white, and milk chocolate. Some of them were even spotted dogs with lop ears, dark chocolate with white spots, or white chocolate with milk chocolate spots. There were tiny baskets of kittens or puppies. Each little animal was darling. My Texas grandma would have said each one was cuter than a spotted pup under a red wagon. In fact, a five-inch toy red wagon filled with one-inch puppies had been one of our best sellers that fall.
    But now those puppies made Monte and his owner flash into my mind.
    What if Aunt Nettie really fell for Aubrey Andrews Armstrong? She could get badly hurt. I couldn’t stand that idea.
    But, as Chief Jones had pointed out, Aunt Nettie was a grown