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for a couple of days, and then she walked away.
    I can just picture how that walking-away view was for my brother. If he’s like me, and I think he is, he appreciates the walking away as much as he does the walking toward. We Kendrick boys are connoisseurs of beautiful women.
    Luke talked to Jackson, and Jackson told him there wasn’t much he could do, but he was meeting with the heirs this afternoon, and maybe Luke could come out and make nice, that sort of thing. He also gave Luke the name of a lawyer, and he said,
You’re going to need one if you can’t work this out with the ladies.
    I have faith that Luke can work it out with the ladies. He said he was going out to the ranch to scope things out, get a feel for them. I said, “Are you going to tell them their dad stole the ranch from our dad?”
    He looked at me like that was a dumb question and said, “Well yeah, Leo. That’s the whole point.”
    Boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that one. Women are superhot when they’re mad.
    But then I got to thinking about it, because that’s what I do, I
think,
and I said, “You know, you ought to invite them to dinner.”
    Luke said, “Now I know you’re crazy. I don’t even know them. I’m not bringing them here,” he said, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if it was because of the house or because he didn’t know them.
    I said, “No, think about it, Luke. They have no reason to make a deal with you. They don’t know you, they don’t care what Dad did, right? But maybe if they see that we are living in reduced circumstances,” and I sort of gestured to my chair, but I can’t really gesture anymore, so I had to knock my hand against it, “they might be more sympathetic.” If you think that’s a totally
sick
idea and a gross manipulation of emotions, you are right. I think someone should pay me for my great ideas.
    But Luke, he just shook his head and said, “Sometimes, I really worry about you, Leo.”
    He doesn’t need to worry about me. I know where I am and where I’m going. He needs to worry about himself because his path isn’t so clear. That’s why he needs a certified genius in his corner.

EIGHT
    With a carefully highlighted map, Madeline started for the ranch later that afternoon, driving cautiously on a narrow two-lane road. It wended up through a forest so thick with pines, spruce, and cottonwoods that the trees were forced to bend over the road, creating a canopy. Roads seemed treacherous enough, but they were made worse by the ground squirrels that sailed out of the underbrush and onto the road before her car, crisscrossing in crazy patterns and narrowly avoiding death beneath her wheels.
    She finally reached a plateau where the road ran alongside a meadow bursting with daisies and sunflowers. A handful of horses grazed, their tails swishing away flies. It seemed to Madeline she’d driven miles and miles, when in fact, according to her speedometer, it had been only seven. She found the turn she was to take at mile marker 243, just as Jackson’s map said (kudos to him for accuracy) and turned onto a gravel road. The grade was steeper here, the curves around the mountainside longer. She drove through towering spruce trees until the road began to straighten out as it crossed another meadow. This meadow was much larger than the one she’d passed, and ahead, she could see the entrance to the ranch. It couldn’t be missed—two thick wooden posts held up a sign, faded by weather, that said H OMECOMING R ANCH .
    Madeline coasted to a stop. Jackson had said the gate would be unlocked, but it was closed. She stepped out of her car, landing awkwardly in her pumps on the uneven road. The gate, all iron, came only to her waist; she gave it a healthy shove, and it swung back, clanging against the stretch of iron fencing that marked the entrance.
    So this is where her father had lived? Madeline turned to look back down the road she’d driven. The forest, the mountains and meadow, all so