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weathered with age, just like the rest of the place. Once upon a time, his father had been obsessed with winning the neighborhood association’s Yard of the Month award. Now the lawn, once manicured and gently sloping away from the house, was a mass of weeds and anthills. Dead shrubs overflowed the flowerbeds. The spindly skeletons of his mother’s prized rose bushes were choking on knee-high crabgrass turned brown by the biting cold.
    He walked up the path toward the faded oak door. The house’s gray brick looked sturdy enough still. But what used to be midnight-blue trim had mottled under the burden of time and too much sun, its pasty color the perfect accompaniment to the falling-down neglect that permeated everything. The few shutters remaining on the windows listed at odd angles, missing row after row of slats. And the two-story traditional’s roof had buckled under years of Georgia heat, warping and blistering in places, cracking off in chunks in others. He reached the top of the front steps, avoided several loose boards and turned to survey the yard again.
    An unexpected urgency swamped him. Guilt spiked through the need not to be there. The years of silence between him and his father were supposed to have brought the man closure. The peace neitherof them had been able to find with the other still in his life. From the looks of things, Nathan had chosen to give up instead.
    The chill of the doorknob felt strange as he turned it. Foreign. Unfamiliar. Even stranger when it resisted and refused to pivot.
    The door was locked.
    As far back as he could remember, his parents had never locked up. There’d been no need in a town like Rivermist. More to the point, he had no keys. He’d thrown them away the day his personal effects were returned when he left prison. He couldn’t keep the keys and not want to come back.
    But leaving his home behind and being locked out of it were two different things.
    â€œCome on!” He jiggled the handle, then rapped his knuckles on one of the glass panels set in the top half of the custom-built door. He rang the bell, as if that would convince the town recluse to answer.
    A shadow behind the frosted glass caught his eye. Someone was coming after all. Someone too tiny and far too feminine-looking, even through the door’s grimy windows, to be his father.
    Buford had said the man lived alone.
    So who the hell was unlocking the front door?

CHAPTER SIX
    T HE DEADBOLT SCRAPED BACK . The door squeaked open. Hinges made their grinding protest heard. Then everything that should have been gone from Neal’s empty heart stood before him, confusion and shock clouding her beautiful features.
    Jennifer Gardner.
    The embodiment of all he’d given up. The dream it had been pointless to keep dreaming.
    His Jennifer.
    No! Not his. Not for eight long years.
    â€œWhat—what are you doing here, Jenn?” He forced out the shorter version of her name. The one he’d never used, not once, after they started dating in high school.
    High school.
    The memories came rushing back, now that she was standing there in front of him.
    They’d fallen in love freshman year, unexpected feelings taking hold. Attraction growing out of years of inseparable friendship. Holding hands giving wayto a shocking first kiss, and the discovery and urgency that had soon followed. They’d started dating for real as sophomores. Then a late afternoon walk around the lake that fall had ended with the sweetest first time a boy growing into a man could have hoped for. And so he’d left his funny friend Jenn behind with his childhood, and had refused to call her anything but Jennifer since.
    Used to drive Reverend Gardner crazy.
    Now…
    He couldn’t deal with calling her Jennifer . Couldn’t deal with her being here, so beautiful and sad and still, in the last place she was supposed to be—as if she’d been waiting for him all this time.
    â€œI…”