“Ready?” Mack asked.

“I am,” she said as she tucked her hand into his. “I’m ready for more than just today, Mack. I’m going to let Wyatt have that apartment, but I’m going to add the furniture into the rent, heavily. I’m happy here working at the shop with Sally and living at the house with you. Life is”—she paused and cupped his face in her hand—“I’m not sure the right word is peaceful when we have two kids that bicker about everything, and after that scorching-hot time in your bedroom, but that’s what comes to mind. The other thing is happiness. I didn’t realize how much I missed that in my life until I found it again.”

“Me, too, on all of what you just said,” Mack told her.

“But before we take another step, I want you to think long and hard about something, and that’s children. We’re not too old to have a child between us, but do we want to do that? We need to give it a lot of thought and maybe even pray about it,” she said.

“Honey, we have two beautiful children. I’d just as soon not plan any more, but if an accident should happen, we won’t be upset. We’ll just figure . . .” He hesitated. “We didn’t use protection the other night.”

“I’m on the pill, not so much for protection, but for irregularity at my age,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”

He led her back toward his truck about the time the gravediggers lowered Granny Hayes’s casket into the ground. Lily stopped and watched them, then walked over to the grave, picked up a handful of dirt, and sprinkled it on the wooden box. “Thank you for what you meant to us, Granny. Rest in peace.”

“She would have liked that,” Mack said.

“I feel like my eyes have been opened after I’d been in a deep sleep since I came home to Comfort,” she said as she brushed her hands together to remove the last of the dirt. “First finding the journal with all my ancestors in it, and then reuniting with my friends and realizing how much they mean to me, and then there’s you.”

“I came in last?” he teased.

“No, I just saved the best for last,” she told him.

He opened the truck door for her, put his big hands around her waist, picked her up, and set her in the passenger seat. “I’ll take being last all the time if that’s the case.”

“Let’s go home,” she said, and she meant it as home—permanently.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Thirteen months later

Lily took a dozen pictures of Holly that beautiful April evening before her daughter left her bedroom. With her long blonde hair all swept up in curls and wearing a lovely light-blue prom dress, she looked even more like Vera’s wedding picture than ever before. Preacher Drew’s son, Clay, waited for her in the living room. Looking all grown up in his black tuxedo with a blue vest that matched Holly’s dress perfectly, he was right at home in the old stone house. But then, he should have been—he’d been dating Holly for the past year and spent lots of time there.

“Oh. My. Goodness!” Clay stood up and his eyes widened. “You are so beautiful, Holly. I’m going to have the prettiest date at the prom.”

She smiled, a little shyly for Holly Anderson, but then Clay brought out the best in her. “Thank you. I’m going with the most handsome boy in the whole school.”

“If y’all are through kissin’ up to each other, let Mama take some pictures of you putting that corsage on her wrist so me and Isaac can get back to watchin’ our movie.” Braden’s voice had gone through the cracking changes. Now his drawl was even deeper than Mack’s and sounded like it came from a much bigger man.

“Little brothers are such a nuisance,” Holly fussed. “I’m never having sons. I’m only having daughters.”

Lily snapped several more pictures and then a final one of their backs as they were walking off the porch. Mack draped an arm around her shoulders.

“Time kind of gets away from us, don’t it? Before you know it, we’ll be watching her leave with some guy. Only she’ll be wearing a white dress and veil,” he said.

Lily shoved her phone into her hip pocket and turned around to face Mack. She put her arms around his neck and tiptoed to kiss him. When the kiss ended, she leaned her cheek against his broad chest. “I don’t want to think about that day, but I do hope that she finds a man who treats her as good as Clay does, and as good as you treat me.”

“We make a pretty good couple, don’t we? So have we got everything in order for our belated honeymoon at the end of next month?”

“All we’ve got to do is pack our bags and drive to the airport. From there it’s all planned out for us. The kids are excited to go on a ten-day Alaskan cruise,” she answered.

“I’m looking forward to it, too,” he said. “Ten days to celebrate our marriage.”

“That happened a year ago.” She tiptoed and kissed him on the cheek. “And we’ve celebrated it every day since.”

“But not on a big ship. Maybe we should do this every year,” he suggested. “But right now I’d better go take care of the evening chores.”

“I’ll have supper on the table when you get back,” she told him.

He left by the back door, and she sat down on the bottom step. It had been a good year, but somehow she’d never gotten around to writing anything in the journal. She had meant to—she really had. The time just never seemed quite right.

“No time like the present,” she said as she stood and went up to her old bedroom, which was now her office. She opened the oak secretary, pulled down the flap, and took out the journal. She thumbed through the pages, scanning more than a hundred years of handwriting from her ancestors. Happy times. Sad times. Deaths. Births. Life in general. It was all there to show her that her life was what she made it and that her choices would have consequences. When she reached the first clean page, she reached for an ink pen and began to write:

Lily Miller Anderson Cooper, April 2020: I’ve never been happier than I am right now. My life is not perfect by any means, but then, no one ever promised it would be. I just watched my daughter, Holly, leave for her very first prom with Clay. He’s the preacher’s son and is a young man that I both admire and appreciate for his convictions and values. Six years ago Holly’s father walked out on us—Holly, her younger brother, Braden, and me—and for five of those years I was little more than a zombie. Then one day circumstances made me sit up and take notice. I realized that my kids were completely out of control, and it would take drastic measures to put them back on the right track. I took them out of the environment they were in and brought them to Comfort, Texas—back to my roots and the house I’d been raised in. It was during those first days that I found this journal, and it has helped me so much to understand that life is what we make it. The kids’ father, Wyatt Anderson, is struggling to find his way. They see him about every three months for a weekend, and I have hopes that someday they’ll have a decent relationship. That’s up to him and them, and I try to stay out of it. I remarried after I came home. Mack Cooper and I said our vows last summer. He’s a good man, a good husband, and a wonderful role model for the children. We have an amazing life here on our little goat farm. Holly knows about this journal, and she knows that someday she’ll have the same responsibility that I have.