Chapter One

"How long is she going to be staying here?" Eric looked out over their black granite kitchen island through the sliding glass door at Julie, who sat on the rim of the hot tub. Next to her, an eleven-year-old Gracie dipped her toes in the water.

The hot tub was turned off for the summer, and four-year-old Jackson was paddling about it in his bright orange floaties as if it were a pool. Eric had been surprised when Matt and Julie chose such a good, sturdy, Southern name for boy, but then Tami told him they'd named the kid after the artist Jackson Pollock.

Julie and Jackson had been here for five days, and Julie had barely spoken about Matt during that time. By the third day, Eric and Tami decided something was wrong and that Julie was probably running from it, but they tip-toed around the subject and patiently waited for their daughter to talk.

Tami sighed and leaned back against the stainless steel refrigerator. "Until they work this out."

Eric whipped off his red-and-white coaching cap and set it on the island countertop. Summer training wouldn't start until Monday, but as the new head coach of the Braemore Bloodhounds, he'd been in the office planning and meeting all summer long. Braemore's football program was fledgling and starved for resources, and it didn't help that everyone whispered he'd only gotten the job because he was sleeping with the Dean of Admissions. "What exactly are they working out?"

"I know as much as you do, hon."

He scratched his head. Distinguished streaks of silver were creeping into his dark hair, but his face still looked closer to forty than fifty. "Do you think he cheated on her?"

"No," Tami said. "Not Matt. It's probably just…the seven year itch. You know how it is."

"No, I don't. I didn't itch. There was no itching on my part. Did you itch?"

"We had our challenges, Eric. You know we did."

He sighed. "But even if one or both of them is itching a little…a woman shouldn't just up and take a kid away from his father and move back into her parents' house!"

"She's not moving in."

"She sure brought a hell of a lot of stuff," he said.

"She's just…she said she wants to stay for the last two weeks of summer. You know she has to get back before the school year starts for in-services."

Julie was teaching English in Savannah, Georgia, where they'd moved just before she got pregnant with Jackson. Matt was working for the largest art gallery in the city, and he was the guy who decided what art to buy and went around the country acquiring it. It was a well-paid position, certainly more than Eric had been making at the age of twenty-seven. He was surprised his daughter and son-in-law had ended up in the South, while he and Tami had settled solidly in the mid-Atlantic, but Savannah apparently had a vibrant art community.

Eric looked at Tami. "Are you gonna ask her – "

He fell silent as Julie plucked Jackson from the hot tub and the kids began to walk toward the sliding glass door.