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in the ranch town of McAllister as a pile of cow shit on Fifth Avenue.
    “Mama wanted to know if you were coming over to dinner tonight. She’d like to see Austin,” Trevor said, referring to EJ’s two year old son.
    EJ sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. He didn’t understand Glenda’s insistence of having a memorial dinner for Raquel every year to remember her life. None of them needed reminding she was dead. He’d made the mistake of attending last year and had to leave early. His memories made the day depressing enough; he didn’t need to sit around looking at photo albums and telling stories of what an angel Raquel had been. He’d loved his wife--once--but she had never worn a halo. “Tell her I have other plans.”
    Trevor narrowed his brown eyes. “What about Austin?”
    EJ shrugged. “I’ll bring him over this weekend. But tonight, we have plans.”
    If eating the leftover pot roast his brother’s wife had given him, watching the Rangers game, and drinking a beer or two after he put the baby to bed at eight o’clock justified as plans.
    “What’s more important than family?”
    His brother-in-law’s tenacity matched that of the Marshall’s bulldog when he was on one of his mother’s errands. Glenda had babied her only son as if he was a crown prince, and although, Trevor was twenty-three years old, he’d never let go of his mother’s skirt. “I never said family wasn’t important, but frankly, I’m not interested in revisiting the picture-perfect life your mother insists on painting for Raquel.”
    Trevor’s eyes widened as he gasped. “How dare you say such a thing today?”
    EJ had enough. He stood and leaned over his desk. “Look. I loved your sister, but life with her had never been perfect for me. She thought she was a princess, and I’ll admit at first I treated her like one, but she was lazy, demanding and at times a down-right bitch on wheels.” This time Trevor’s face paled and he thinned his lips. EJ didn’t care that everything he said would, no doubt, be relayed to the queen of bitchdom, his mother-in-law. He was on a roll. “The last straw for me was when we brought our baby home from the hospital and she refused to even look at him.”
    “She was depressed!”
    “I get that.” And he did, kind of. The doctor explained her postpartum depression was caused by her hormones returning to normal more quickly than she could become accustomed to and a predisposition to depression. But he knew it went deeper. She’d hated being pregnant, despite having a trouble-free time and an easy delivery. He’d caught her staring in their bedroom mirror when she was about eight months and telling their baby how much she hated him for making her fat and ugly. The memory sent a stab of pain into his heart. How could a mother hate her own baby, a child she’d created with a man she’d claimed to love? Sure, the pregnancy hadn’t been planned, and wasn’t at the ideal time in their renewed relationship, but he thought she wanted a family. Until she got pregnant. Had she suffered from postpartum depression, or was she depressed because now she had a baby she’d despise taking care of? Or was she angry because she married him because she was pregnant? After all, they had sex the first night they were together after a long breakup. Maybe she’d never intended to have a future with him.
    He kept those thoughts to himself. “But instead of seeking help, she refused and started using drugs.”
    He stopped before he went any further. Before he admitted he’d dealt with depression, too, but couldn’t understand why Raquel killed herself. No one knew the bottle of Zoloft she’d emptied belonged to him. He’d never taken more than three of the antidepressant pills the VA doctor prescribed for him to help with the PTSD he developed after a mission he’d commanded had gone terribly wrong. As he sat in his leather chair, he buried the memory of the five soldiers, who