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of mint so we’ve got the green.”
    â€œAva, you didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
    â€œI certainly did.” Ava laughed at Phoebe and flipped back her sassy swing of blond hair. At forty-three, Ava Vestry Dover remained the most beautiful woman of Phoebe’s acquaintance. And perhaps the kindest.
    When Ava lifted the pitcher, Phoebe hurried over. “No, I’ll pour and serve. You go on and watch awhile. Mama’ll feel better with you standing with her,” Phoebe added quietly.
    With a nod, Ava walked over, touched Essie on the shoulder, then moved to stand on Carly’s other side.
    There was her family, Phoebe thought. True, Ava’s son was off in New York in college, and Carter’s pretty wife was working, but this was the foundation, the bedrock. Without them, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t just float off like a dust mote.
    She poured lemonade, passed around the glasses, then stood beside Carter. Leaned her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry Josie can’t be here.”
    â€œMe, too. She’ll be here for dinner if she can.”
    Her baby brother, she thought, a married man. “You two ought to stay the night, avoid the holiday traffic and the insanity of revelry.”
    â€œWe like the insanity of revelry, but I’ll see if she’d rather. Remember the first time we stood up here and watched the parade? That first spring after Reuben.”
    â€œI remember.”
    â€œEverything was so bright and loud and foolish. Everyone was so happy. I believe even Cousin Bess cracked a smile or two.”
    Probably just indigestion, Phoebe thought, with lingering bitterness.
    â€œI felt, really felt, maybe everything would be all right. That he wasn’t going to break out and come for us, wasn’t going to kill us in our sleep. Christmas didn’t do that for me, not that first year, or my birthday. But standing here all those years ago, I thought maybe everything was going to be all right after all.”
    â€œAnd it was.”
    She took his hand so they were linked, right down the line of the rail.

2
    Cleaned up and hung over, Duncan sat at his kitchen counter brooding over his laptop and a cup of black coffee. He’d meant to keep it to a couple of beers, hanging with some of the regulars at Slam Dunc before heading off to catch the music, another beer or two at Swifty’s, his Irish pub.
    When you owned bars, he’d learned, you were smart to stay sober. He might bend that rule of thumb a little on St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve. But he knew how to coast through a long night with a couple of beers.
    It hadn’t been celebration that put the Jameson’s with a bump of Harp back into his hand too many times. It had been sheer relief. Joe wasn’t a smear on the sidewalk outside the bar.
    I’ll drink to that.
    And it was better to be hung over due to good news than hung over due to bad. You still felt like shit, Duncan admitted as the horns and pipes throbbed in his abused head, but you knew it would wear off.
    What he needed to do was get out of the house. Take a walk. Or a nap in the hammock. Then figure out what to do next. He’d been figuring out what to do next for the past seven years. And he liked it.
    He frowned at the laptop another moment, then shook his head. If he tried to work now, even pretend to work, his head would probably explode.
    Instead, he carried his coffee out to the back veranda. The mourning doves were cooing, bobbing heads as they pecked along the ground under the bird feeder. Too fat and lazy, Duncan thought, to bother to fly up into it. Rather take leavings.
    A lot of people were the same.
    His gardens were thriving, and he liked knowing he’d put a little of his own sweat and effort into them. He considered walking through them now, winding his way under the live oaks and the thick spider-webs of moss to the dock. Take a sail maybe, cruise the river.
    Damn