from Sadie,” Daniel explained. “She’s the one who got me and Meg together.”
He slung an arm across Sadie’s shoulders and kissed her hair somewhere above her right ear. One of those gestures she’d interpreted—misinterpreted—to mean she was special to him. Even now she couldn’t help melting against him just the tiniest bit, and imagining for a nanosecond that this had all worked out differently, that she and Daniel—
She realized Trey’s gaze had narrowed on her. That while everyone else listened to Meg rattling on about Sadie’s incredible intuition, introducing her and Daniel, he had been observing her.
“Feeling the heat, Sadie?” Trey asked. “You’re wilting.”
At barely five o’clock the temperature was nowhere near the mid-nineties that had dominated the afternoon. She straightened away from Daniel. “I’m fine, but thanks for your concern,” she said crisply.
“This is wonderful having you all here together,” Mary-Beth said. “Tomorrow’s barbecue will be just like old times.”
Not quite. In the old days, Meg’s father, Brian, had presided over the grill alongside Sadie’s dad, and her oldest brother, Logan, regularly defended his record for consuming the most burgers in one night. But Brian and Logan Kincaid had died in a fishing accident when Sadie and Meg were high-school seniors.
Trey had given up his college football scholarship to take his father’s place running Kincaid Nurseries, the family garden center. Turned out he was a natural businessman, just as he was a football player—over the years he’d added more garden centers in surrounding neighborhoods.
“Let’s get you all settled in,” Nancy said to Meg and Daniel. “Trey’s staying for dinner tonight, so we’ll have some time to get to know each other ahead of our busy weekend.”
Sadie watched Daniel and Meg walk up the path through Nancy’s spectacular front garden. Her own parents’ garden was equally impressive—Sadie’s mom and dad had taken turns presiding over the Cordova Garden Club, and Kincaid Nurseries was the club’s number-one sponsor. As next-door neighbors, the two families were a match made in heaven.
Sadie turned away before she could watch Meg and Daniel walk into the house. Shutting her out.
One weekend. I can survive one weekend.
THERE WASN’T QUITE a full complement of Beechams around the seventies glass-topped table in Sadie’s parents’ dining room that night. Sadie’s older brother Jesse, his wife, Diane, and eight-year-old twins, Hannah and Holly, came to dinner, along with her sister, Merrilee, three years younger than Sadie, and her husband, Ben, and infant son, Matthew.
But Sadie’s younger brother, Brett, and his wife, Louisa, had stayed away. Two of their three preschoolers were recovering from chicken pox and today was officially the last day of their contagion. They’d be at tomorrow night’s barbecue. Kyle, her oldest and only un-attached sibling, had breezed in, claiming he had to rush off to see his latest girlfriend, but he was still sprawled in his seat opposite Sadie. Her brothers and sister had all remained in Cordova.
“It’s like Grand Central Station around here,” Gerry Beecham, Sadie’s dad, said. “Wives, husbands, kids… and to think you and I worried we might have an empty nest, Mary-Beth.”
Mary-Beth blew him a kiss from the far end of the table.
“It’s a shame we don’t have you here more often, Sadie, love,” Gerry continued.
Sadie’s bungalow in uptown Memphis was just over half an hour away. Her parents acted as if she lived on the other side of the country.
“Sadie was never going to stay a Cordova girl,” her mother said fondly.
You made sure of that. Sadie quashed a flare of resentment. Sending her to a boarding school for gifted children at age ten, after her elementary-school principal had her IQ tested, had not been an act of rejection. Her parents had been proud but overwhelmed by the prospect of “raising a genius to fulfill her potential,” as the principal put it. They’d sent her away for her own good.
She speared three beans with her fork. “I really don’t live that far away,” she muttered, knowing she was wasting her time.
Going to college at Princeton had widened the distance between her and her family, and now it seemed her default setting was “away.” Even when she was right here.
She tried to concentrate on the conversations rippling around her—the dramas of the PTA, a new cupcake recipe, a camping trip to the Smokies planned for later in the summer. But her family always considered her “above” such mundane topics, so no one asked her opinion or shared their cupcake tips. Not that she would have known what to do with them.
Sadie’s mind wandered next door. She wondered how Daniel was getting along with Nancy. Fabulously, of course. He was the kind of guy every mother dreamed her daughter would bring home.
“Sadie?” Her father said.
She jolted back to the present, and realized everyone was looking at her. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.” She thought back. Hadn’t Merrillee been complaining about her cupcakes not rising?
“Did you wait too long before putting them in the oven?” she asked her sister. “If the baking powder released its carbon dioxide gas too soon—” She broke off. “Hey, I wonder what percentage of global warming is caused by bakers forgetting to put their cakes in the oven.” She chuckled…and realized everyone else was staring at her, baffled.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t hilarious. But Daniel would have got it. Would have laughed.
Sadie blinked, hard.
“I was asking when we’ll get to see that garden of yours, love,” her father said.
“Uh…it’s not quite there yet.” Sadie didn’t like to admit to the atrocious state of her garden—the love of everything botanical was one thing she shared with her parents, who between them had four green thumbs and sixteen green fingers. All of her siblings had inherited both the talent and the enthusiasm.
Shame the gene pool hadn’t had one green digit to spare for Sadie. When she’d bought the bungalow two years ago, she’d had visions of creating a lush, peaceful, enticing landscape.
Her failure was a constant frustration, all the more aggravating because it didn’t make sense. As a seed biologist, she knew the theory of plants inside and out. She had the passion, too—a beautiful garden could bring tears to her eyes, and she loved getting her hands dirty. But her attempts to actually grow anything seemed doomed to failure.
“I haven’t had much time for gardening, I’ve been so busy at work.” She switched to a topic she could tackle with a hundred percent confidence, before the questions got too probing. “We’re looking at developing new strains of wheat with a higher protein content.”
She started on a layman’s description of the project. Five minutes later she was pleasantly surprised to realize she still had her family’s attention. Usually eyes were starting to glaze over by now. “Anyway—” she gave a little laugh, unnerved by their rapt expressions “—I’m loving it.”
“It sounds great,” Merrillee said encouragingly.
“Right over my head, sis.” Jesse swished his hand above his spiky haircut to demonstrate. “I wish I had your brains.”
“Your life sounds super fulfilling, Sadie.” Diane, Jesse’s wife, smiled kindly.
“Uh…thanks.” How odd. That sounded like the sort of comment you made when you were— Wait a minute!
The reason everyone was listening with such interest to wheat-protein statistics wasn’t that they’d developed a sudden interest in crop biology. Sadie would bet a million bucks that her mom had told them she had a boyfriend, and then told them they’d broken up.
They felt sorry for her!
Her