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For the man I married, who fished my manuscript out of the trash and insisted I follow my dream. His support has given me the courage to make writing my full-time job, even though I still whine about deadlines and characters who refuse to cooperate.

A special thanks to the coffee shops in Indiana that kept me sufficiently caffeined up, so that I was working instead of napping or perfecting my FreeCell skills. In particular, thanks to the staff at The Grind, who gave me an insider’s view of how a great coffee shop operates.

All those lattes were research, honest.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

COMING NEXT MONTH

CHAPTER ONE

IF HER HANDS HADN’T been covered in double chocolate chip cookie dough, Melanie Weaver would have slapped duct tape over her mouth to stop herself from doing it again.

Saying yes when she really meant no.

Even when she had the best intentions of refusing, that slithery yes word slipped out instead. “Do you want a slice of Great-Grandma’s fruitcake?” “Can you call Bingo for the Ladies’ Auxiliary?” “Don’t you just love this orange sweater?”

She hated fruitcake, had grown tired of the “B-4 and After” jokes, and never wore orange. Yet every year, Great Grandma brought a rock-hard fruitcake to Christmas dinner and Melanie choked down a slice, praising the wrinkled dates and dried cherries. On Tuesday nights, she dutifully showed up at the Presbyterian Church and called out letters and numbers in a smoky room filled with frantic reddotters. And in Melanie’s closet, there were three orange sweaters, birthday presents from her aunt Cornelia, who took Melanie’s compliment of a mango-colored afghan as sure evidence of love for the color.

So it stood to reason, based on her history of always saying the wrong word at the wrong time, that on a bright spring Friday morning she would accept an invitation to her twenty-year class reunion when her life was as jumbled as a ten-thousand-piece puzzle.

“It’ll be wonderful to have you!” Jeannie Jenkins, former cheerleader, blasted Melanie out of her reverie with a voice that hit unnatural decibels on the phone. “Everyone is, like, so looking forward to seeing you.

“Or something,” Melanie said. She hadn’t returned the card because she hadn’t intended to go, nor to answer all those questions about where Cade was.

Or, worse, see Cade there with another woman on his arm. She may be ending her marriage, but she wasn’t quite ready to imagine him with someone else.

“The reunion is only, like, a week away. We’ll all be together again, in just a few days. Isn’t that so exciting?”

“Absolutely. ” Melanie tried to work some enthusiasm into her voice. She wanted to see her old friends, to catch up on their lives, but the thought of running into Cade, surrounded by memories of happier days, was unbearable. Her resolve would falter, and all those maybes would pop up, the same maybes that had stalled her leaving over and over again because she’d thought things might change. Go back to the way they were.