Chapter 1

The rake left his hands before he understood what was happening.

Hollis Vance had been smoothing the aisle for the third time that morning, the wooden teeth combing the pale gravel into even rows, the ash handle warm from the May sun. He was mid-sweep, the rhythm of the work as familiar as breathing, when a hand snapped out of nowhere and closed over the handle just above his grip.

Rosalind Deacon ripped the rake from his hands like she was taking a toy from a child.

The ash handle turned in the air. It hung there for a fraction of a second, spinning, catching the late-morning light, before it landed teeth-first in the boxwood hedge behind the white ceremony arch with one loud wooden clack that carried across the whole lawn.

The folding chairs stopped scraping. The caterer's voice went quiet mid-sentence. A single red-winged blackbird shot up from the fence line and disappeared over the ridge.

Hollis looked at his empty hands. A thin smear of dark soil stayed across his palm where the handle had left it, a faint brown line cutting through the calluses.

Rosalind's hand came down flat on the air between them, a gesture of dismissal so complete it was almost elegant. She turned away from him before he could speak, her chestnut blowout catching the light, the tortoiseshell clip high on one side glinting.

"It was in the way of the aisle," she said to the bride's mother, who stood two steps behind her in a lavender linen dress.

Wren Calloway was a small woman with a neat silver bob and warm brown eyes that had spent thirty years watching people's faces in a hospital corridor. She looked at the rake in the boxwood. She looked at Hollis's soiled palm. Then she looked at Rosalind's powdered cheek and something in her face shifted, like a curtain drawing back from a window.

"Let him finish the aisle," Wren said, and her voice was careful, the way she used to speak to nurses who were about to make a mistake.

Rosalind didn't turn around. She was already walking the rows of white folding chairs, her nude heels sinking slightly into the grass, her gold watch catching the sun as she gestured at the caterer to move a floral arrangement six inches to the left.

"You're done here before the ceremony," she said, her voice carrying, a statement of fact delivered to the whole lawn rather than to the man she was addressing.

Hollis stood mid-aisle with his hands at his sides. He was forty-one years old, lean and six feet tall, with a face that had spent twenty years in the Tennessee weather. The sun had carved lines around his gray eyes and darkened his skin to the color of worn leather. His slate-blue oxford shirt was rolled to the elbows, the cuffs stained with the faint green tint of hedge work.

He did not move.

He did not speak.