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Chapter 1
Hope Jones
***
Graham Springs, Arkansas
"The Morgans are back in town," Stacy said.
For so many years, that was a normal thing for her to say, so I tuned her out. The Morgans used to come to Arkansas twice a year like clockwork. I would see them every summer and Christmas. The phrase was something I had heard Stacy say tons of times.
We grew up in a small lakeside town in the foothills of the Ozark mountains. Graham Springs was situated on the third largest lake in Arkansas—Lake Sutton. The lake was shaped a bit like the letter T that was kind of lying on its side. It was only sixty-five miles wide, but it was jagged and lop-sided, and because of its odd shape, had almost four hundred miles of shoreline.
Graham Springs was among several tiny towns that bordered Lake Sutton. It was on the southeastern side of the lake, and it was the largest of all the lakeside towns, but it was still really small. We were home to seven thousand full-time residents and there were another two or three thousand around the lake who used our town seasonally during the summer. Graham Springs was far from a booming metropolis, but we had public schools, a department store, a few grocery stores, and a small hospital, which was more than any of our neighboring lakeside towns could say.
The main roadway looked like any other small town, but you could drive one minute toward the lake, and suddenly you were in the middle of pristine nature at its finest. Lake Sutton was God's country, with cliffs, trails, and waterfalls. There were picturesque views on every square mile of this lake.
I had been raised here, so I was used to the glory and splendor of it all, but I had also traveled to other states and cities, and I knew how rare and beautiful Lake Sutton was. During the peak traveling seasons, Lake Sutton was a vacation spot for rich people, so we had well-to-do seasonal guests during the holidays and summer.
That was how my mom met my dad. She grew up in Graham Springs, and my dad had come on vacation with a friend. He fell in love with my mother, and he wound up staying here that summer and never going back to Mississippi. They had me, and then my little brother came along a year later. My parents stayed together for a few years, but they weren't happy as a couple.
My dad stayed in the Lake Sutton area after they divorced, and my childhood was split going back and forth between the two of them. My little brother, Eric, came with me wherever I went, and I became a caretaker for him even though I was only a year older.
For ten years during our childhood, our dad lived in Broken Arrow and worked for the Morgan family.
Those were the best days.
The Morgan grandparents lived at the mansion full-time, and the children and grandchildren visited twice a year or more. Broken Arrow was further north and west in the upper portion of the letter T. It was around thirty miles from Graham Springs by car, or twenty by boat. I knew the two most direct routes like the back of my hand because I had traveled to the Morgans' lake house many times.
My father had worked for that family for ten years doing groundskeeping, yardwork, cleaning, painting, and other general maintenance. He wasn't the only person who worked for them, but he was the only one to live on the property full-time. During his time with the Morgan family, he lived in one of the three detached houses on the property—the one that was a little farther away from the others and was built specifically for the groundskeeper. I was with my dad about half of the time when he worked there. Legally, he only had custody of Eric and me two weekends out of the month, but we loved it at the Morgans' property, so we stayed with my dad as much as he would have us.
Those were the good old days. I lived in a tiny apartment with my mom in Graham Springs half the time and in Broken Arrow at a gorgeous mansion for the other half. Granted, Dad didn't live in the main house—but Eric and I got invited to go inside anytime the grandkids were visiting.
I had the sweetest, fondest memories of the Morgan family and their lake house. I was thrust into a moment of nostalgia when Stacy said their name, and it took a minute for her words to sink in.
"Wait, who's back?" I asked in a shocked tone since it had been years since I had heard their name.
"The Morgans," Stacy repeated, nodding. "They're back in town."
Several different thoughts and feelings hit me all at once, and Charlie Morgan was the first of them.
Maximus Charles Morgan Junior aka Charlie.
I thought of Charlie Morgan and pictured a sequence of nostalgic moments that I had shared with that boy. There were five or six guys in the Morgan-slash-Cameron clan, and they were all good-looking, but Charlie was the one I always had a crush on. I remembered curling up on the couch with him in the upstairs playroom when we were in middle school. We had watched The Goonies together fifty times, and I had amazing memories of lazy afternoons after hours of playing and swimming in the sun.
"Hope, are you even listening to me?"
"Yes, I am."
"I said the Morgans are here."
"TheMorgan-Morgans?" I asked in disbelief. "I thought they… I thought that house was sold… abandoned."
Stacy shrugged as she wiped the tables next to me and adjusted the menus and napkins.
We were at her parents' restaurant. It was a small but longstanding pub in Graham Springs, a block away from the lake. It was everything all in one—a coffee shop, restaurant, and bar. The Black Skillet Inn. They served bar food like burgers, fries, sandwiches, and quesadillas—nothing fancy. But it was delicious, and there was not much else in town, so it was always busy. Stacy's parents had owned it since we were kids. She tried to escape the inevitability of working there, and she got a job at the bank when we graduated high school, but it didn't take. She was really good at working at the restaurant, and her parents loved having her around.
"I talked to them about it earlier," she said.
