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There was a healing scar on her lower jaw from being cut from broken glass. She didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror, but she felt selfish for caring because so many people had worked hard to save her life.
The upside to it all was when Dan won the case on her behalf, to the tune of millions. A year to the day of her accident, he knocked on her door to tell her the only good news Amalie had had in months. When she opened the door, Dan was standing on her doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.
Amalie smiled. “It’s not Christmas. What’s up?” she asked, as she let him in, then led him into the living room.
He handed her the flowers and put the candy on the table between them. “We did it, Amalie. The courts awarded you everything I asked for on your behalf.”
Amalie gasped. That had to mean millions.
“Everything?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everything.”
Amalie leaned back in her chair, holding the bouquet like a talisman. “You are a rare man, Dan Worthy. We’ve traded cookies and wine at Christmas for four years, andbarely said more than hello in passing. I don’t know what prompted you to take all this on for me, but I will be grateful for the rest of my life.”
Dan shrugged. “I get paid, too, but I chose this job because I’ve witnessed the system shafting people who needed help most, and seen the ones with the most money and power get away with murder. The bastard who hit you had already been let off twice for driving drunk with little more than a hand slap, and look what he did to you. They don’t change. And the only options left to the victims is to, literally, make them pay. As we discussed, it was deposited directly into your bank account. You are good to go.”
“Thank you. The trucker who pulled me out of the burning car saved my life, and now you’ve just saved my future. I owe both of you more than I can ever repay.”
“Just pay it forward, and we’re even,” he said. “Gotta go or I’ll be late to court. Take care, neighbor. I’ll let myself out.”
November-One Year Later
Amalie Lincoln had come a long way since her accident two years ago and was tired of being overlooked. No matter how many résumés she submitted after her accident, she’d never gotten past the first interview. The moment they saw the pink scars, their expressions frozein the smiles they’d been wearing, and they never looked her in the eyes again.
That’s when she decided the only way to get work was to be her own boss. But she was done with Oklahoma. She needed a fresh start, and since she’d never been farther east than Arkansas and Missouri, she started looking for other options, which was not unusual, because Amalie had been looking for answers most of her life.
The day she turned eighteen, she sent off for a DNA test kit from Ancestry.com. By the time it arrived, she was having second thoughts about submitting it. Whoever had abandoned her didn’t want her to begin with. Why was she doing this? Then rationale won out. If for no other reason, knowing medical history of your people was valid, so she took the test and sent it.
The results came back weeks later. Like most Americans, she had ancestors in different countries, obviously on the move from one place, looking for something better in another. She saw the irony. That was her to a T.
But she never got a hit from the website, and was never contacted by anyone claiming to be related. Nobody wanted her when she was born, and obviously nobody wanted her now, so she forgot about it. However, Amalie had dreams and a life yet to be lived. It was time to get out of Tulsa, and out of this rut.
Now the holidays were upon her, and with no office parties to go to, and no friends left to invite her over for Thanksgiving or Christmas, she decided to spend thetime on her own, and in a new place. Somewhere she’d never been before.
After a little research, she found a tourist attraction she’d never heard of, in a place called Jubilee, in the state of Kentucky. She scanned the website, admiring the shops and the little valley in the Cumberland Mountains where it was nestled, and decided this was it! She loved country music and mountains, and the draw of stepping into a place that not only held onto their past, but had found a way to share it with tourists, seemed delightful. She made a reservation at a hotel called the Serenity Inn for two weeks, arriving the week of Thanksgiving.
Once she arrived, she knew she’d made the right choice. The changing color of fall leaves visible from her hotel window covered the mountains like a patchwork quilt. The days were sunny but brisk, and every day she lost herself within the hustle and bustle of tourists and shops, and the friendly faces of the storekeepers.
She ate Thanksgiving dinner in the hotel dining room along with dozens of other diners. Every day she became the tourist going in and out of shops, watching fudge being made and quilt makers at work. She watched the blacksmith at the forge, and wandered into a store with Native American jewelry and bought a handmade ring made of silver with a turquoise setting. She walked the streets eating funnel cake and listening to fiddlers playing bluegrass music in the square. She went to a Reagan Bullard concert at one of the musicvenues and caught a matinee performance of a different musician at another.
When she learned the mountain looming above Jubilee was called Pope Mountain, she felt a connection, like being introduced to someone new.
Every day afterward as she looked toward the mountain, she felt something she’d never felt before. A connection—a longing—a sense of wanting to stay, and she began thinking about living here. It didn’t take long to fall in love with the concept.
At that point, she thought of work and started scoping out options. The first thing she noticed was the lack of public accountants. There was only one small CPA firm in the whole town. But she wasn’t looking for a job there. She was checking out the competition.
A couple of days before she was due to leave, she rented office space in the business complex next to the bank, with a window facing the street. Hired a sign painter to mark her presence in that place, then rented a house in the residential area of the town. On the morning she left Jubilee, it was with the knowing that she was coming back to stay. It took a while to pack up her life in Tulsa and get out of her lease, but she’d done it.
It was just the first week in January when she returned to Jubilee, and when she drove into town, her eyes went straight to the mountain. The colorful leaves were gone, but there was green from the ancient growth of evergreen and pines, and the mystery of it still called to her.
There was a new sign on the window next to the First National Bank in Jubilee, painted in gold lettering.
A.LINCOLN,CPA
It was an impressive sign, in big bold letters.
Amalie had been back in Jubilee for a week, knee-deep in setting up her new home, ordering furniture and technology for the office, and when she went to make a deposit at the bank next door, she asked the teller for tech-support recommendations.
