“I love you, Mack Cooper,” she said.

“And I love you, Lily.” He drew her closer to his side. “Times like this, when we send a person on to their eternity, or when I see my father slipping away a little at a time, those things remind me that we should say what’s in our hearts more often.”

She’d thought that her heart would flutter if and when Mack ever said those words to her, but instead of a rush of excitement, there was simply peace and happiness. What they’d had in the bedroom had so much heat that she’d been surprised that it didn’t fog the windows. She had no doubts there would be plenty of love in their lives.

“You are so right,” Lily said as she let go of another bit of her past. What Wyatt had done or hadn’t done was on him. She had a bright future ahead of her—hopefully sharing every minute of it with Mack and her children.

Something that her mother had asked her just before she walked down the aisle to be married to Wyatt came back to mind.

“Do you like Wyatt?” Vera had asked.

“Mother, I love him,” Lily had told her mother.

“I didn’t ask if you loved him or even if you were in love with him. I asked if you like him. There’s a difference between love and being in love, and also in liking a person. Love is akin to lust, and lasts a few minutes a day. In love is deeper than that. But, honey, you better like him first and foremost, because that goes beyond all the rest. It’s what’s left when you’re old and lust isn’t there anymore for health reasons. It’s the glue that holds a marriage together,” Vera told her.

Lily didn’t remember how she’d answered her mother that day, but looking back, she didn’t think she’d ever liked Wyatt, with his ego and his manipulation. She’d loved him, but she had doubts that she was ever in love with him. She was in love with Mack, and even better, she really, really liked him.

“I’d ask you to move in with me”—he chuckled—“but you kind of already have, and besides, it wouldn’t be a good example for the children for us to sleep together with them in the house. So what are we going to do about us?”

“I guess we’ll take one day at a time and do the best we can with whatever life throws at us. I’m glad you’re here with me to help me with whatever that might be,” she answered.

“I want so much more than just friendship or even this relationship we’re in right now,” he said.

“So do I,” she admitted.

A soft southern breeze blew her blonde hair across her face. Mack reached over and tucked it back behind her ear and then kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll leave the timing to you, but I do want you to know that I’m ready when you are.”

“Mack, are you proposing to me?”

“Not in a cemetery.” He shook his head. “Although I like to think that maybe your mother wouldn’t mind, since she’s right here with us. I’d rather my proposal be a little more romantic, though. Maybe this is just a commitment toward that end, if you’d be willing for that much.”

“I’m willing.” She laid a hand on her parents’ tombstone. Her mother’s name was on one side, her father’s on the other. Their marriage date was engraved below a set of entwined wedding bands. There it was right there—dates of birth, dates of their deaths, and the most important thing to Lily that day, a symbol of their commitment to each other. That’s what she wanted when she was finished with this life and Holly took over the family journal. She had been born. She had died. But the most important thing in her life, other than her children, would be when she became Mrs. Mack Cooper.

“Ready?” Mack asked.

“I am,” she said as she tucked her hand into his. “I’m ready for more than just today, Mack. I’m going to let Wyatt have that apartment, but I’m going to add the furniture into the rent, heavily. I’m happy here working at the shop with Sally and living at the house with you. Life is”—she paused and cupped his face in her hand—“I’m not sure the right word is peaceful when we have two kids that bicker about everything, and after that scorching-hot time in your bedroom, but that’s what comes to mind. The other thing is happiness. I didn’t realize how much I missed that in my life until I found it again.”

“Me, too, on all of what you just said,” Mack told her.

“But before we take another step, I want you to think long and hard about something, and that’s children. We’re not too old to have a child between us, but do we want to do that? We need to give it a lot of thought and maybe even pray about it,” she said.

“Honey, we have two beautiful children. I’d just as soon not plan any more, but if an accident should happen, we won’t be upset. We’ll just figure . . .” He hesitated. “We didn’t use protection the other night.”

“I’m on the pill, not so much for protection, but for irregularity at my age,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”

He led her back toward his truck about the time the gravediggers lowered Granny Hayes’s casket into the ground. Lily stopped and watched them, then walked over to the grave, picked up a handful of dirt, and sprinkled it on the wooden box. “Thank you for what you meant to us, Granny. Rest in peace.”

“She would have liked that,” Mack said.

“I feel like my eyes have been opened after I’d been in a deep sleep since I came home to Comfort,” she said as she brushed her hands together to remove the last of the dirt. “First finding the journal with all my ancestors in it, and then reuniting with my friends and realizing how much they mean to me, and then there’s you.”

“I came in last?” he teased.

“No, I just saved the best for last,” she told him.

He opened the truck door for her, put his big hands around her waist, picked her up, and set her in the passenger seat. “I’ll take being last all the time if that’s the case.”

“Let’s go home,” she said, and she meant it as home—permanently.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Thirteen months later

Lily took a dozen pictures of Holly that beautiful April evening before her daughter left her bedroom. With her long blonde hair all swept up in curls and wearing a lovely light-blue prom dress, she looked even more like Vera’s wedding picture than ever before. Preacher Drew’s son, Clay, waited for her in the living room. Looking all grown up in his black tuxedo with a blue vest that matched Holly’s dress perfectly, he was right at home in the old stone house. But then, he should have been—he’d been dating Holly for the past year and spent lots of time there.