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more pieces. She’d hated it.
    He’d thought somehow they’d be able to work things out. He’d been wrong. He couldn’t control what his wife wanted or did—just as Susan had said he couldn’t control whether the volunteers showed up or not.
    “Daddy, come over here.”
    Nathan looked toward his daughter and waved, forcing a smile that he didn’t feel to his face. He jogged to his daughter, who was laughing at something Susan had said. He loved his daughter’s laugh. He wanted to hear it more.
    “Susan is gonna get some high school students to help us with the animals. Isn’t that great? We need it.”
    “Yes, it’s wonderful.” Susan wasn’t his dead wife. She was just trying to give him a hand. He relaxed the tense set to his muscles and maintained his grin. All he knew at the moment was that his daughter was beaming. Maybe having volunteers was the answer he was looking for.

Chapter Seventeen
    Story:
    Where is Susan?
Nathan watched the group of teenagers leave after they’d helped clean the pens and stalls of the animals. He checked his cell probably for the tenth time in the past couple of hours. In the past few weeks, Susan had always been there by seven on Saturday. It was nine and she hadn’t even called to tell him she wasn’t coming or would be late.
    What if something has happened to her?
    That question taunted him over and over for the next hour. He couldn’t forget how, as the hurricane had come closer to Hope, he’d been expecting his wife to come back to the farm. And she never did. She’d headed for her parents’ house in Memphis. But she never made it because she got caught in a flood.
    He stared at the road, willing Susan to appear. She had come every weekend for the past month. He’d begun to look forward to her visits. For the first time in months, he actually had the chance to play, to enjoy doing activities other than work with Carly
and
Susan. So where was she?
    He punched in Susan’s cell number, but it went straight to voice mail. He didn’t leave another message. The fact that his call had gone to voice mail only heightened his worry. He didn’t want to care.
    But he did.
    He couldn’t stand around any longer, staring at the road, waiting for her arrival. He’d planned to go riding with Susan and Carly and have a picnic by the stream in the woods. He might be disappointed, but he wouldn’t let his daughter be.
    Striding toward the barn, he caught sight of Carly with Oreo. She tossed a tennis ball and the dog half limped, half ran after it. It wouldn’t be long before Oreo fully recovered. The way his daughter had attached herself to the dog, he figured they would have another permanent animal around the farm.
    She waved at him. “Have ya heard from Susan?”
    “No, but we’ll still go riding.”
    “But what if Susan comes and we aren’t here?”
    “We can’t wait any longer. The horses need to be exercised. I’m sure something just came up with Susan. Probably she had to work today,” Nathan said, but he didn’t think that was it…
    * * *
    At least she was dressed properly for a hike down a country road.
    Susan peered down at her right palm, where a blister had formed when she’d tried to get the lugs off her blown-out tire and they wouldn’t budge. At all. Okay, maybe she was a wimp and had no muscles in her arms. She definitely was going to take up lifting weights.
    On top of the blowout, her cell phone was dead. She was always forgetting to recharge it overnight, and now, when she needed it, the cell wasn’t working. Could the day get any worse?
    Well, yeah. Only a couple of people had driven by, and not one had stopped to help her. That would teach her to come the more scenic way to Nathan’s farm. So now she was forced to walk to Nathan with the sun beating down on her and the air filled with humidity.
    Up ahead she saw the turn to the dirt road that led to his house and barn. Although her feet ached from the two-hour hike, she increased her pace,