“I’m not done torturing you.” Winnie yawned, then smiled. “Ryan and I had a huge fight last night.”

“Ah, well, that explains the look of bliss.”

“We never used to fight.” She smiled as she reached across the desk to swipe some chips. “Fighting’s wonderful.”

“Each to his own. Although the two of you are such big pansies, I can’t imagine it gets too dangerous.”

“We yell,” she said defensively. “Or at least he did last night. He really wants me to come home. He’s trying to be understanding, but he’s getting frustrated.”

“Not from lack of sex, that’s for sure.”

Winnie actually giggled. “I never thought we’d have so much passion.”

“You are a lot weirder than me.”

Twenty minutes later, when Sugar Beth returned to work, Jewel passed over an envelope. “This came for madam while she was out.”

Sugar Beth opened it and found a round-trip air ticket to Houston. She gazed at the date. The ticket was for tomorrow, her day off, a flight leaving in the morning and returning that same night. She pulled out a separate sheet of paper and found a confirmation number for a rental car.

She bit her bottom lip and gazed across the street at Yesterday’s Treasures. It could have been Winnie who’d done this, but she was too preoccupied now to have thought of it. Sugar Beth pressed the envelope to her breast. Colin.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Sugar Beth stood in the doorway of the second-floor lounge at Brookdale and gazed at Delilah bent over a jigsaw puzzle. Her gray hair fell straight and smooth to just below her ears, and a headband printed with ladybugs held it back from her chubby face. Today she wore the pink jumper Sugar Beth had brought her several months ago, along with a lavender T-shirt. For a moment Sugar Beth simply gazed at her, then she spoke softly. “Hey, sweetheart.”

Delilah stiffened. Her head came up slowly, her eyes already filled with hope. “My Sugar Beth?”

A moment later they were in each other’s arms, with Delilah saying her name over and over again.

For the next half hour, she couldn’t seem to stop talking. “I didn’t think you’d ever come . . . You said you wasn’t mad, but . . . And then I gave Henry my extra muffin . . . Dr. Brent filled my tooth . . . And Shirley knows you’re only allowed to smoke outside . . .” As she spoke, she held Sugar Beth’s hand, and she continued to hold it as they took a walk across the grounds. She chose Taco Bell for lunch, and afterward they went on a shopping expedition that finished off Sugar Beth’s paycheck. She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that she had only six more weeks until the next payment was due.

Delilah’s anxiety finally set in, and she wanted to go back to Brookdale. “Meesie gets worried if I’m gone too long.” Meesie Baker was Delilah’s favorite aide.

“I think it’s harder on you bein’ so far away than it is on her,” Meesie said later when Sugar Beth caught her alone. “She misses you, but she’s doin’ fine.”

Sugar Beth stroked Delilah’s hair as they said good-bye. “I’ll call you on Sunday. And I’ll think about you every day.”

“I know you will, my Sugar Beth. Because you love me so much.”

“You got that right, ace,” she replied, which made Delilah giggle.

On the flight back, Sugar Beth gazed out the window and fought the lump in her throat. How many people were lucky enough to have someone in their lives who loved them so unconditionally?

As she drove home in the dark, she tried to figure out how she could thank Colin. In the end, she took the coward’s way out and wrote him a note. Her first three attempts revealed too much and ended up in the wastebasket, but the version she stuck in his mailbox as she left for work on Friday morning did the job without the sentiment.

Dear Colin,

I saw Delilah yesterday. Thank you. Being with her meant everything to me, and I take back nearly every bad thing I’ve said about you.

Gratefully,

Sugar Beth

(Please do not mark for spelling and punctuation.)

Colin crumpled the letter in his fist and tossed it on the ground next to the wheelbarrow. He didn’t want her gratitude, damn it, he wanted her company, her smiles. He wanted her body—he couldn’t deny that—but also her quirky point of view, that irreverent humor, those sideways glances she gave him when she didn’t think he was looking.

He threw down his shovel. Ever since Sunday, he’d been tense and irritable. He couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep. No big mystery why. Guilt wasn’t a comfortable companion, and it was time he did something about it.

The phone call came at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, an hour before the bookstore closed. “Gemima’s Books,” Sugar Beth said.

“If you want to see your dog alive again, be at Rowan Oak at five o’clock. And come alone.”

“Rowan Oak?”

“If you call the police, the dog’s . . . dog meat.”

“I dumped you!”

But he’d already hung up.

She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t let him manipulate her. But not long after the store closed, she found herself on the highway heading toward William Faulkner’s legendary home in Oxford. Colin had made it possible for her to see Delilah, and she owed him this. Still, she wished he didn’t have to make everything so hard.

The house and grounds closed to the public at four o’clock, but someone obviously had important connections because a burgundy Lexus sat in the otherwise empty parking lot and the wooden gate was open. Having grown up in northeastern Mississippi, Sugar Beth had been to Rowan Oak many times—with a Girl Scout troop, church youth groups, the Seawillows, and during senior year, in a big yellow bus with Mr. Byrne’s English classes. William Faulkner had bought the decrepit Greek Revival plantation in the early 1930s. At the time the house had no indoor plumbing or electricity, and Faulkner’s wife was rumored to have spent her days sitting on the stoop crying while her husband began making the house livable. Until his death in 1962, Faulkner had lived here, gotten drunk here, frightened his children with stories of a ghost he invented, and written the novels that had eventually won him the Nobel Prize for literature. In the early 1970s, his daughter had sold the house and grounds to the University of Mississippi, and since then, visitors from all over the world had come to see the state’s most famous literary landmark.

She approached the two-story white frame house through the imposing avenue of cedars that had been planted during the nineteenth century. Long before she reached the end of the old brick walk, she saw Colin leaning against one of the house’s square columns with Gordon lying at his feet.

“Pat Conroy called Oxford the Vatican City of Southern letters,” he said as he stepped off the porch.

“I didn’t know that, but I do love the man’s books.” She scratched Gordon’s head. “My dog’s still alive, I see.”

“I’m nothing if not merciful.”

He wore a white sweater and an immaculate pair of gray slacks. The outdoor work had left him tan, and she was once again struck by the contrast between his masculinity and his elegance. He was a mass of contradictions, haughty and cynical, but also tender and a lot more sentimental than he let anyone see. How his wife’s suicide must have devastated him. “What’s this about?” she asked.

“I have something I want to give you.”

“You’ve given me more than enough. That plane ticket—”

“Faulkner has always been my favorite American writer,” he said, cutting her off.

“Not surprising. You share a fascination for the same literary landscape.”

“We don’t, however, share the same facility with language. The man was a genius.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t even contemplate saying anything disrespectful about William Faulkner.”

“As long as I don’t have to read another one of his books, I’ll be completely respectful.”