At home, her mother Ruth had not been able to stand at the stove for more than fifteen minutes in weeks.
Money was no longer a worry.
It was a ticking sound in every room.
Jonah Whitaker knew that.
Everyone in Peach Hollow knew everything about everyone else, especially when poverty made a family easy to watch. Jonah owned more land than anyone for thirty miles in any direction—pastures, timber, two creeks, three tenant houses, and the great white ranch house on the hill people called Whitaker House whether they admired it or hated it. He was thirty-seven, broad-shouldered even now in sickness, and rich enough that people lowered their voices when they spoke his name. Six months earlier, a doctor out of Dallas had told him he was dying of a degenerative disease that would leave him weak, then bedridden, then gone.
