Chapter 1
They gave my sister a penthouse. They gave me a duffel bag full of nothing, and a set of keys to a cabin they assumed was already dead.
My name is Captain Renee Calloway, United States Army, and I flew home from Fort Benning still in uniform because there hadn't been time to change before the funeral. I hadn't slept in thirty hours. I hadn't cried yet either. Some things wait their turn.
The attorney read my father's will at the dining table where I'd eaten a thousand family dinners, and when he got to my name, my younger sister Skylar didn't even wait for him to finish the sentence.
"A cabin," she said, and laughed, actually laughed, right there over our father's casket flowers still wilting on the sideboard. "Fits you perfectly. You always did smell like a barracks anyway."
A few cousins suddenly found their green bean casserole fascinating. My mother, Diane, sat with her hands folded so tightly in her lap the knuckles went white, and she said nothing. That silence hit harder than the insult did. It always had.
Skylar inherited the Nashville penthouse, the one with the wraparound balcony my father used to joke he'd never be able to afford to look at, let alone live in. I inherited two hundred acres in the Ozarks and a cabin nobody in my family had mentioned once in thirty-one years.
I stood to leave, and Skylar followed me into the hallway, because Skylar always needed the last word the way other people needed air.
"Don't be dramatic," she said. "You were never here. I'm the one who stayed. I'm the one who actually loved this family."
May you like
"You stayed close to the money," I said. "That's not the same thing as loving anybody."
Her smile sharpened into something I recognized from childhood, the smile she wore right before she broke something and blamed me for it. "Enjoy your shack, Captain."
