“Abby could use some cheering up, so don’t hurry this job, okay? I need a little time.”

      “Huh.” Old Whitey leaned over to spit his tobacco in the grass. “Thought she wanted her vehicle repaired so she could lay tracks out of Trueheart. Said something about gettin’ to Sedona.”

      “Things have changed,” Jack muttered. Don’t make me say what, old man.

      “What?”

      Great. Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Well…Abby would be smart to settle here for the winter.” Jack forged on, feeling as if he were trudging head down into a dust storm. “She’s never built anything and she thinks she’ll build an adobe by the fall? Ain’t gonna happen.”

      “Gal’s pretty spunky.”

      “Yep, but take it from a divorce lawyer, she’s smack-dab in the middle of the Divorce Crazies. She’ll change her mind ten times in the next ten months. Meanwhile, till she’s over this phase, Trueheart’s a safer, saner town to raise her son than Sedona’ll ever be. Last thing Abby needs is to get lost in a power vortex.”

      “Hmm.” Whitey chewed thoughtfully, then said, “Sure you know which end of the branding iron you’re grabbing?”

      Jack cocked his head. “Meaning?”

      “Meanin’ if anybody gets burned around here, it might not be Abby.”

      Dear Reader,

      In this fifth story in my series about the town of Trueheart, Colorado, Abby Lake is a woman caught up in that wonderful/terrifying phase of life I call the “Divorce Crazies.” I hope you’ve never experienced it yourself, but if you have, you know it’s a time of extreme vulnerability and extreme creativity.

      Since (through no fault of her own) her last effort at making a good life failed, Abby’s determined to get it right this time for herself and her young son, Skyler. She’s changing everything—her job, her home, her attitude toward men, love and marriage. She means to grab life and happiness with both hands before they slip away.

      To Abby’s wary new neighbor, lawyer Jack Kelton, it seems that Abby “hasn’t a clue what she wants—but she’ll be flying off in all four directions at once, looking for it.”

      Jack may have a point. I remember the first year of my own divorce: buying a handyman’s-special house on the East Coast one week (I wasn’t that handy), then flying to California the next to learn if a man I hadn’t seen for fifteen years might be The One. (He wasn’t.) Darting back to my new house to buy forty of everything (paper towels! canned beans! flashlight batteries!) as if I could build a wall with all those supplies between me and the cold scary world.

      And so forth for the rest of that crazy year, till at last I met someone who taught me to calm down and smile again. So here I give you Abby Lake, on her way to learning how to smile again in the town of Trueheart, Colorado. As always, hope you enjoy!

      Peggy Nicholson

      Kelton’s Rules

      Peggy Nicholson

      To Ron, for all the times

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

      CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

      CHAPTER ONE

      “MO-O-OM, WE SHOULD GO back!” Perched on the bench seat behind his mother, Skyler smacked the Colorado road map.

      “Sweetie, I know I took a wrong turn, but see what a gorgeous place we’ve found. Can you believe those mountains?” Abby Lake took one hand off the school bus steering wheel and waved to the right where distant peaks caught the late-afternoon sun. “Just wonderful, huh?”

      Framed in her rearview mirror, Skyler was pink-faced and scowling. He pushed his glasses up his short nose and glared straight ahead at the two-lane country road. “You should’ve asked me before you turned. I’m the navigator.”

      “You and DC looked so comfy back there, I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” Buckled in behind her on the one bench seat remaining in the stripped-out bus, Skyler had drifted off. He’d been smiling in his sleep, hugging DC-3, the enormous white tomcat that lay cradled against his chest.

      Abby hadn’t seen her son smile like that in two months or more. She’d drunk in the sight, feeling like a wanderer in the desert who’d stumbled upon a stream at last—and knelt to scoop cool, clear water with both hands. Because maybe that smile meant the worst was behind them. Skyler would find his happiness again. And then, please God, he’d forgive her.

      Stealing glimpse after glimpse in her mirror, memorizing the tender curve of her child’s mouth, the shape of the cat’s ear and the spray of his whiskers—she planned to sketch this scene tonight, once they stopped—somehow she’d missed her road, somewhere west of Durango.

      “We should go back!”

      “It’s sort of difficult to turn this beast.” Used to a compact car, Abby was still amazed by the huge turning radius of the ancient half-size bus. And it must be leaking power-steering fluid—a tight turn elicited a screeching protest that set her teeth on edge. Never should’ve bought this thing. “Besides, I think we’re coming to a town up ahead—Trueheart, if we’re where I hope we— Where I believe we are. If so, we can angle southwest again toward Cortez.” She reached behind her to pat his map someplace in the vicinity of the tiny dot with the charming name of Trueheart. “So we haven’t lost too many miles.”

      “I mean we should go back to New Jersey. We should go home. This is stupid. I hate this place!”

      “Oh, Sky, sweetie,” Abby murmured helplessly. Beyond the bug-spattered windshield, the road wavered and blurred. She blinked it clear again. “We can’t go back.” They had no “back” to return to. The divorce settlement had given her the suburban trophy house that Steve had insisted they buy two years ago when he’d left navy aviation to become a commercial pilot. But on a single income, she couldn’t possibly afford to keep a five-bedroom minimansion. Didn’t want it anyway.

      Last week she’d sold it for a profit of twenty-thousand dollars, which would be their grubstake for a fresh start. A new life out west.

      A life her ten-year-old son hated already.

      “We could! We could be home in four days. Dad’s gotta be missing us.”

      Want to bet? With Chelsea the Super Stewardess—oh, pardon me, flight attendant—to fly? And a new family on the way? He hasn’t