To Lynne and Larry Cormack with heartfelt gratitude for twenty-five years of friendship

Chapter One

      TEARS. BOOKS THROWN. And pencils. Breakage. Namecalling. Screaming. Hair-pulling. It was like a scene from a bad marriage or the kind of drama that a reality television show adored, rife with mayhem, conflicts, conspiracies.

      But it wasn’t a bad marriage, or bad TV.

      It was Morgan McGuire’s life, and it didn’t help one bit that each of the perpetrators in today’s drama had been under four feet tall. The day had culminated with a twenty-one-child “dog pile on the rabbit.”

      It was the kind of day they had failed to prepare her for at teacher’s college, Morgan, first-year first-grade teacher, thought mournfully.

      And somehow, fair or not, in her mind, it was all his fault.

      Nate Hathoway, father of Cecilia Hathoway, the child who had been at the very center of every single kerfuffle today, including being the rabbit in that unfortunate