To my husband, Joe.
I almost lost you to a double stroke.
I praise God every day that He’s given us a second chance.
You are my love and my best friend forever.
Contents
Note to Readers
Everybody knew.
Tanner Hamilton stood stiff-spined, arms crossed and his knees locked tight, front and center on the makeshift auction block located on the community green at Serendipity, Texas’s First Annual Bachelors and Baskets Auction, and scanned the entirely too enthusiastic audience. Sweat beaded his brow and made his black T-shirt stick to his skin.
It was ripping him up inside to be standing out here at the center of a public venue with everyone’s eyes upon him. If they weren’t judging him, then at the very least he spotted pity in some of their eyes. It was a small town. His friends and neighbors—everyone in his acquaintance and probably some who weren’t, had heard about poor Tanner Hamilton.
It wasn’t like he was the only man in the world whose wife had ever left him, but he might as well have been, for the way he was feeling.
His heart was in shreds and there was nothing he could do to hide it.
He clenched his fists against his biceps as he forced a breath into his burning lungs. Tension rolled off his shoulders, leaving his neck stiff and unmovable.
He hated when people stared at him. This whole experience made him feel more like he was on a chopping block than the auction block. He wasn’t much in the mood for community events these days, especially because he was pretty sure he could guess what was going through the crowd’s minds right about now.
Poor Tanner. His wife went and left him without a word about where she’s gone. Why’d she do it? It is always hard to tell in cases like these. It could be she was at fault. Then again, maybe Tanner had somehow run her off.
Run her off?
No.
He gritted his teeth even harder to keep from shouting that one single, defensive word out loud.
No.
He might be guilty of a thousand things in his relationship with his wife—many thousands of things, if he were being honest—but not that. He hadn’t told her to leave.
He hadn’t told her anything.
Most of these folks from around here knew who the true injured party in his relationship with his wife was—and it wasn’t him. Maybe it was his pride talkin’. Maybe not. He’d had plenty of time to mull over what had gone on between them during the rough times, and even though he knew they had more than their fair share of problems and trials for a young couple, he still couldn’t imagine what could have suddenly set Rebecca off to the point where she would purposefully choose to ignore the wedding vows she’d made to him to love him for better or for worse.
Where were those vows now?
He couldn’t say. He didn’t even know where she was.
He would admit, but only to himself, that maybe what they’d been facing at the time had been worse for both of them, especially Rebecca, but he wouldn’t have run away from their problems, no matter what. When he’d said, To have and to hold, from this day forward until death do us part, he’d meant every single solitary word.
Rebecca, on the other hand? Not so much.
So they’d drifted apart in those last few months before she’d left him. That happened at some point in every marriage, right? It wasn’t all roses and sunshine all the time.
He was a simple rancher with an equally simple philosophy about how to love his God and live his life. A man dealt with whatever circumstances God gave him without complaining. Sometimes it was good, sometimes not so much. Some things a man could plan for, see the storms coming so he could batten down the hatches. Other times things came unexpectedly, or didn’t come at all. Sometimes life swung a fisted punch in a gut which was hard to recover from, and no doubt about it. But a real man had to pick himself up, dust himself off and keep on keeping on. That’s how he ran his ranch, and up until a short while ago, that’s how he’d believed he’d kept his marriage alive and