She pointed to the wooden wine rack on top of the refrigerator, and he pulled down a bottle of chardonnay she’d forgotten she had. He went back to the same drawer where he’d produced the can opener and got out her corkscrew. Dani quickly set the table while he opened the wine.

She sat down and looked at the pigeon outside her casement window. “I have a lot of questions.”

“It’s your nature.”

“And you think you know my nature, do you?”

“In my business,” he said, filling her wineglass at the table, “you have to learn to size up people fast. Not the nuances of who they are, just the bare bones. You’re honest and open by nature and very direct-some would say blunt. You make a lot of demands on yourself and the people closest to you, even if you’re incredibly tolerant in general and-again in general-a lot of fun to be around.”

She looked at him, dubious. “You figured all that out just since Thursday.”

“Yep.”

“No way. You’ve just been talking to Kate.”

The humor in his dark eyes made her want to smile, in spite of everything. “Nope.”

“Ira.”

Zeke filled his wineglass. “Well, he is indiscreet, but no, I’ve just been observing you.”

Dani tried her wine, which was smooth and very dry. “My father.” From Zeke’s look, she knew she was right. “He just thinks I’m hard on him. Any other daughter would have let him rot. Me, I put him up for the night, and he repays me by sneaking off at the crack of dawn-”

“He says he shouldn’t have to check in with his own daughter. He’s not in junior high.”

She snorted. “He might as well be.”

“You see? You’ve got that hard-nosed Witt streak.”

Sipping her wine, Dani studied the man dumping pasta into the boiling water. Could she size up the bare bones of Zeke’s character? He had a sense of his own limits. A sense of duty and honor. A sense of humor. But those were guesses. There was so much about him she didn’t know. So much she wanted to know.

“You know my great-aunt,” she said.

He nodded, giving the pasta a quick stir. He’d already dumped the tuna and tomatoes and tomato sauce into the frying pan with the onion; she’d missed that. He stirred the sauce, too. “I’ve known Naomi Hazen all my life.”

She was real to him, a person. “I hardly even knew she existed-and I didn’t know about the affair she and Nick had.”

“It happened even before you were born. If you were Mattie, is it something you’d tell your only grandchild?”

“That’s a fair point,” Dani conceded. She watched Zeke take a dish towel by the ends and lift the bubbling pot, then empty the pasta into a colander in the sink. She lost his face in the steam. She asked, “What’s Cedar Springs like?”

He set the empty pot on the stove, not answering.

“I don’t mean to pry…”

“No, it’s okay.” He walked over to the table and picked up the two plates, taking them back to the counter. With a slotted spoon he scooped out the spirals of pasta onto the plates. “I just don’t think about Cedar Springs every day, and I haven’t lived there in a long time. I guess it’s pretty much an ordinary middle Tennessee town. It’s got oak-lined streets, magnolias, dogwoods, a slew of churches, good people, bad people. It’s changed since your grandmother was a kid. I barely recognize it these days myself.”

“Is the house Mattie grew up in still standing?”

He spooned sauce over the pasta and brought the plates over to the table, setting one in front of Dani. “I suppose I should have picked a few flowers on my way in.”

She smiled. “Not around here. Too many stray dogs.”

Sitting opposite her, the pigeons fluttering at the window, he drank more wine. “Yes, the Witt house is still standing. It used to be the fanciest house in Cedar Springs, and Jackson Witt was about as rich a man as any of us could imagine. But he wasn’t rich at all. Well off, but not rich-not by Chandler standards.” He shrugged. “I reckon the Witt house hasn’t changed a bit since he built it.”

His southern accent had become more noticeable, whether deliberately or unconsciously Dani didn’t know. She tried to picture an oak-lined street and a fine old southern house, but she knew the image in her mind was mixed up with fantasy and stereotypes and probably wasn’t accurate at all. She’d never even been to Tennessee. “Mattie’s never told me much about her childhood.”

“I don’t blame her,” Zeke said.

“I don’t, either-”

“Yeah, you do.”

It wasn’t an accusation but a simple statement of fact.

She tried the pasta. It was surprisingly good. “I’m trying not to.”

“Mattie and Naomi had a tough childhood. They had money, which a lot of people in those days didn’t, but their mother died when Mattie was eight and Naomi just a tot, and their father wasn’t fit to raise two little girls by himself. He was a complicated, difficult man. But the Witts did a lot for Cedar Springs. They started the woolen mill to give people work, planted trees, paved streets, donated land for a public library, kept their church going.”

“Then he wasn’t a total bastard,” Dani said.

Zeke shook his head. “Maybe it would have been easier if he had been. Dani, Jackson Witt was the most unforgiving man I’ve ever known. He was deeply religious, but he missed or plain didn’t get the lessons on forgiveness. His expectations of other people-especially his own children-were unrealistic. He demanded Mattie and Naomi fit his ideal of feminine perfection-subservient, obedient, soft-spoken, religious, industrious within very proscribed limits of acceptable work.”

Dani shuddered, trying to imagine her grandmother living under such conditions.

“He forbade them to wear pants or cosmetics or fix their hair in ways he considered inappropriate, never mind offensive. They couldn’t dance, play games, ride bicycles, read popular novels. He despised movies. Anything they did for fun was done behind his back. They were supposed to be an example to the rest of the town, proof of his own holiness, I suppose. It’s one thing to live a puritanical life out of choice and conviction, to teach your personal values and principles to your children. But he crossed the line into psychological abuse.”

“You’re a lot younger than Mattie and Naomi. How do you know all this stuff?”

“Everyone in Cedar Springs knew.”

“So if they were to have lives of their own, they had either to believe in their father’s rules or break them.”

Zeke nodded. “There was no middle ground.”

“But it still must have been hard for Mattie to leave.”

“With the particular kind of abuse her father dished out,” Zeke said, staring into his wine, “she had to have suffered enormous guilt. Add to that leaving a little sister behind. Naomi was just eleven when Mattie took off with Nick. It’s been rumored around town for years that she tried to get Naomi to go with her, but she wouldn’t leave. Anyway, Naomi found her own way out from under her father’s thumb.”

“Nick again,” Dani said.

Drinking his wine, Zeke studied Dani over the rim of his glass. She felt warm under his gaze, but not uncomfortable. That surprised her. He said, “Naomi married the vice president at the mill. He was a widower, considerably older than she, and about as hard to live with as her father. Rumor has it he beat her. I’m not sure if she knew that going in or not. Probably. She’s always been remarkably clear-eyed about people. Her affair with Nick-it lasted barely a summer-allowed her to be free and still stay in Cedar Springs.”

Dani shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“Once her father and husband had disowned her, they also relinquished any control over her. By breaking their rules, Naomi could live on her own terms. She couldn’t have left the way Mattie did. She loved Cedar Springs, belonged there.”

“Mattie’s never talked to me about her. And I mean never.”

“Maybe she couldn’t,” Zeke said. He set down his wineglass. “Don’t judge her, Dani. Naomi never has.” He smiled warmly, sadly. “You should go to Cedar Springs one day. It’s a pretty town. Naomi will serve you peach pie, and you’ll never guess she ran off with a rake of a Hollywood director and her sister’s ex-husband while she was married to another man.”