“Well,” Mason said to the empty mountain air, “that seems insane.”
June took another careful bite of cookie. Joy stepped closer to him for the first time.
And that was how the loneliest man in North Carolina became responsible for two abandoned twin girls before he had even unpacked his suitcase.
Three years earlier, Mason had stood in a sunlit church in Charlotte and watched Beatrice laugh during their wedding vows because he had gotten one line wrong and improvised badly to cover it.
She had been the kind of woman who made sincerity look effortless. Not naive—never that. Beatrice Sterling had been smarter than half the men on Mason’s board and kinder than all of them put together. She had a way of seeing pain in other people without humiliating them by noticing. She ran the charitable arm of their foundation with ferocious competence, but what people remembered was her warmth.
To Mason, she had felt like proof that ambition and tenderness did not have to be enemies.
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