Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) by Alison Kent

but your bookshelves are too crowded already.”
    “I like ten.”
    So he’d noticed. “Tell you what. You can pick out three today,” he said, writing the number beneath the rest of the items on the list, “then choose three from your shelf to give to someone who might need them.”
    “Kelly Webber might need them,” she said matter-of-factly before leaning close to her bowl to scoop another bite of eggs into her mouth. “She doesn’t have enough and Ms. Harvey says we need to read books every day.”
    And there went his heart again, though this time the thump came with a tightening of his gut. “Well if Ms. Harvey said it, it must be true.”
    “Everything Ms. Harvey says is true.”
    “Oh, really,” he said, biting off half a piece of bacon.
    “Duh. She’s a teacher.”
    He’d have fun reminding Addy of that in fifteen years when she was deep into her cultural anthropology studies or whatever. Setting the list aside with the roll of tape, he tossed the pencil back into the drawer. “What’s the best thing you’ve ever learned from Ms. Harvey?”
    Addy set down her milk, her mouth twisted to one side. “About the moon. And the sun. And the shadows on the world. Like clips. With a lamp.”
    “ E -clipse. And how the earth rotates on its axis around the sun, making day and night?”
    She nodded as she shoved a whole strip of bacon into her mouth and chewed. “She had a soccer ball and a corn of pepper and then she had a lime with a stixis through it because the pepper was too small to twirl around.”
    He took a minute to translate her six-year-old speak. A lime on a stick representing the earth on its axis. A soccer-ball sun and a peppercorn Earth. Lego bricks for fractions. Portraits of presidents instead of conversation hearts.
    Clever Brooklyn Harvey, using familiar objects to demonstrate the foreign—though for all he knew, having attended absolutely zero school functions, her props were standard in kindergarten instruction.
    He wanted to kick himself for not paying more attention to what Addy was learning in school; blaming his mother for going through the notes from his daughter’s teacher was just lame. He knew better.
    He’d talked to Peggy Butters at Christmas when she was doubling up on her seasonal cookie baking. They’d joked then about mothers ordering goodies for class parties and passing them off as homemade.
    Hell, he’d bought cookies decorated like jack-o’-lanterns himself for Addy to take to school at Halloween. And he’d helped her with her Olaf costume. How many little girls had dressed like Frozen ’s Elsa, while his daughter had insisted on being the movie’s snowman?
    This was Addy’s first year of school, and he was going to have to step up his game for the twelve of public education yet to come. If he didn’t, all the rest of his efforts to provide for her wouldn’t mean squat.
    For five years his focus had been on establishing Bliss as the place for artisanal chocolates in the Hill Country. Maintaining his online business had been easier; that was no more than creating the supply to meet the demand that had continued to grow since he’d begun offering his wares in San Francisco.
    The first few months he and Addy had been in Hope Springs, he’d cooked in this very kitchen, packaged boxes for shipment on folding tables lined up beneath the loft’s long wall of windows.
    He’d held interviews for his showroom help in his living room. He’d brought in a branding designer for his logo, an interior designer for the look of the shop. Experts in packaging, labeling, advertising.
    He’d used the money he’d been handed by Duke Randall, the man who’d been his best friend in California. His mentor. His conscience and guide, and though she would never know it, Addy’s uncle. He hadn’t questioned where it had come from; he didn’t want the answer. He’d needed it to give his daughter a good life, a safe life; he didn’t want to know.
    It had been worth it: the