Moonlight in the Morning by Jude Deveraux

take photos, then see what I have.” On her first visit to Edilean she’d taken pictures, then later she’d enlarged them, cut them into good compositions, and made her paintings from them. Since then she’d worked more from photos than from life.
    “So Lucy had breakfast with you?”
    “Yes,” Jecca said. She didn’t want to say that the woman ran off when Kim arrived for fear Kim’s feelings would be hurt.
    “Such a reclusive woman,” Kim said as she drove through a narrow alley and parked behind the shops. “Mind if we go see what I did with my store first?”
    “It’s what I want to see most.”
    Jecca had seen Kim’s little shop twice before. Of course she’d been there for the grand opening, but a few months ago, Kim had redone the lighting and put in new carpet. Jecca had seen photos, but in person it was better than she’d imagined. The well-designed lighting made each piece seem to be in its own case. Besides the highlighted pieces, there was an area for locals who wanted to buy an engagement ring. Kim showed Jecca a box of rings with channeled jewels. “I designed them especially for people who were on their second marriage or wanted to renew their vows. I call it my Forever collection.”
    Jecca smiled. For all that Kim was the practical one of the three of them, underneath, she was deeply romantic. “Sophie would have called the rings Trying for Heartbreak Again,” Jecca said, and Kim laughed.
    “I miss her so much!” Kim said.
    “You still haven’t found her?”
    “No,” Kim said. “Wait a minute! I just had an idea. My cousin Sara’s new husband has connections in the FBI. Maybe he can find her.”
    “My concern is that Sophie doesn’t want to be found. She knows where we live. She heard the name Edilean often enough, and Layton Hardware was said every day. If Sophie wanted to see us, she knows how to contact us.”
    “Yeah, maybe,” Kim said. “But I’d like to know that she’s all right. Maybe if I can find her and tell her you’re here for the summer, she’ll visit too.”
    “There go all the men in this county,” Jecca said, but she couldn’t keep from smiling as she remembered what Tris had said the night before. Had he been telling the truth when he said he’d folded Sophie’s half of the photo back? Probably not, since men followed Sophie wherever she went. They used to carry her books around campus for her. For every dance, at least six men asked Sophie out, and on weekends she’d sometimes have three dates a day. Sophie called them “free meals.” “If I don’t date, I don’t eat,” she said. She’d come from poverty, and every dime was a struggle for her. She refused to let Kim or Jecca help her and always paid her way, even if it was for just a third share of a pizza. “ Men are supposed to pay for things,” she used to say.
    On the day the three of them graduated they’d hugged and cried and vowed to stay friends forever. Jecca and Kim kept the vow, but Sophie had disappeared. They’d tried every method they knew to contact her but had failed. Three years ago, Kim flew to Texas, Sophie’s home state, and drove to the small town where Sophie said she’d gown up—but no one there had heard of her. No one recognized her photo.
    “Do you think everything she told us about herself was a lie?” Kim asked Jecca on the phone that night.
    “If it was, she had a reason,” Jecca said.
    They knew Sophie didn’t want to be found, but that didn’t keep them from hoping—or from trying to find out about her.
    After they left Kim’s shop, they walked around Edilean and stopped in Mrs. Wingate’s store, Yesterday.
    Jecca was astonished by what she saw. Clothes for children and babies, made of the softest cotton imaginable, had rows of lace and embroidered strips inserted into the fabric. Jecca turned over a little dress that had a heart of lace in the skirt. There didn’t appear to be any seams. The lace had, somehow, been butted up against the fabric