LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Five years ago, Meri Prescott left Stone Gap, North Carolina, with a fire in her belly and a promise that if she ever came back, she’d be doing it in style. She’d imagined riding down Main Street in the back of a limo while the blue-haired ladies at Sadie’s Clip ’n’ Curl gawked and the fishermen who parked their butts and their one-that-got-away stories on the bench in front of the Comeback Bar shook their heads and muttered about the good old days when a two-tone Chevy was fancy enough for getting around town.

      Meri had imagined a homecoming that would tell everyone in this nowhere town that she had made it, become more than anyone imagined. That she was more than just a pretty face, someone who worried about her manicure but not her grade point average. A girl, really, who had thought New York City would be the cure for all that ailed her, and that in that giant city she had finally found the person she was meant to be, not one who had been manufactured like a store mannequin.

      Okay, so she’d been blinded by the stars in her eyes. The Meri Prescott who had left Stone Gap with a tiara and a plan was not the Meri Prescott who was returning. Not by a long shot. And she wasn’t so sure Stone Gap was ready to accept the woman she had become.

      Frankly, she didn’t give a damn either way. She was here for Grandpa Ray, for as long as he needed her. To help him, and in the process...help herself.

      Her fingers drifted to her cheek, to the long, curved scar that had yet to fade, a constant memory of the division between her past and her present. There were nights when she woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the attack outside her crappy outer-borough apartment. She’d tried, tried so hard to stay in New York, to keep up with her photography job, but the city had changed for her, and the buildings she used to love had become like prison walls.

      She needed air and space and warm sun on her face. Then maybe she’d be able to conquer the demons that haunted her nights and shadowed her days. Maybe then she’d be able to hold a camera again and see something through the lens besides the face of her attacker.

      Maybe.

      At the stop sign holding court in the intersection of Main Street and Honeysuckle Lane, her ten-year-old Toyota let out a smoky cough. The car’s AC had stopped working somewhere back in Baltimore, and exhaust curled in through the open windows, a sickly sweet stench that made it seem like she hadn’t journeyed very far from the congested streets of Brooklyn.

      All it took to remind her that she was back in the small-town South was a glance out the window, at the wide verandas fronting the pastel

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