We held each other’s gaze for a long, silent moment. She straightened, squaring her shoulders. “Okay.” She nodded. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s his name? Who is he?”

And so she told me. Patiently, evenly, she answered all of my questions. I kept my inquiries away from the private details of her life with him. I already knew he’d completely won her over at first before casting her aside like garbage. I didn’t need to know anything more about that. But he had a name, now. He was a person. Not just some anonymous figure upon which I could focus all my hatred. His name was Gerard Dempsey. He was of Irish and English descent. He was a successful real estate entrepreneur and had gained his millions that way. He had one sister, no brothers and three other children, all much older than me.

I also learned that he had never contacted my mom after I was born. Never written her a letter or made a phone call, though he knew exactly where we lived. She told me I had her eyes and hair color, but that my skin, jaw and nose were his.

She offered to show me a picture—the one picture she had of him—of them together, but I declined. I didn’t want to see them together, happy. Her young face full of bright ideals, unaware that he was stacking lie upon lie on top of their relationship like a house of cards.

“Did you love him?” I finally asked.

Her eyes drifted away to focus off into the distance. They took on a dreamy quality. “I did. Or rather…I loved who I thought he was, when I thought I knew everything about him.”

I breathed in slowly. “Love is dangerous. Deceptive.” I shook my head. “No offense, but I think it’s for fools.”

When she returned her gaze to me, her eyes were hard. “Mia, you are far too young to be talking like that. You sound like a bitter and lonely old lady.”

I clenched my teeth. Maybe I was, on the inside. Older than my years, wasn’t that what they called it?

Mom spoke again. “There are nice men out there. Lots of them. Most of them. Don’t waste your life being bitter and angry about the one dud your mom screwed up on.”

I froze for a moment, strangely reminded of Adam’s words in the echo of my mother’s. Every single man you look at for the rest of your life is tainted by him. I shook my head to clear it. “Why didn’t you ever date again?”

She shrugged. “You were the most important thing in my life and I didn’t trust my judgment enough to bring a potential loser into your life again. So I just didn’t.”

“And now? I’ve been out of the house for four years.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been working on it,” she said cryptically and then stood, gathering the plates and scooting off to the kitchen while I gazed after her thoughtfully.

I took over for Mom with the horse care and she was able to move on to fixing up the house and preparing to reopen the B and B. After a week, I’d called Heath to let him know I was staying in Anza for a while. He packed up my apartment for me. He was the best friend ever—but I also suspect that part of it had been done out of guilt for his part in what had happened between Adam and me.

My days fell into a mundane but comforting routine of waking up early, feeding the horses and cleaning out stalls, doing all the outside work, turning them out and exercising them during the cool hours of the morning.

Then, after a shower, I worked on the blog for several hours. Even with the crappy Internet connection on the ranch and my old box barely squeaking by, I still managed to put up some content every day.

But I was guarded in my posts. Much more guarded than before. I’d always been careful not to reveal geographical or personal information about myself but even so, whenever I sat down to write, I had the specter of Adam peering over my shoulder. I knew he was reading. Or maybe he no longer cared. Maybe he was too busy embarking on his new fulfilling relationship with “real woman” Lindsay.

Daily, my mom and I would congregate for lunch and swap stories, share news, both local and national, and grow closer than we’d been in a long time.

The hottest hours of the afternoon were for sitting next to the swamp cooler in the kitchen with my medical books around me, studying.

Yep. That was my exciting life in Anza, but I found myself, as the weeks passed and the date of my big test approached, feeling stronger, more self-sufficient and discovering new things about myself that I’d never explored before. I also found myself Googling alternatives for people with premed majors who didn’t go to medical school. They weren’t all bad—research, nursing, consulting—but they weren’t my dream. And I knew I was going to have to dig in deep to find the courage to take that damn test again and face another possible failure, or else say good-bye to my dream forever.