Secrets over Sweet Tea Read Free Page A

which were haphazardly thrown over the side of the tub. After he slipped his running shoes on, he returned to the bedroom.
    She looked beautiful lying there, her dark-brown hair scattered in waves across the pillow, the filtered sun lighting her flushed cheeks. He went to the side of the bed and leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft and inviting. Her arms came up around the base of his neck, and he chuckled through the kiss.
    “Seriously, I’ve got to go. If I don’t go now, I won’t have time to exercise today.”
    “I hope you have a great day then.” Her words dripped with confidence, a certainty that he would never leave. He shook his head to dislodge his emerging thoughts. If he didn’t get outside right now and run, he wasn’t going to leave this house all day.
    “You too, babe.”
    He left the bedroom and headed through the kitchen to the door that led out to the small garden. He turned the knob and entered the warm May Tennessee morning. As he came to the edge of the fence, he looked quickly to see if any cars were on the streets. All was still quiet, so he jogged across and settled into a pace that was certain to produce a sweat fast.
    The streets of downtown Franklin formed a grid of sorts. Main Street ran down the middle, crossed at regular intervals by numbered avenues. First Avenue, on the northeast end of town near the Harpeth River, bent around to form Bridge Street, parallel and north of Main. Third Avenue met Main at the town square, with its stately Confederate monument. And the entire downtown district came together southwest of the square, where Fifth Avenue met Main and a diagonalstreet called Columbia Avenue to create Five Points. This star-shaped junction could take you any direction you wanted to go—Murfreesboro, Nashville, Bellevue, Thompson Station, or Brentwood. But it also invited you to stay because all of town life intersected at Five Points. A post office anchored one corner; a church sat on another. Then there was a Starbucks and an ice cream parlor, and the Williamson County Archives building finished it off.
    This one little section of town could fulfill just about every need a person had—spiritual, emotional, physical, and relational. And yet Zach Craig had never felt so unfulfilled in his life. A bead of sweat dropped into his eye as he reached Main Street and turned east. Already the lift from his morning tryst—that alive feeling—was draining away. His run wasn’t helping much either. He couldn’t outrun the truth of what his life had become.
    He and Caroline had been married for fifteen years now. The twins were almost fourteen, and the estrogen in his household was off the charts. The girls cried over almost everything, and when they weren’t crying, they were simply nasty. He didn’t know where his sweet little girls had gone. And Caroline wasn’t much better. With her, you never knew what you were going to get. Each morning you could throw a feather up in the air, and where the wind would take it was usually more dependable than Caroline’s moods.
    A sneeze that tickled his nose almost forced him to stop running. Spring had arrived with a vengeance, and the allergies that had tortured him since he moved to Tennessee now bloomed to life with the flowers and the grasses. His other faithful companion, shame, was about to settle over him with a vengeanceas well. So he shifted his thoughts quickly to the cases that lay before him that day. He let them play through his mind as he continued down Main and skirted the square.
    He had been predominantly a divorce attorney for the last five years—more out of necessity than choice. Title closings had been his real expertise, but when the real estate market tanked, he’d had to find something that was steady. And divorce certainly seemed a dependable source of income, especially in the Nashville area. He had actually read in a magazine that the city had been given the grade of D in marriage survival.