The fire crackled merrily in the fireplace, but it wasn’t enough to warm up Jesse Collins. There was a bone-deep cold in her body that made her feel as though she would never be warm again. She snuggled into the corner of her sofa and pulled her mother’s afghan tighter over her legs.

When she was younger, she had thought that all of her parents’ things had been sold. There had been an estate auction at one point. Not that Jesse had been allowed to attend, but it had mostly included livestock and ranching equipment that was not useable by the Hernandez family and would not be any good to Jesse by the time she was ready to take over the running of the place.

She had been nearly nineteen before Avery Hernandez had admitted to her that all of her mother’s and father’s personal items and furniture were in storage. There had been two huge containers of household goods that had been delivered to the house as soon as Jesse had taken possession at twenty-one. Opening them had been a little bit like Christmas.

Jesse wrapped her hands around her mug and licked a marshmallow. When she’d been little, her mother had always put marshmallows in her cocoa. By the time she was older and had gone to live with Joe and Avery Hernandez, Avery had been the one to put the marshmallows in. But that hadn’t lasted long. Jesse and Avery had a very strange and sometimes complicated relationship.

A log popped and split apart. It settled to the bottom of the grate in a shower of sparks. Jesse jumped a little at the noise. She wondered why she felt so jumpy. It was an unpleasant sensation. Usually she felt untouchable in this house. It was her home, and it was good to be home after so long away.

There was nothing Jesse could think of that would make her believe the nonsense that Avery Hernandez was spouting about Jesse’s mother, Amelia, and Joe Hernandez. Jesse’s mother had loved her father. Amelia and Rawling Collins had been a wonderful love story. Anyone who had known them could attest to that. This crap about Joe and Amelia having an affair was just that. Crap. Lies. They were all lies. And Jesse was done listening to them.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The clock was moving toward midnight, and the clouds were finally breaking up. The trip into Denver had taken far longer than Jesse had wanted it to. She blocked out the memory of her truck. That was going to take some serious maneuvering, and right now, her brain was all spent. She wanted to go to sleep, but sleep was elusive. Somewhere in this house were the answers that Jesse needed. She just had to find them.

The strange thing about living in a house full of old things that had been taken out and then put back in was that she should—in theory—know exactly where everything was. Her mother had been a very dedicated journal writer. Some of Jesse’s earliest memories had been of her mother sitting in her armchair writing in her journal. That was what Amelia did every evening to decompress. So, where were those journals now?

Jesse stood up. She wrapped the afghan around her shoulders and turned a slow circle in the living room. When the movers had put her parents’ personal things and furniture back into the house, Jesse had purposefully had them place everything as close to the old way as her memory allowed. Cal had grumbled that this was sick proof of her unwillingness to move on, but for Jesse, it was more complicated than that.

Jesse needed closure. Her parents had died so quickly. There had been no time to say goodbye to them or to her home. She had been taken over to the Hernandez home the night of the accident, and she had not been allowed back to her home ranch until the house had been emptied of its contents and everything was in storage. And even then she had been sneaking off the Hernandez ranch to return to her parents’ place. Joe had been adamant that she not go anywhere near the Collins Ranch. It had never made any sense to Jesse. Maybe she would find those journals and suddenly everything would make sense.

Moving very slowly through the house, Jesse found herself in the dining room. She stared at the familiar outlines of her mother’s dining room hutch and the buffet. She gazed at the table where she remembered eating Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. She knew her mother’s good silverware was in the buffet. What else was in there? Jesse had a vague memory of aged paper bound with lacy yellowing ribbon. Where had that memory come from? Had she explored those drawers when she was a child?

Wrapping the afghan more securely around her shoulders, she sank to the floor in front of the buffet. The old rag rug was a real relic. Jesse loved its softness and the way it reminded her of hiding under the table when she was a very young girl. Sitting cross-legged on the rug, she anchored the afghan to ward off the chills that seemed determined to settle in her bones. Then she opened the double doors and peered inside.

There was a lot of stuff in there. Had there always been this much stuff? Had it been boxed up and put in storage all those years ago? And who in the world had done all of that? Why had Jesse never really thought about that until now? She hadn’t even unpacked this stuff herself. She had been in the kitchen.

She sat back and turned to look through the arched doorway that led into the kitchen. She’d been in there. One of the movers had been in here. The boxes had all been meticulously labeled. There had been no doubts as to where things went. So, Jesse had been confident in letting the movers unpack without much interference. She’d been more concerned about getting her kitchen put to rights so she would be able to cook and eat. There weren’t a lot of fast food options in the vicinity of her ranch. If the kitchen wasn’t useable, she wouldn’t be able to eat.

“But who packed the stuff and labeled it in the first place?” she whispered.

Jesse peered inside the buffet. She should have brought a flashlight. The alcove beneath the thing was far deeper than she had first imagined. It was like an endless pit. The big wood box filled with her mother’s wedding silver was right in front. Behind that, she spotted stack upon stack of what looked like smaller boxes. Taking the silverware container out, she set it aside and reached for the first mysterious stack. The boxes were made of pasteboard covered in some sort of decorative foil paper. Some of them had yellowing lace glued to their edges. A few even had some tiny plastic pearls added for decoration. They were all very distinctive.

The one on top was secured with a green velvet ribbon. Jesse pulled this open and then lifted the old lid. She heard the pasteboard crack, but it did not fall apart in her hands despite the fact that it seemed ready to do just that. The scent of old paper mingled with some kind of perfume was strong. The box was filled to the top with what looked to be letters and cards. The letters were folded neatly in two stacks.

Jesse reached gingerly into the box and pulled out the letter on top. It unfolded in her hands, and she looked at the date. It had been written before she was born. Many years before that time, actually, and probably a little while after her parents had gotten married. The letter had been written from her mother to her father. It opened with the words My Love.

The sting of tears caused Jesse to put the letter back and close the box. This was not what she was looking for. Rather, it was proof that suggested she was looking for something that did not exist anyway. This letter and probably the rest of the contents of this box and its companions all proved that what Avery Hernandez had told Jesse just a few hours ago at the hospital was entirely false.

With a heavy sigh, Jesse put the box back in the stack. She leaned into the buffet and pulled out two more stacks of these. She suspected that they were not all love letters from her mother to her father. Her mother had kept cards and letters from everyone. She loved to go back and read them later. Sometimes she had shown Jesse what the cards said. This had been the sort of thing to help Amelia Collins through the death of her own parents. They had died of old age, but she had been able to remain connected to them through the letters and cards that they had sent her.

Jesse had a brief bizarre thought that there was a lot lost these days since nobody sent real letters or cards anymore. What would happen if she sent Cal a letter? The thought was preposterous and produced a snorting giggle that made her clap her hands over her mouth despite the fact that she was alone.

This love letter nonsense was a fanciful kind of feeling. Jesse was still chuckling to herself when she reached far into the back left corner of the buffet. Then her fingers brushed what felt like a stack of notebooks. Jesse sucked in a quick breath of surprise. Pulling out a whole stack of her mother’s journals, Jesse eagerly set them on the rag rug beside her and picked up the one on top.

“This was written when I was maybe six or seven,” Jesse muttered. “Where are the most recent ones?”

She looked at the front cover of the notebook. The outside was covered in doodles. Jesse recalled her mother doodling on phone books, message pads, and pretty much everything she could get a pencil on. That was how she kept her brain focused on what she was talking or thinking about.

Flipping the cover open, Jesse realized that there was a tiny number scribbled onto the upper left-hand corner of the inside cover of the journal. It wasn’t a fancy journal. It was just a composition notebook with a black-and-white marbled cover. The number in the corner was twenty-two.

“Twenty-two, as in this is the twenty-second notebook she’s written in? Holy cow!” Jesse breathed.

She scrambled to open the next book. Twenty-one. Then twenty. They were counting backwards as though they had been stacked in here in some semblance of an order. But there was no telling how that order had been affected by the restacking done by strangers.

Jesse hurriedly found another stack of journals. This group began at ten. Then she found a stack that included twenty-nine. But the first date in the journal was well over a year before her parents’ accident.

“I need number thirty.”

Jesse got up on her knees. The afghan fell to the floor, forgotten. She dug in the rear corner of the buffet. There were no more journals on the left side. Reaching to the right, she pulled one stack from there, but most of the contents on that side included more boxes of correspondence.

She finally found journals two through twenty-nine. Her search had not lasted long. Somehow, time seemed to have stopped anyway, and she had no idea what time it was. The journals were all lined up before her on the rag rug in perfect order and set in groups of five. The dates matched. So, why was there no number one? Had her mother thrown it away? It seemed unlikely, considering the fact that she’d kept all of the others. It would not have made sense. And number thirty was missing as well.

Jesse got up and grabbed the afghan. She’d started to feel like an ice cube again. Pacing back and forth in front of the table, she tried to remember if her mother had still been journaling right before the accident that had claimed her life. Squeezing her eyes closed, Jesse tried to recall where her mother had kept her journal. Had there been someplace else that the final journal would have been stashed?

Jesse might have thought that was a real possibility if it hadn’t been for the fact that journal number one was also missing. Not only that, but she could well remember that her mother had continually put her journal in and out of the buffet. That was what had given Jesse the idea to look here in the first place. This was where her mother kept her correspondence and her personal papers. Birth certificates, deeds, and other legal papers had gone in the safety deposit box at the bank. Personal items went in here. This was a place that her father never touched. It had belonged solely to Amelia Collins, and the whole family knew it.

Standing still, Jesse shivered as she felt a chill slide down her spine. She was already cold. This was different. This was more. If number one and number thirty were missing, it suggested someone other than her mother had decided to take those journals for a reason. Why?

It seemed like the best way to find those journals was to find the person who had packed up her parents’ things all those years ago. That person would have had unfettered access to those journals and to any other “proof”—if that was even what someone was trying to find in those journals.

What if this house was full of proof? What if that’s why Joe Hernandez had wanted this place cleared out and still had no desire to allow Jesse access to her parents’ home and belongings? If he was hiding something, then it would make perfect sense that he would go to great lengths to cover up his shame or his secrets. Joe Hernandez did not like to be exposed. He would rather pretend that he was always perfectly right.

Jesse returned to the fire. She was so cold now, much colder than she should have been on a wet summer night. Her fingers were icy, and her blood felt sluggish in her veins. Perhaps it was time to admit that she was frightened.

Standing very close to the fire, Jesse let the crackling flames soothe her agitation. She could find the answers that she needed. She wasn’t a helpless eleven-year-old anymore. She was a grown woman. She had control of her destiny. And right now, that meant it was time to uncover the lies that had been woven around her life when her parents died so mysteriously in an accident that nobody could explain away.