…”

Should she go or not? Was she in the mood?

Why not? she finally decided. I’ve got nothing else to do anyway.

Miles Ryan made his way down Madame Moore’s Lane, a narrow, winding road that ran along both the Trent River and Brices Creek, from downtown New Bern to Pollocksville, a small hamlet twelve miles to the south. Originally named for the woman who once ran one of the most famous brothels in North Carolina, it rolled past the former country home and burial plot of Richard Dobbs Spaight, a southern hero who’d signed the Declaration of Independence. During the Civil War, Union soldiers exhumed the body from the grave and posted his skull on an iron gate as a warning to citizens not to resist the occupation. When he was a child, that story had kept Miles from wanting to go anywhere near the place. Despite its beauty and relative isolation, the road he was following wasn’t for children. Heavy, fully loaded logging trucks rumbled over it day and night, and drivers tended to underestimate the curves. As a homeowner in one of the communities just off the lane, Miles had been trying to lower the speed limit for years.

No one, except for Missy, had listened to him.

This road always made him think of her.

Miles tapped out another cigarette, lit it, then rolled down the window. As the warm air blew in the car, simple snapshots of the life they’d lived together surfaced in his mind; but as always, those images led inexorably to their final day together.

Ironically, he’d been gone most of the day, a Sunday. Miles had gone fishing with Charlie Curtis. He’d left the house early that morning, and though both he and Charlie came home with mahi-mahi that day, it wasn’t enough to appease his wife. Missy, her face smudged with dirt, put her hands on her hips and glared at him the moment he got home. She didn’t say anything at all, but then, she didn’t need to. The way she looked at him spoke volumes.