Chapter One
Zoe McCourt was sixteen when she met the boy who would change her life. She'd grown up in the mountains ofWest Virginia , the oldest of four. By the time she was twelve, her father had already run off with the wife of another man.
Even then, Zoe hadn't considered it any great loss. Her daddy was a short-tempered, moody man who preferred drinking beer with the boys or banging his neighbor's wife rather than seeing to his own.
Still, it was hard, since most weeks he had at least brought home a paycheck.
Her mother was a thin, nervous woman who smoked too much and compensated for her husband's desertion by replacing him, with some regularity, with boyfriends cut from the same cloth as Bobby Lee McCourt. They made her happy in the short term, angry and sad in the long, but she'd never been able to do without a man for more than a month straight in any case.
Crystal McCourt had raised her brood in a double-wide, slotted into a lot in theHillsideTrailer Park . After her husband ran off,Crystal got shit-faced drunk and, leaving Zoe in charge, hopped in her third hand Camaro to head out in pursuit of, in her words, "the cheating son of a bitch and his godforsaken whore."
She'd been gone for three days. She hadn't found Bobby, but she came back sober. The chase had cost her some of her self-respect, and her job at Debbie's House of Beauty.
Debbie's House might have been more of a hut, but it cut deep to lose the regular pay.
The experience toughenedCrystal considerably. She sat her children down and told them things were going to be rocky and things were going to be hard, but they'd find a way.
She nailed up her beautician's license in the trailer's kitchen and opened her own house of beauty.
She undercut Debbie's prices, and she had a talent with hair.
So they'd gotten by. The trailer had smelled of peroxide and permanents and smoke, but they'd gotten by.
Zoe shampooed heads, swept up shorn hair, and minded her three siblings. When she showed an aptitude, she was given comb-outs or allowed to trim.
And she dreamed of better, of more, of the world outside that trailer park.
She did well in school, especially in math. Her skill with numbers put her in charge of her mother's books, the taxes, the bills.
She was an adult before her fourteenth birthday, with the child inside yearning for something more.
It was no surprise that she was dazzled by James Marshall.
He was so different from the boys she knew. Not just because he was a little older—nineteen to her sixteen—but because he'd been places and seen things. And God, he was so handsome. Like Prince Charming out of the storybook.
His great-grandfather might have worked the mines in those hills, but there was no coal dust on James. The generations between had scrubbed it all away, and added a sheen of polish and gloss.
His family had money, the kind of money that bought class, and education, and trips toEurope . They had the biggest house in town, as white and showy as a bridal gown, and James and his younger sister were both sent to private schools.
TheMarshalls liked to give parties, big, splashy ones with live music and fancy catered food. Mrs. Marshall would always haveCrystal come right to the house to do her hair for a party, and Zoe often went along to do Mrs. Marshall's nails.
She would dream about that house, so clean and full of flowers and pretty things. It was so wonderful to know people lived that way. Not everyone was crowded into a trailer that smelled of chemicals and stale smoke.
She promised herself that one day she would live in a house. It didn't have to be big and grand like theMarshalls ', but it would be a real house, and it would have a little yard.