Chapter One
Misery,Texas, Spring 1880
Hannah Louise Barkley heaved a discontented sigh as she gazed down
Misery's dusty main street toward the small white Methodist church where
Easter Sunday service would be held the following day. She'd been gone
five years, and five years hadn't been nearly long enough.
Everything looked the same. Across the street the front window of
Robinson's General Store still bore the crack of Tommy Mullins's
baseball, the dress displayed in the milliner's shop looked at least two
years out of date, and Doc Leahy's office was still located upstairs
from the druggist. The wooden sidewalk she strolled upon was as
splintered, rotted, and neglected as it had been the day she'd left.
Though she had missed her father and Maude in the years she'd been gone,
there wasn't much about the town she'd pined for.
Misery would never change. And neither would the folks residing in it.
They were small-minded, unsophisticated, nosy, and prone to gossip. In
New York, no one knew your business unless you wanted them to. Here,
everything a person said or did was held up to public scrutiny, pulled
apart, dissected, and commented on, oftentimes in the morning edition of
the Sentinel. She hadn't missed th ... read full excerpt from: Defiant ebook
