Chapter 1

Cadence headed to Jake's for her night shift, her heart in her throat and her stomach in her feet. Jake was an old family friend. She had known him and his wife Renee her entire life. Renee and her mother went to school together and were best friends. When she was a child, she called them Uncle Jake and Aunt Renee. Because her mother died while pregnant with her, Renee was the closest thing she had to a mother figure in her life and Jake was more a father to her than her own. They were always what she needed: a shoulder to cry on, emergency money to fix a broken down car, and a job to keep her afloat in between semesters.

Jake owned a bar that he named after himself, in the center of a podunk town in Kentucky called Allen. At 22, Cadence was done with college and ready for whatever turn her life was going to take. She'd gone to NKU for a business degree to help out her father's restaurant, but he had died at the beginning of her freshman year. She had kept plugging away at it, going back home in the summer and staying at the old farmhouse that belonged to her grandparents on her mother's side. It was nestled in the woods away from the center of town, private and quiet so she could be alone with her thoughts. And pretty much just alone.