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Chapter One

“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted

The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind

No surprise there This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines By now, she knew the drill

They trespassed She yelled They pretended she didn’t exist She called the police

Ellen was thoroughly sick of it She couldn’t carry on this atching frolass of iced tea like an outraged southern belle

It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it Her pop-star brother was safe at ho his wounds And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life He’d decided to be a celebrity, and then he’d hbor, Carly The consequences ought to be his to deal with

Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend She’d e, law school, e, divorce, motherhood They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods

Her choices had also made her the kind of wouy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday

Enough, she thought Enough

But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her iant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought

Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials When she first e land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of laing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her round

It was only after her divorce that things started to grow In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted fro to a solid presence inside her wo, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through thethat Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help