Nate Springfield read aloud, smiling at the strange similarity his daughter's characters bore to a real family—theirs. He looked up from the manuscript. “Norton?” His sixteen-year-old daughter, Elisha, blond and pretty, grinned sheepishly across the dining table. “Well . . .” “I mean, your mother, Sarah, gets to be Susan, Elijah gets to be Elias, you get to be Lisa—but Norton?" “It's the first name I thought of that started with an N. I can change it.” Nate waved that aside. “No, Norton's fine. I'm resilient. I can recover.” “So what do you think?” Nate deliberately took a long pause, cleaning his reading glasses, stretching his big frame a bit, checking the weather out the window. He leafed through his daughter's writing assignment again, page by page. This was Elisha's last home school assignment for the year, and she was late turning it in. Now, as a matter of discipline, she had to finish it before she could go horseback riding with her brother. And Nate, a former Montana lawman who used to “wait”
