FALLS LIKE THUNDER [TYLER OWENS]

PROLOGUE : A LEGACY IN THE MAKING

PROLOGUE : A LEGACY IN THE MAKING

JO HARDING SPENDS MONTHS TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF WHERE SHE BELONGS IN LITTLE WILLOW THORNTON'S LIFE.

It is a daunting thing, to have your six-year-old niece on your doorstep during an off-season, hand in hand with a social worker explaining that you are the last stop before foster care. It ain't like she shouldn't have seen something coming. Not with the calls coming in asking the last time she had seen her wayward sister, the poster child for parental-loss induced drug addiction, but the lab is distracting being funded and functioning now, and her sister disappearing is not anything to write home about.

Sometimes, it is too easy to pretend that an image of her older sister, still only a few inches taller with her front two teeth still missing, got swept off in that storm too with her daddy too.

There maybe had been one absent minded call that she at least agreed to meet or pick up someone or something of hers but it does not hit her until its a Friday morning and there is a little blonde girl the image of her sister staring right back at her.

Willow Mae Thornton, her niece on an unknown branch of the family tree. Jo had no clue she even existed, let alone seen a damn picture.

The social worker explains that a motel clerk found her remaining behind after the couple in the room checked out, leaving behind trash and food and her. "It was as if a tornado blew threw the room," she quotes the motel clerk in true Oklahoma fashion and a little to on the nose for the family. Jo tries to ignore the ache of her heart and wishes she could live in her false narrative a little longer.

Jo is only slightly worried it will scare Bill off when he finally makes his way out onto the porch. It has been like a honeymoon phase all over again since that outbreak, but she reminds herself it was only a year back they had been on the brink of an official divorce and this could be the tipping point again. The previous years of their marriage consisted of chasing and working in the lab; more focused on their careers than ever entertaining the idea of a family.

Then the moment finally comes, that entertaining part where there is no time to really think with her kin sitting next to Mose on the front porch, doing her best to pretend she ain't listening to a word said between adults. Jo is hesitant, unsure, overwhelmed that it all falls to her to either give a girl a home or send her to foster care. Then, it is Bill that develops a bleeding, impulsive heart that decides they can take on a six-year-old in their storm chasing prime.

He figures out the logistics of it all; the off-season is no issue, especially with her being the age that she heads right into school during the day and steps off the bus just in time for one of them to head home from the lab. Aunt Meg is more than happy to take on the little bugger when the chasing starts in the summer, reasons that Mose will be happy for more energetic company. She even decides on a permanent residency in on the old Thornton, now Harding ranch house rather than rebuilding her Wakita home