Long, thick blonde hair, a little messy from the day. Blue-green eyes, sharp even when I’m tired. A faint scar on my chin—barely noticeable now, but I know it’s there. And then there’s the things I don’t want to look at. The purplish half-moons under my eyes, proof of too many late nights, too many early mornings. The faint lines on my forehead, barely there, but enough that I see them now. The exhaustion etched into my skin.
People used to call me pretty.
Back when I was younger, even after I had Hudson—still basically a kid myself, holding a newborn with shaky hands and running on caffeine and panic and blind instinct. I didn’t know what I was doing, but they told me I was pretty like that made up for it.
I wasn’t clever. Or confident. Or prepared in any way.
But I had a nice face. And apparently, that was supposed to be enough.
Pretty was the fallback. The thing they offered when they didn’t know what else to give me.
Like it was a ribbon tied around the wreckage.
Like it somehow made everything else less hard, less heavy.
But pretty never paid the bills.
Pretty didn’t get up at 3 a.m. when Hudson had a fever. Pretty didn’t fix the plumbing or make payroll or show up every day when I wanted to disappear.
I sling my jacket over my shoulders, already reaching for my bag, already shifting into the next part of my day—getting Hudson to practice, making sure he eats something that isn’t a gas station granola bar, remembering to throw a load of laundry in when we get home.
“See you tomorrow,” I call, my voice blending into the lull of theafternoon slow-down.
Dawn barely looks up from the register, lifting two fingers in a lazy goodbye. Opal mutters something under her breath that could be either a farewell or a complaint about the griddle.
I take a step toward the back door, ready to leave. And then the front door jingles.
It’s instinct, nothing more, that makes me glance back. A habit I don’t think about. Just a split-second check before I walk out the door.
But then my heart stops, because that’s when I see him. His face.
I know that face.
I built a piece of myself around it.
His hair’s darker than I remember. Still brown, still thick, but shorter now—tidier, like life forced him into structure he didn’t ask for. The ends still have a mind of their own though, just enough to hint at the boy he used to be. The one who let it grow too long in the summers and never remembered to comb it unless someone reminded him.
His jaw’s sharper now. Scruff lining his cheeks and chin, the kind of five o’clock shadow that says he works outside, stays busy, and probably comes home too tired to shave. It suits him.
The cleft in his chin is still there, the same one I used to trace with my finger when we were young. His shoulders are broader, his chest solid beneath a jacket that looks worn and well-used, like it’s seen more miles than it should have.
And his hands—God, his hands.
They’ve always been big, but now they look like they belong to someone who’s built things. Fixed things. Lost things. The kind of hands that carry weight without complaint.
And then his eyes. Honey-colored. Still sharp enough to see through me. Still soft enough to make me wish he wouldn’t. Familiar in the way something is when you’ve memorized it without realizing, when it’s become part of you.
I know those eyes.
I wake up to them every morning. I see them across the breakfast table,in the rearview mirror, beneath a baseball cap tilted too far over a twelve-year-old forehead.
My stomach flips, a deep, sick kind of drop.
Boone Wilding.
The boy I spent my whole childhood with. The one who whispered promises to me under a sky so wide it felt like it was holding us.
Boone hasn’t seen me yet. His gaze sweeps the diner, taking it in, registering the ways it’s changed, the ways it hasn’t. There’s a tension in the way he holds himself, like he’s bracing himself for impact.
