“I guess you haven’t heard. I’m back to teach and coach at the high school,” I reply.
He glances down at the popsicle in my hand before he says, “I hadn’t heard.”
“You still working for your dad?” I nod toward the hardware store.
He shakes his head. “It’s mine now. Dad gave it to me a couple years ago.”
“Wow,” I say. “Grant Williams, businessman.”
“Yep,” he replies, putting his hands in his pockets.
A thick silence builds between us. We’re just two men staring at each other. We may have played football together, and he was in Emma’s class—Sadie’s younger sister—so we crossed paths plenty, but we knew each other without ever really knowing each other.
“Well, I’m sure I’ll see you around, then,” Grant finally says. “Welcome back.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I reply quickly. “Good to see you, Grant.”
He turns to head back into the hardware store, and I walk toward my truck.
The truck my grandpa handed down to me when I was sixteen. It’s rusted a bit around the wheel wells, and sometimes you have to convince it to start up when it’s been sitting a little too long, but I can still hear Sadie’s laughter in the cab and sometimes catch a whiff of vanilla—a sweetness that lived on her skin and in her hair.
The hinges groan when I open the door, and it seems to argue again when I shut it behind me. I turn the key in the ignition, and when I look up, I see Sadie’s Volkswagen Beetle beginning to cross Main Street.
She’s carefully looking back and forth, creeping across the asphalt. When her eyes land on me watching her from my truck, she abruptly looks away and speeds up, disappearing in seconds.
It took me time to come back—time to put back the pieces of myself that fell apart, exposing the shaky ground I’d built my future on. Now that I’m finally here in Dusty Hollow, I’m wrestling with a new possibility. The one where Sadie Summers might not want to give me another chance.
3
SADIE
Same books.Same cookies. Same Sadie.
The words have been echoing in my head for the past hour as I drove out to Firefly Farms, then stopped to notarize a property deed for Marcie Jenkins, then swung by the community garden to make sure the produce cart was full. It wasn’t, so I picked a few tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash to round it out—because of course I did.
Who else was going to do it?
When I open the door to my house, the quiet greets me like an old friend—familiar, dependable, and suddenly unbearable. I want to melt into the walls, become vinyl and floorboards.
Is this how an identity crisis begins?
Becoming one with inanimate objects? Trying to hide from the life you’ve built that seems to run perfectly for everyone else?
I sigh, placing my library books on the kitchen counter and letting my purse slip off my shoulder to the floor. I go to the fridge, where I crossGo to the library, Notarize papers for Marcie,Go to the bank,andTake produce to Firefly Farmsoff one of my lists.
Then I addRun into ex-boyfriendjust so I can run a line through it.
I stare atex-boyfrienda little too long, replaying the way heat licked at my skin when he leaned in. I hate that my body betrayed me, how it wanted his warmth to linger.
My phone buzzes again in my purse. I’ve been ignoring it, which isn’t like me, but I’m just so tired. So alone. So . . .the same. Apparently.
I fish out my phone from my purse, dread dropping like an anchor through my body when I see there are thirty-two messages.
I see a few texts from women from church, the animal shelter, and my mom.
Hallie Harper just had a baby girl, so I know somewhere in there is a message requesting me to put together a meal train.
But I know most of the messages reside in one text thread—the one with my sisters.
