Grace smiled shakily at her, took a deep breath, and replied, “Thanks.I needed that.”
Sunny merely nodded because she knew exactly what it felt like to be the butt of malicious gossip and scandal.Sympathy or kindness were the things most likely to break any of the widows.
Under all of it, like a smell that had gotten into the carpet, ran the name nobody would say in front of the wrong booth.Ruth Sanger held court at the counter of Rose’s Diner and supplied gossip freely to anyone who wanted it, leaning in, her voice pitched to carry exactly as far as she wanted it to.Hank had asked her, weeks back, to cool it.From the temperature of that room, Sunny gathered the asking had not taken.
She stood on Main Street in the hot, summer sun and watched her adopted town coming apart at the seams.The old useless anger rose in her, the anger of having to say nothing while people decided who and what she was and didn’t allow her a single word in her own defense.
Then she went to drop the reconciled books at the mayor’s office and found Bonnie Watson at the end of her rope.
Bonnie’s desk was buried under the town’s whole nervous system: water-board minutes, the volunteer-fire roster, a road-grading bid, a folder marked SEPTIC, COUNTY, and she was pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose when Sunny walked in.
“Tell me it balances,” Bonnie said, without opening her eyes.
“It balances.”Sunny set the ledger down.“To the penny.You’re the only client I’ve got whose books actually do.”
Bonnie smiled, but she looked like a woman who’d been awake since four AM.fretting about her to-do list.
“There’s a candidates’ forum tonight,” Bonnie said.“At the Grange.Dale’s Tolliver’s been telling anyone who’ll hold still that he’ll be there.”She sighed.“He’s good at the glad-handing part, and I’m not.I can run this town in my sleep.I have been, frankly, since way before Lucas got sick but I can’t stand up in front of three hundred people and tell them how wonderful I am.It feels like a lie even when it’s true.”
“But you are wonderful.”
“Thanks.But Dale doesn’t have to tell the truth.He only has to be comfortable.”Bonnie squared the septic folder on top of the road-grading folder with great precision as if she’d rather throw both across the room.
“His whole pitch is that everyone’s tired of hearing about the fire.And everyone is tired of it.The WoWS most of all.But we also want to know the truth at last.”Another sigh.“He tells folks we don’t need to go digging through the ashes.That we just need and want a little peace and quiet and half the room exhales like he just shut off an alarm.You can’t argue with peace and quiet.People are too worn down to want anything else.”
Sunny didn’t answer that because the thing forming in her chest wasn’t agreement.It was a fire.
“I’ll be there tonight,” was all she said.
The Grange hall filled past its fire code maximum by seven.Sunny noticed mostly because counting something was what she did when her stomach was tied in bad knots.
The WoWS had claimed two full rows down front—Rose, Natalie, Molly, and Charlotte.Grace walked in, still a shade pale from the bakery, with Tessa whose arms crossed as her gaze roved the room.
Bonnie’s fiancé, Gray Lawton, stood against the side wall where Bonnie could find him with a glance, which she did every time she looked up from her notes.
Hank came in just as the emcee got the event started with a few Grange announcements.Sunny felt Hank’s presence without even having to turn around.She did look over her shoulder, though, and saw him find a bit of wall in the back to lean against.
Madison and Jack had the whole herd of kids back at the house with Makayla and Presley as reinforcements and a stack of pizzas for hazard pay.
Dale Tolliver took the floor first, and he was good.She had to give him that, even though she hated to admit it.
He was a big, easygoing man in a clean shirt, and he worked the room the way a man works a sale barn with a joke about the coffee, a few people greeted by name, a story about his daddy that landed cozy and warm.Then he told the crowd that the town had been through enough.He told them they didn’t need more strangers in windbreakers crawling over their grief and being nosy.That they needed a man like him who’d lived here his whole life, who knew everybody and their people, who would keep a steady hand on the wheel, and let folks get back to living.
The room breathed out around him, exactly the way Bonnie had said it would.Sunny watched the exhale move down the rows like wind across wheat, and her hands went cold.
Then Bonnie spoke, and she was just what she’d promised: competent, undramatic, a little dry, laying out the unglamorous truth of a town that ran because somebody balanced its books and made its payroll and kept its water clean.It was all true and none of it landed.Sunny accepted reluctantly that nobody could make three-hundred tired people fall in love with a balanced budget.
And then Dale Tolliver, certain that he had the room, made the mistake Sunny’d been waiting all day for.
He chuckled, warm and indulgent.“Now, Bonnie here’s done a fine job keeping the chairs warm while Lucas is poorly.Nobody’s saying she hasn’t.But there’s a difference between a secretary opening the mail and a man running a town.We don’t need a little lady taking the reins of our town, Folks.We need a leader.”He spread his big hands and smiled around at all of them then looked at Bonnie behind her podium.“Tell you what, Missy—when this is over, you can keep pouring the coffee, and I’ll see you’re paid fair for it.”
The room laughed.Not all of it.But enough of it.
And Sunny was on her feet before the laughter had faded.
Heads turned.She felt every one of them, and the part of her that had learned to make herself small screamed at her to sit back down.She didn’t.
“My name is Sunny Carter.Most of you don’t know me.”Her voice came out level, which surprised her.It was the voice she kept for bad news.“I’m the forensic accountant Mrs.Watson hired recently to audit the town’s financial records, which makes me the one person in this room who’s actually read what it takes to run Cobbler Cove, line by line, for the last twelve years that your current mayor has held the job.”
