I pulled back. “What.How do you know my middle name?”
“Harper told me,” he said simply. “Seventh grade. I asked her, I don’t remember why. She told me, and I thought?—”
“You thought what?”
He pulled me closer. “I thought it suited you. Pretty, just like you.”
I stared at him in the dark. “You have known my middle name for this long, and you never said anything?”
“It never came up.”
“It never—” I sat up fully. “Levi. I just had a minor crisis because I didn’t knowyours, and you’ve been sitting on mine since theseventh grade?”
“I wasn’tsittingon it?—”
“You absolutely were. You were hoarding knowledge.” I pointed at him. “That is the single most quietly unhinged thing about you, and I want you to know I am adding it to the list.”
“There’s a list?”
“There’s been a list for years. Good things. Funny things. Things that could either be annoying or not, depending on my mood. There’s nothing bad, though. You’re too good to be real, and you always have been.”
He reached up and pulled me back down and tucked me against his side as if I’d always belonged there. He was smiling. I could feel it. “Go to sleep, Rebecca Lynn.”
“Don’t push it,” I said. But I was smiling too.
I put my head back down on his chest. Outside, the river kept moving. The campground was quiet and dark, and somewhere in Sweetbriar, my podcast episode was doing whatever it was doing with my real voice attached to my real name, and tomorrow things would start to matter in the way Levi had said they would. But that was tomorrow.
Chapter 31
Becca
“Welcome back toSomebody Said in Sweetbriar—I used to think that being seen was the most dangerous thing. I’m revising that opinion.”
Ipulled into the Stop & Go lot a few minutes before my shift and sat in the car for a moment longer than I needed to, engine idling, watching Elizabeth move around behind the register through the plate glass window. The podcast went out last night. My voice—my actual voice, my name, effectively—out there in the world now, attached to everything I’d said about the campground and the developers and Aggie, and I had no idea who had heard it. Could be nobody who mattered. Could be everyone in Sweetbriar. It could be that Elizabeth was going to look up when I walked through that door with the same expression she always had, none of this would come up at all, and I’d spend eight hours ringing up coffee and cigarettes and lottery tickets, and that would be that.
I gathered my bag from the passenger seat and got out before I could keep talking myself in circles. The bell above the door chimed when I pushed it open, the same as it always did, smalland ordinary and completely indifferent to the fact that I had spent last night doing the scariest thing I’d done in years.
Elizabeth turned from the register, eyes already locked on me.
“Okay,” she said, soft but firm. “Now.”
“Elizabeth—”
“I’ve been holding this since four forty-seven this morning.” She came around the counter with that focused stride of hers, the one that meant the conversation was happening whether I liked it or not. “I pulled over on Marker Road. Had to. I kept thinking about you, last night, talking about this town, the campground, the people in it—you made me cry, Becca, and I couldn’t see the road through the tears.” She stopped right in front of me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I opened my mouth, closed it. “Tell you what?”
“Any of it.” She leaned one hip against the counter, arms crossed, eyes never leaving mine. “The podcast. The developers. The campground. All of it.”
“I didn’t know most of it until recently,” I said quietly. “And the podcast?—”
“You’ve worked beside me eight hours a day. Five days a week. For a long freaking time.” Her voice stayed steady, but there was something raw underneath it. “I’ve known you forever. We sat next to each other in kindergarten, damn it. And the whole time you’ve been dealing with this alone. No wonder you couldn’t freaking sleep.”
I looked down at the counter, tracing a scratch in the laminate with my thumbnail. “I know.”
“You didn’t just rile people up,” she went on, softer now. “Anger is cheap, and people were already worried; they just needed a target. What you did was harder. You made them feel seen. Like only someone who lives here could, who has skin in the game, was actually paying attention and believed theydeserved to know what was happening to their town. That’s what moves a place like Sweetbriar.”
My throat tightened. “Okay,” I whispered.
