Page 51 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Only her brother hadn’t attempted to cross that threshold.

Would he be accepted by anyone? By some?

He would never know, and she wasn’t sure that was the place for him to be, considering the path he was currently traveling in his life. The same could be said for Sam, but there was a very good chance the pub would be the fuel toward his success.

“I’m sorry,” Hadley replied softly, though she genuinely meant the apology. “For coming in here like that. For assuming.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Sam said with a small shrug. “There’s not a soul in this town who doesn’t know I’ve got a problem. No use pretending otherwise.”

He gestured toward her with his mug.

“Watching you this past year, coming back here, planting yourself in a town that you left behind at the age of eighteen. Well, it made me think maybe I could do the same. Start over in the same place with the same people who know the worst of me.”

Hadley blinked hard against the sting behind her eyes. Sam had her all wrong. All she’d thought about lately was how she’d made a mistake, and how maybe it was time to rectify the decision she’d made last year.

“Making amends isn’t easy,” Sam said, as if he could hear her thoughts. “But it beats the alternative, doesn’t it?”

“I honestly don’t know, Sam. And that’s part of the reason why I told Mason to take the money and run.” Hadley curled her fingers into her palms. The slight bite of her nails kept her grounded. “I told him to take every cent the state gave him and put this town in his rearview mirror. I can’t be selfish about it. I moved back here hoping for something that I don’t even know exists. Maybe that I’d get my brother back? I think I always knew that boy was gone, but I kept wishing for him anyway.”

Sam shook his head, slow and certain.

“You have it all wrong, Hads.” Sam had full conviction in his tone. No doubt whatsoever. “Mason won’t leave this town. Ever. He’s as much a part of this place as the corn is. As the Threshing Man, if you want to put it that way. This town took away what future he had, and he’s still here, still getting up, still trying to drive home. He might not be too good at it yet, but he’s trying.”

Hadley averted her gaze, blinking away the tears that she couldn’t keep at bay any longer.

“He’s struggling. No question about that,” Sam said, pausing long enough to get what he wanted from her. Her full attention, as if he needed her to understand that she was never leaving this town, either. “There’s a small piece of him that won’t ever let them win. That won’t let this ground have the last of him. Whatever else Mason does, he’s not going to hand himself over. Not to the bottle, not to the Threshing Man, not to the memory of your daddy. Not to any of it.”

22

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Thursday – 7:49 am

Hadley pulled up out front of the station and spotted the two women before she’d shut off the engine. Nora and Whitney, each with a coffee from the bakery, their heads bent toward one another, so deep in conversation that neither had marked the Equinox at the curb. Hadley let them go on a moment before she turned her focus to the rearview mirror.

Her reflection was the same as yesterday, and that struck her as unfair.

An hour ago, she’d found her brother’s truck folded into an oak and spent the drive to their childhood home picturing him dead in a ditch. She’d stood in the living room, a foot from the floorboard she’d learned to skip at seven years old, and listened to Sam Cashman decide to save his own life while her brother drank his own away one swallow at a time.

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she’d still be standing after all Mason had carried. Yet she couldn’t push the disappointment down, or the regret that ran under it for how the two of them had turned out. None of that stared back at her from the mirror. Her eyes were the same green. Her lips were still annoyingly chapped. The same scar ran through her right eyebrow.

Hadley let out a slow breath before popping the console for a bottle of antacids. She shook two into her palm and chewed them down, and once the chalk coated her tongue, the burn under her sternum eased back a fraction. She traded the bottle for a tube of ChapStick worn down almost to nothing, barely enough wax left to cover her bottom lip, but she made do.

The weather had turned on the drive back into town. The clear sky she’d driven out to the Cox place under was gone, and a bank of clouds had stacked up in the west, gray at the base and building taller by the minute. The air had thickened, heavy even inside the vehicle, with a chill threading underneath that hadn’t been there at dawn.

A storm was coming.

The rain wouldn’t arrive until later in the day, by her guess, which left her the morning to make her calls and decide whether she was driving out to Emberwood or to Earl Vinton’s place. She reached across for the talisman on the passenger seat and stepped out of the vehicle.

Whitney spotted her first. She murmured something low and nudged Nora, whose head came up, and she covered half the distance between them without delay.

“Hadley. We were hoping you’d be back soon.” They met on the sidewalk in front of the old Victorian. Nora’s gaze drifted toward the front porch. “Reed wasn’t in the habit of leaving the station much before ten.”

“Is everything all right?” Hadley couldn’t tell if the comment was a criticism or an observation, and she let it go either way. “I’m just coming back from an interview.”

“An interview? Concerning what we spoke about last night?” Nora traded a look with Whitney, enough to indicate that she’d confided in her friend. When Hadley didn’t answer straightaway, Nora pressed on. “I spoke with my cousin last night after I got home. We were on the phone for hours. By the time we hung up, I figured it was too late to call you.”