Page 80 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

June climbed up onto the little stage they’d built at the barn’s mouth and took the microphone with the easy confidence of someone born to hold one.

“Evening, Sweetbriar!” Her voice rang out clean over the crowd, and a cheer went up from somewhere near the cider table. “Welcome to the Starling Harvest Ball, the last and best night of a season that has, honestly, given every single one of us more than we bargained for.” Laughter rippled through the crowd, warm and knowing, the sound of a town that had lived through the same fall season together and come out the other side mostly intact. “We’ve got dancing, we’ve got pie, and later tonight, right there at that gazebo, we are going to crown this year’s Mr. Pumpkin and settle, once and for all, which of our extremely reluctant contestants has been the best sport about a contest only a few of them signed up for voluntarily.” More laughter, louder this time, somebody hollering a name I didn’t catch. “So eat something. Dance with somebody. And stick around, because before the night’s over, we’ve got a crowning to get to and a farm to celebrate.”

The crowd surged forward toward the tables, and Gwen and June peeled off into it almost immediately, swallowed by cousins and neighbors, and I stood there a moment at the edge of the light alone, one hand pressed flat against my stomach like I could physically hold the nerves down that way, scanning the crowd without meaning to, the way I’d been doing all evening since I’d walked down that path.

And then I saw him.

He was standing near the gate in the navy suit he’d worn to Becca’s wedding, and I hated, immediately and with my whole chest, how good he looked in it—shoulders set the way they always were, like a man permanently at attention, jaw freshly shaved, hair combed back except for the one piece that never stayed, standing there looking more uncertain than I had ever once seen him look in all the months I’d known him.

He was, infuriatingly, unfairly, the best-looking thing at this entire party, and some small, humiliated, entirely inconvenient part of me noted that even now, even furious, even wrecked, I still wanted to walk straight across that yard and put my hands against his chest the way I had on the bluff, and demand that he tell me that what we had was still real.

He hadn’t seen me yet. He was staring into the crowd like someone might tell him what to say once he found me.

Jonas came up the path just past him with my grandmother on his arm, the two of them laughing about something, her hand tucked properly into his elbow, and I had one half-second to feel my whole chest go warm at the sight of her out here at all, dressed and laughing, before my eyes moved past them.

And found my mother, now right beside Matt, close enough that her hand was tucked into his arm.

She was wearing a pretty blue dress I’d never seen before, something new she must have bought just for tonight, and her hand sat in the crook of his elbow the exact same way my grandmother’s sat in Jonas’s—easy, familiar, a woman standing beside someone she’d already decided to welcome back in.

The joke I’d had ready, the one already halfway up my throat, died before I could get it out, and something else took its place instead—not hurt. Something closer to relief, so sudden it nearly buckled my knees.

Because there was no anger left anywhere in that yard for him. My mother’s arm through his. My grandmother laughing on Jonas’s. Both of them out here dressed and ready, exactly like they were every single year, because nothing short of the roof caving in had ever once kept a Starling woman home on the night of the Harvest Ball, and both of them had apparently decided, sometime between last night and tonight, that whatever he’d done wrong, he’d more than made up for it. They wouldn’t have looked at him like that, wouldn’t have let him anywhere near them like that, if he hadn’t earned it honestly.

Which meant I didn’t have to walk into this alone. Whatever I still had to say to him, whatever he still had to say to me, the two women who loved me most in this world had already looked him over and decided he was worth trusting.

I straightened my spine, smoothed the front of the dress I hadn’t chosen but now couldn’t imagine wearing anything else, and walked toward him.

Chapter 34

Matt

She was twenty feet away and closing when June’s voice cracked out over the speakers.

“Alright, Sweetbriar—gazebo, now, everybody! All the contestants have arrived, and we’ve got a Mr. Pumpkin crowning to get to!”

The crowd turned toward the gazebo at once, and the yard moved like a single animal changing direction, and I felt myself get swept up in the current of it before I could do a single thing about it—a hand on my shoulder pulling me toward the contestants’ line, some kid cutting straight between me and the one person I’d actually driven out here for. I looked back once, fighting the pull of the crowd just to find her again. Elizabeth was still there, twenty feet away, further now, an island in a river of her own neighbors, and for one terrible second I thought I’d lost the only chance I was going to get, that the whole night would close back over her like water and I’d end up saying all of this from that stage to a woman who wasn’t even close enough to hear it.

Then June was calling contestant names off a clipboard, and I found myself herded up under the gazebo lights with Jude and Tristan and the rest of them. Nobody looked comfortable. Tristan kept tugging at his collar like it had personally wronged him, and I understood the impulse, because standing up there in a suit I’d chosen with too much care, about to say the truest thing I’d ever say out loud, I felt about as far from comfortable as a man could get and still be upright. There was nothing to do but stand there and let the night happen to me.

The gazebo was lit up white and gold, strung with the same café lights that had watched Elizabeth’s talent set land a lifetime ago, and past it the whole dark lawn was packed with Sweetbriar in its good clothes, faces turned up, waiting. June stood at the rail with her phone propped in a little stand beside the microphone, the same crowd-noise app she’d been running all season glowing on its screen with a live bar graph that had apparently just decided the fate of six grown men. She had the unshakable confidence of a woman who had been building to exactly this moment her entire life, and when the crowd’s roar peaked she snatched the phone right up off its stand and held it high over her head like a torch, letting the app’s noise reading settle the matter for anyone who still doubted her methods.

“Okay,” she announced, to the crowd and the twelve thousand people watching through her phone. “You know the rules, because I made them and I explain them every year. It’s science. I hold up the phone, you make your noise, the loudest number wins Mr. Pumpkin. No appeals.”

June went down the line.

She held the phone up over Dale first, and the crowd gave him a good warm roar, and June studied the number with the grave squint of a woman reading a lie detector. “Respectable,” she said. “Dale, that’s your best year.” She moved to Tristan, held the phone up, and got a wall of sound from the back rows in particular, making him look like he wanted the gazebo to collapse and take him with it. “Interesting,” June told her livestream. “Very interesting. I’m not going to guess who’s making all that noise.” She held the phone over Simon, who did not acknowledge it, who stood there with settled patience. He got a solid, respectful roar. “Simon doesn’t campaign,” June explained to her followers. “Simon has never campaigned for anything in his life. And yet.” She held the phone over Jude, who threw both arms up to conduct his own applause, and the number spiked, and he pointed at me across the stage in open triumph until June said, “That’s mostly Bella and your grandma, Jude,” and the number, upon reflection, meant less.

And then she came to me.

“Officer Hartford,” June said, and something in her voice shifted, dropped the bit for half a second. She raised the phone up over my head.

And I stopped hearing the crowd.

Because I’d found her. Down in front, off to the side, Elizabeth stood with her arms wrapped around herself, not making a sound, not part of the roar, just looking at me—and every rehearsed word I’d built went straight out of my head, and what was left was very simple and very large, and it was only for her, and the phone over my head could not measure a single ounce of it.

“You all know how this works,” she called out, grinning, tapping the screen once like she was double-checking numbers she already knew by heart. “Every round this season, right down to tonight, decided the same way it’s always decided—by this app, by all of you, by how loud you got.” Laughter rolled through the crowd, warm and knowing, the sound of a whole crowd who had, at some point this fall, personally screamed into a phone held over June’s head. “I want it on the record that the margin tonight was not close. It was, in fact, extremely, suspiciously not close, which either means Sweetbriar has excellent taste or Officer Hartford has been quietly campaigning, and I choose to believe the former because the latter would imply he’s fun, and we all know that’s not confirmed.” More laughter, louder. She glanced at her screen one last time, milking the pause the way only June could, fully aware her phone was capturing every beat of it for whatever audience was watching live.

Sweetbriar’s Mr. Pumpkin,” she announced, “is Officer Matthew Hartford.”