Page 50 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

Luckily, to counterbalance those stressful messages, Dawson had been sending me updates on a cat he’d rescued sometime yesterday named Minnie. He picked her up from the vet this afternoon, and I was receiving photos every few hours throughout the day. He sent one of her curled up on his shoulder while he was doing paperwork. One meeting the horses. Another meeting, Banjo.

He had this way about him that animals, kids, and babies just responded to. They loved him. Seeing the evidence of that again through Minnie, the kitten, was just another reminder of the man I’d loved, the man I’d thought I was going to spend my life with.

I still wasn’t sure what to make of what he’d told me. If he really didn’t remember what happened between him and Vicki, did it change things? Should I ask Vicki? Did it even matter at this point?

My mind was contemplating those questions as I scrolled through the photos of Minnie and Dawson when Ida came in to change out Buddy’s I.V. As she finished up, she glanced over at me, mischief dancing in her eyes. “Heard you were at Cupid’s Arrow with Gio last night,” she said. “That boy is trouble with a capital T.”

“Good thing I’m not lookin’ for trouble,” I said, keeping my tone casual.

She gave me a wink and disappeared, but not before refilling Buddy’s water and jotting something on his chart. Buddy watched her leave, then turned to me with a speculative look.

“You seeing that Russo boy?” Buddy grumbled. “Just because he got doctor in front of his name doesn’t mean he’s a good man.”

“He’s just a friend, Buddy,” I explained, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. “Nothing more.”

Now, Dawson, that was a different story. He was more than a friend and someone I definitely wanted to talk about. The impulse to ask about the letters Dawson wrote and find out why he hadn’t given them to me, was intense, but I resisted. Not only was Buddy’s complexion pale, his skin was so thin it looked translucent, and he appeared exhausted. The last thing he needed was an interrogation.

My phone lit up, and I glanced down to see that it was Peter calling. Again. It was strange, when we were actually seeing one another, he was never this attentive. Now that I’d called things off, he was all about me.

“You gonna answer that thing? That boy keeps callin’ you.”

I wasn’t sure how Buddy knew that Peter was calling. I wanted to check the room for hidden cameras, but his eyes weren’t even that good.

I didn’t respond, and he didn’t press, but the silence between us felt loaded, like the pause before a bull charges the chute. I realized from the uncertainty in his stare that he was waiting for me to tell him something. Communication had never been his strong suit, but I didn’t think it was about Peter or Gio. If I had to guess, I would say it was what I was planning to do—about the farm, about him, about my life—and that I didn’t actually have a plan at all. For the second time in twelve hours, I felt completely untethered.

Since he’d shut me down the first time I’d brought it up, I figured round two might be better. “I can hire some temp staff. Maybe a farmhand or two, just to keep things running until⁠—”

“There’s nothing wrong with the way things are now,” he cut me off, sharp as a cattle prod. “You don’t need to go sticking your nose into it.”

I tried not to flinch. “Buddy, you’re in a hospital bed. You can’t do it all yourself.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said, and this time the old iron was back in his voice. “I’ll be home in a week, and things will be exactly the way I left them.”

That’s what I was worried about. I wanted to do as he asked and stay out of it, but I couldn’t, not in good conscience. I could see it in his face and in the way the doctors hovered near his chart that there was almost no chance he’d be back at full strength anytime soon. Maybe never.

I sat at the foot of his bed and watched him drift into a shallow, restless sleep, arms folded over his chest, as if even in unconsciousness he was bracing for a fight. My phone chimed again, it was my assistant, and I silenced it with a flick of my thumb.

If Buddy wouldn’t tell me what was really going on with the farm, I was going to have to go back to the house and find out for myself.

19

THE SLEEPOVER SURVEILLANCE COMMITTEE

Dawson

Lockhart family dinners were a weekly ritual of smoking meat, laughter, and my brothers’ shit-talking one-upmanship. It was just the six of us this week—Mom, Dad, and my three younger brothers, no strays my mom had hired and therefore adopted into our family. Well, no human strays. Minnie was there, curled up in my mom’s lap, sound asleep. As soon as the vet told me Minnie would need to be bottle-fed every two to three hours, I knew Mom was going to ‘volunteer’ to help out, and I would have no choice but to surrender the kitten. Mom’s maternal instinct was too strong, especially when bottles were involved. But hey, if it got her off my back from talking about grandkids, then it was worth it. Rex, Ranger, Duchess, and Lady were all in their normal begging spots, at Mom’s feet. They were getting extra bites since she had Minnie on her lap. Banjo was on his perch on the top of the bookshelf with his catnip.

The dining room smelled like barbecue coals and unfinished business, and the old trestle table, refinished so many times it had practically lived a dozen lives, felt smaller than usual.

Dean was beside me. Damon and Dylan sat across from us. Dad was at one end already deep into his second bourbon, Mom at the other working through an iced tea that held more lemon than the produce section at Fred Meyer. We tore into our steaks with the hunger of men who’d spent eight hours wrangling animals and hauling fence posts, which was fine by me. Chewing gave me something to do besides talk.

Conversation bounced around the table with the usual chaos, Damon and Dylan conducting their own running commentary in a coded language of insults and comebacks. Dean fired off sports trivia in the hope that someone would finally admit he was right about the 1995 Rose Bowl, and I tried to disappear into my food. Dad’s phone buzzed on the table, he excused himself to take the call and no one batted an eye. Chuck Lockhart was all business all the time. His idea of work-life balance was that he lived to work. Within a few minutes, he was back and focused entirely on slicing his steak into perfectly symmetrical cubes.

It was Mom who finally steered the ship into rougher water. She fixed her gaze on me with those intense mossy green eyes, the ones you couldn’t look away from without feeling like you’d failed a test you didn’t know existed. “Dawson, honey, have you heard anything more about Buddy?”

I swallowed hard, the hunk of ribeye momentarily stuck in my throat. “Yeah. He’s been moved out of ICU. They’ve got him in a regular room now.”

Mom let out a little sigh, relief laced with skepticism. “That’s good. Really good. So you’ve been to see him then?”