Page 116 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

The equipment barn.

The orange bandanna she’d tied around her wrist yesterday.

The way she’d laughed over lunch when Meme told stories about James.

Maybe the girl in that photograph wasn’t gone.

Maybe Carson had spent so many years believing everything good belonged to the life she’d had before that she’d stopped looking for pieces of it in the one she still had.

That wasn’t something I could fix.

I wasn’t sure it was something anyone could fix for her.

But as I walked back toward the south pasture and the line of new fence posts waiting for us, I found myself wondering what Marigold Ranch would look like a month from now if Carson said yes.

Not what it used to look like.

What it could become.

And for a reason I couldn’t quite explain, I wanted to be here long enough to see it.

Chapter

Thirteen

CARSON

I said yes at seven forty-three on Monday morning.

I stood in the ranch office with Pops’s old desk beneath my hands, Rosie’s spreadsheet open on the computer, a mug of coffee going cold beside me, and typed four words into a text message.

Carson

We’ll host the festival.

Then I stared at them. Deleted them. Typed them again.

For nearly ten minutes, I negotiated with myself over punctuation, like a comma might somehow protect me from what I was about to do.

Outside the office window, Marigold Ranch was beginning another ordinary morning.

Earl drove the utility cart past the dairy barn with two empty feed buckets rattling in the back. Cows moved lazily through the south pasture. Blueberry stood beneath the shade of the old oak, tail flicking at flies. Somewhere closer to the house, Meme had opened the kitchen windows, and the faint smell of biscuits drifted across the yard whenever the breeze moved in my direction.

Nothing looked different.

That was the strangest part.

For five years, I had convinced myself that bringing the Harvest Festival back would require some dramatic moment. That I would wake up one morning healed enough to want it again, open the equipment barn, string orange lights across the property, and somehow become the Carson I remembered.

Instead, I was tired.

The cooling unit had made that horrible rattling noise again during the night.

One of our feed invoices had increased another six percent.

Pops’s truck still sat at Jones Automotive.

The south fence had only just been made dependable enough that I could stop checking it every time the wind picked up.