Page 78 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

Nothing I actually needed.

Which was why every time I opened the spare bedroom door and saw them sitting against the wall, I told myself I’d deal with them another day.

Four years of another day.

Tonight, though, they bothered me.

I stood in the doorway longer than necessary, staring at two dusty cardboard boxes like they’d personally offended me before shutting off the hallway light and walking back toward the living room.

My house wasn’t empty.

That wasn’t the right word for it.

It was furnished. Clean enough. There were pictures on the walls downstairs, though most had been hung by Mom after she came over one afternoon and declared my living room looked like a rental property. There was a leather sectional I’d spent too much money on, a television that took up most of one wall, a kitchen I rarely used for anything more complicated than coffee, and a garage full of tools I didn’t need because I spent most of my waking hours inside another garage.

It was a good house, and I liked it here. But lately, Clover had started calling it my bachelor cave.

Tonight, for the first time, I understood what she meant. Nothing about it felt permanent. Not because I planned to leave Willow Creek—I never wanted to leave this crazy town, and I’d bought this house to establish my own roots and be ready for the day I found the woman I’d want to call my wife. But, four years later, and that day still hadn’t come.

I’d never understood people who spent their entire childhood desperate to escape the place that raised them. Jax occasionally talked about moving somewhere warmer when winter came around. Usually after the first snow, when he was scraping ice from a windshield before sunrise and swearing loud enough for half the neighborhood to hear him.

I hated the cold as much as he did. Still, I wouldn’t leave. My parents were here. Jax was here. Clover was here. Even Hunter, who had spent years hiding from everyone, had somehow become part of the reason Willow Creek felt like home.

I liked knowing June would complain if I bought supermarket bread instead of hers. I liked knowing Rosie would keep the tavern kitchen open twenty minutes late if Dad walked in hungry. I liked that Darlene Pike somehow knew I’d gotten a speeding ticket before I’d even decided whether to tell Mom about it or not.

Well. I could live without the last one…

But I liked belonging somewhere. What I hadn’t done was build much of anything that belonged specifically to me. Like the garage. Jones Automotive had Dad’s name on the sign. Eventually, it would belong to Jax and me. Dad had said as much a hundred times, usually followed by a lecture about why we needed to stop spending money on tools he considered unnecessary.

I loved the shop.

I loved fixing something someone else had given up on. Loved the moment an engine turned over after hours spent trying to figure out why it wouldn’t. Loved working beside my brother, even when he irritated the hell out of me.

There was satisfaction in knowing how to make broken things work again.

But if I pictured myself at fifty, I didn’t picture the garage. At least, not only the garage.

I pictured land. A house farther outside town. A workshop big enough that I could disappear into it for hours. A barn and a couple horses. Maybe even cattle, though Dad would probably remind me I complained every summer I worked at Marigold Ranch. Kids running around somewhere they could get dirty without somebody caring. And most importantly, a woman who wouldn’t lose her mind when muddy boots made it through the back door. Sunday dinner was nonnegotiable at Mom’s because she’d probably hunt me down if I ever tried ending that tradition.

Nothing extravagant.

Just mine.

Roots deeper than a mortgage and an address.

I had never thought there was anything particularly strange about wanting that.

Tonight, after watching Carson Rome sit in a crowded town hall while half of Willow Creek tried to resurrect the part of her life she’d buried, I wondered when she’d stopped wanting the same thing. Because I knew she had, once before. The Harvest Festival had been the proof od it.

I dropped onto the couch and turned on the television. Some documentary I’d started two nights ago resumed halfway through a scene I didn’t remember. I watched for maybe thirty seconds. Then muted it.

Carson had looked like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin when Rosie wrote MARIGOLD? on the whiteboard.

I noticed.

Probably because I had been noticing too much about her since she walked into the garage yesterday dripping rainwater across the concrete.

The way she braced herself whenever somebody offered help.