Page 91 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

HAYRIDES

BONFIRE

Another lay face down near my boots. I bent and turned it over. The paint had faded.

WELCOME TO THE WILLOW CREEK HARVEST FESTIVAL

MARIGOLD RANCH

Carson stopped beside me. Neither of us spoke. The equipment barn wasn’t empty. It was a time capsule. Five years of dust covered a life that had been shut behind these doors and left exactly where everyone abandoned it.

I looked at Carson. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes moved over the wagons. The lights. The signs. Things she probably hadn’t touched since James was alive.

“I haven’t been in here in a while,” she said.

I believed her.

Outside, Blueberry called from the pasture. Somewhere closer to the dairy barn, a cow answered. Normal ranch sounds continued around us as if opening these doors hadn’t changed anything.

But Carson stood frozen in the sunlight with one hand still wrapped around the old metal handle. And for the first time, I understood what Willow Creek was actually asking her to do.

They weren’t just asking Carson to host a festival.

They were asking her to open a door she’d kept shut for five years.

I looked back at the faded sign. Maybe that was why everyone else was so eager to bring the Harvest Festival home.

They remembered what Marigold Ranch had been. A place that made magic feel real.

Chapter

Eleven

CARSON

For five years, the equipment barn had existed at the far edge of Marigold Ranch like a room in a house nobody talked about.

I passed it almost every day.

Sometimes twice.

I checked the lock when storms came through, made sure the roof hadn’t started leaking, and once paid Earl and another ranch hand to replace a section of siding after a tree branch punched through it during a summer storm.

But I hadn’t stepped inside because there had never been a reason. At least, that was what I’d told myself.

Standing there now with Beau beside me, sunlight pouring through the open double doors and illuminating years of dust suspended in the air, I realized how much effort I had put into avoiding a building that couldn’t possibly hurt me.

The old Harvest Festival sign leaned against my leg. I should have set it back down. Instead, I traced my thumb across the faded paint.

WELCOME TO THE WILLOW CREEK HARVEST FESTIVAL

MARIGOLD RANCH

Pops had made it himself, and I had helped him when I was barely a teen.

The lettering wasn’t perfectly straight, and the little pumpkin painted beside Marigold Ranch looked more like an orange tomato, but Pops had refused to let anyone replace it.

I remembered Rosie suggesting a professionally printed sign one year, and Pops had looked genuinely offended. He said if people couldn’t appreciate handcrafted work, they were welcome to turn their cars around and celebrate somewhere else.