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He saw a creek. I saw a place where I dug around for crawdads. The same creek where I tripped and fell into a fallen beehive. Where Eliza, again, had appeared out of thin air and helped me up, never mentioning my crying while she quickly slapped mud on my stings.

But that was a lifetime ago—six years, to be exact.

Before her family cheated my family out of the stadium.

Before her father and my granddad forbade us to hang out together—the one thing they truly agreed upon.

Walking through this town with my glove and ball made me feel like a kid again, and for the first time since I had come back, I felt like myself.

After a half an hour of wandering and counting over five bougie cardinal statues around town, I reached the old train station. Its red paint had peeled, and it leaned a bit. A few abandoned, rusty railcars shone burnt orange in the sunlight. Tall grass and weeds covered the tracks.

Dad had taken me here sometimes after we hit a few balls at the elementary school field. “You can tell a lot about a town by what it keeps and what it throws away,” he had said. “Fairfield keeps everything. Remembers everything. Do good things here, and they’ll love you forever. Screw up, and it’ll follow you to your tombstone.”

They may have kept the train station and the old barbershop on Maple Drive, but he had been wrong about the doing-good part. All Granddad and his farm did was good for this community. And they repaid him by taking a cash offer from the wealthiest family in town.

Fast money always made people look the other way.

I tucked my glove and ball under my arm before picking up a couple of rocks. Winding up slowly, I tossed them at one of the already broken windows of the station. Dirty glass shattered loudly to the ground.

“Do you mind?” a familiar voice snapped.

Well, damn. Of course she’d be here.

Chapter Seven

Eliza

“A theater is the most important sort of house in the world, because that’s where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they’d like to be if they dared to, and what they really are.”

—Tove Jansson

Dear God, if you could please strike down Reed Fulton with a mighty lightning bolt right now, I promise I’ll curse less and go to church more. Amen.

Reed waved to me from the railyard parking lot, and the skies stayed clear.

So much for the power of prayer.

Was there nowhere in this freaking small town for a girl to find some peace?

I closed my script and glared down at his tall shadow. “So what, are you following me now?” First the catwalk, now here…What’s next, my favorite booth at Jenny’s?

He scooped up another couple of rocks, tossing them into one of the empty trash cans near the boarded-up entrance of the station. “Can’t a guy just walk home?”

I pointed toward the Fulton farm behind him, the town limits a literal stone’s throw from one of their fields. “Home’s that way.”

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward the cornfields. “ ‘It’s okay, honey! I was just talking to the corn.’ ”

“Excuse me?”

He faced me. “ ‘This is my corn. You people are guests in my corn.’ ”

Still loved quoting movies, I guess.

“ ‘Is this heaven?…No, it’s Iowa!’ ” He tossed his baseball up and caught it in his glove. “You seriously haven’t seen that movie?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. All I wanted was a quiet place to get away, and now here I was in the million-degree humidity listening to Reed speak Field of Dreams quotes to his corn.

Then again, while he continued pretending to be Ray Kinsella, maybe I could escape?