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“Well, damn. If he’d do all this when he’s not even your man, think about what he’d do if he put a ring on it.”
The moment she said it I pictured Hank standing at the altar, wearing a tux, and me walking toward him.
“You are, aren’t you!” Ashley pointed at me accusatorily. “You’re thinking about him putting a ring on it.”
“Shh!” I hushed her as I looked around to make sure that my loudmouth sister’s outburst hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention.
“Did someone say, put a ring on it?” Cheyenne asked as she, Isabella, Reagan, and Reagan’s friend Nadia joined us on the porch.
“Thank you all for doing this.” I tried to change the subject, hoping that turning the attention onto them would work. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“It was all Hank,” Reagan stated.
“He called us over for an emergency family meeting and gave us our marching orders,” Cheyenne explained.
“But all of this…” Isabella gestured the same way that Ashley had. “Was him.”
I’d known, of course, that the idea was Hank’s. No one else would have known about Luna’s canceled party in Seattle. But he’d only found out about it a couple of nights before. There was no way I thought he put this together so quickly, I just assumed that he’d told his sister and Reagan and Isabella, and they’d ran with it.
“He planned all the games. Got the jumpy house. The food. Everything,” Cheyenne added.
“Really?”
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that Hank himself had done all of this.
“You look surprised,” Cheyenne correctly assessed.
“I am.”
“From what Billy has said, Hank will move heaven and earth for the people he loves,” Reagan stated as if it were a fact that I was someone he loved.
“He’s always been that way,” Nadia, who had grown up in Firefly shared. “People were always so scared of him because of his size, and he did have a pretty bad temper when he was a teenager. But I always thought he was just a big teddy bear. He was always doing things behind the scenes—that I’m pretty sure he hoped no one would ever find out about. But this is Firefly, and people talk. His good deeds aren’t a secret, but no one gives him credit. This town put him in box a long time ago. They only see him in one light, not a very flattering one at that. They see him one way and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit that narrative.”
We all stared at her and she began to give examples.
“Like when Mrs. Shaw’s salon flooded, he replaced all the flooring on his own time and his own dime. Pretty in Peaches was up and running in less than a week. Or when Sandy Marshall’s husband left her for a stewardess, he paid Mrs. Birch for her childcare for three kids for an entire year. Or when Mrs. B bought the B&B using all her life savings and didn’t have the money to renovate, he gave her a special rate, only charging her for materials. He did all the work for free. Or when he found Tanner Abernathy OD’d in the back of Southern Comfort, he got him into a treatment facility and paid for it out of his own pocket because Jennings didn’t believe his son had a problem. And Hank hates Tanner. He put him in the ICU their senior year.”
As I listened to Nadia a few things struck me. First, Hank really was a hero in the truest sense of the word.
Second, was Hank the one who had been paying for Luna’s childcare? It had to be him. Mrs. Birch had refused to take a dime from me and this would explain why.
And third, maybe I wasn’t so special after all. If he went around doing these extraordinary things for so many people, then maybe I was just one more person that he was helping.
Yeah, but did he kiss everyone he helped? The tiny voice in my head asked.
There was the kiss. That Notebook kiss was special. Or at least that’s what I was telling myself.
