Page 28

Frank

Pearl says you’re stuck at Morrison’s with Cole. You all right?

Me

Fine. Waiting out the weather.

Frank

Don’t forget what he did with the blueprints. Don’t tell him anything you aren’t willing to hear repeated at the next meeting.

I read the message twice, then turned my phone face down on the hay bale.

“Everything all right at home?” Griffin asked.

“The power’s out on Main Street. Frank is considering CPR for his freezer. Ivy probably hasn’t noticed. She reads by candlelight anyway.”

“Does she know electricity was invented?”

“She knows. She considers it an unnecessary sequel.”

I laughed before I could stop myself. Earlier that day, Griffin had been a problem. Now he was funny. Finding Griffin funny felt dangerous.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “You told me some of it in the basement. Your engagement ended, and your father took his side. What happened with your fiancé?”

I could have deflected. I had deflected that question from people with a better claim to the answer. But the battery lantern cast a hard white circle, the wind battered the north wall, and there was nowhere to go until the plow came.

“Thomas proposed because his parents wanted him settled with somebody appropriate,” I said. “When I found out and confronted him, he wasn’t sorry. He was irritated, as if I’d disrupted a transaction we had both understood.”

“That’s—”

“It got worse. I went to my parents. My father took Thomas’s side inside of a day, because Thomas’s father was in his club and I was going to be embarrassing at the club.” The old hurt flared and faded. “My mother said I should know my place. Those five words. She does not remember saying them.”

His jaw tightened. He didn’t say that’s awful, which I appreciated more than I expected to. “What did you do?”

“Packed the car in about ninety minutes and drove north until the radio stopped getting the city and stopped at Holly Creek because the name sounded like a place in a movie where nothing terrible happens.” The lantern’s cold light lay between us. “I got here on the third of January, which I’ve told you. What I didn’t tell you is that Ivy was carrying a wreath to the dumpster behind the bookshop. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at me—a total stranger with a car full of garbage bags and a coat from another life. Then she said, can you work a register. Not where are you from. Not what happened to you.”

“And you could.”

“I could not. I learned in four days.” I pulled the blanket up over my knees. “Ivy gave me a job before I had a local address. Adele trusted me with her business. Nobody asked me to earn a place here first.” I looked down at the wet edge of the blanket. “I’ve been trying to earn it ever since.”

Griffin turned the thermos cup in his hands. “So you’ve spent eight years making sure nobody can question your place here.”

“I’ve been participating.”

“Frank told me what you did when Pearl’s bakery nearly failed. You spent forty-eight hours calling merchants, building a budget, and presenting it to the council. What did they pay you?”

“Nothing. Pearl needed help.”

“Every time you tell me what this town gave you, you follow it with everything you’ve done in return.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It’s been eight years of saying yes. What happens if you stop?”

I should have laughed. Instead, I pulled the blanket tighter around my knees. Griffin looked away first. “That was too far.”

“Yes. It was.” I sat in the lantern light, furious with him for asking a question I had spent eight years avoiding. “I told you the part I don’t tell people,” I said when I trusted my voice again. “It’s your turn.”