Her tone makes me laugh, the first real one since I opened the shop this morning.
“Thanks,” I say, still smiling as I end the call.
I rub a hand over my face, fingers pressing into my eyes until colors bloom behind my lids.
I glance around the corner where Eli’s playing, lost in his own little world.
For a moment, I just watch him.
He looks so content and safe.
In that stillness, something inside me steadies.
No matter what happens, no matter who comes back or what truths threaten to surface,
I remind myself that this is what matters. Him.
Us.
I take another deep breath, drop my hand, and force a faint smile across my face.
Then I turn back toward the counter, slip my phone into my pocket, and get back to work.
7
GRANT
Snow crunches beneath my boots as I step out ofNoel’s Winter Wonders, the soft chime of the door fading behind me.
The air outside is sharp enough to sting my lungs.
I tug my jacket tighter, collar high against the wind, and make my way toward the truck parked a few storefronts down.
My breath ghosts in front of me in pale clouds that vanish just as quickly as they form.
Noelle’s face—those wide hazel eyes, the little furrow between her brows, the way her smile faltered the second she saw me—keeps looping in my mind like a record that won’t stop skipping. She’d looked…startled. Spooked, even.
Like seeing me was something she hadn’t prepared for, something sheneverwanted to happen.
My chest tightens at that thought.
I shove my hands into my coat pockets and lower my head against the wind, boots thudding against the sidewalk.
The streets are quiet, the kind of small-town stillness I’d forgotten I missed, but my thoughts are too loud for the calm to matter.
Does she regret that weekend?
That thought’s been needling at me since I left, gnawing its way through everything else that had been stressing me out since traveling here for Richard’s birthday.
Six years is a long damn time.
Maybe she’s had plenty of time to tuck it all away in some dark corner of her memory, chalk up what happened between us as some mistake, a bad judgment call after too much wine and too many unspoken emotions left unchecked.
But god, I hope she doesn’t because I sure as hell never have.
That weekend—those few stolen nights the four of us shared—weren’t just a lapse in judgement for me.
They were a crack in the armor I’d spent most of my life building. With her, everything I usually kept locked down just came loose.
