The drive to town is short enough to be dangerous.
Valor Springs blurs past the windows in familiar slices: the feed store with the sun-faded sign, the diner that still smells like cinnamon even from the parking lot, the church with the white steeple that’s been repainted so many times it might collapse from kindness.
Nash doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t need to. The presence of him fills space like storm pressure. I can feel the weight of his attention even when he’s watching the road.
“There’s a list,” he says finally, tapping the folded paper my mother handed him like he’s been in possession of a grocery list long enough to develop feelings about it. “Your mother wants me to verify the brand of flour because apparently there’s a scandal.”
“There is,” I say. “If you buy the wrong one, the biscuits turn out awful.”
He lets out a low laugh that briefly takes ten years off his face.
I stare out the window before that sound can do something reckless to my heart.
We park in front of Miller’s Market, which is half grocery store, half community bulletin board, and one hundred percent where you will run into someone you owe a polite conversation to while holding a bag of onions.
The bell over the door jingles as we walk in. It takes exactly twelve seconds for the first head to turn. Then another.
Then three more.
Small towns don’t stare the way cities do. Cities are impersonal. Texas stares with investment.
Nash slides a hand to the small of my back. Not possessive. Not squeezing. Just a subtle placement like he’s guiding me through a door.
I freeze for a microsecond.
His thumb moves once—barely a stroke, more of a steadying pulse.
And my traitor body decides to remember what it felt like to be fourteen and breathless and convinced he was the only boy who’d ever matter.
I keep walking.
“Delaney!” Mrs. Hartwell calls from the produce aisle. She’s sixty, unstoppable, and probably responsible for half the town’s marriage proposals through sheer influence. “Back home for good?”
“Back for now,” I say.
Her eyes flick to Nash like she’s assessing a prize bull. “And you, sir?”
“Nash Hawthorne, ma’am.”
“Oh, I know who you are.” The smile she gives him suggests she knows who he was at seventeen, too. “I was beginning to think you’d grown allergic to this town.”
Nash’s hand tightens just a hair at my back. “Just been busy, that’s all,” he says evenly.
Mrs. Hartwell hums and looks between us like she’s reading the last page of a mystery. “Well, isn’t that something.”
Itissomething. It’s a lot of something.
We escape deeper into the store.
Nash becomes a surprisingly competent grocery partner. He reads labels, double-checks brands, and humors my mother’s handwritten note that says NO STORE-BRAND BUTTER, ABSOLUTELY NOT. He bends close to hear me over the hum of the refrigeration units, and I fight the stupidly intimate urge to rest my forehead against his shoulder like we’re not walking a high-wire act over the canyon of our past.
“Your mom still bossy?” he asks as he tosses coffee into the cart.
I snort. “She’s refined. Like vinegar.”
“Vinegar’s useful.”
“So is a taser. Doesn’t mean I want one in my purse.”
