PROLOGUE
The cake was shaped like a tractor, which Wren thought said everything about how thoroughly her life had changed.
She stood at the edge of the Banks family yard holding a paper plate loaded with enough sugar to fuel a small aircraft, watching her nephew Eli attempt to dismantle the tractor cake with both fists while her sister-in-law photographed it as a dog with its hind legs in a makeshift wheelchair barked encouragement.
Around her, the afternoon had settled into that particular golden quality that August saved for its best days. The light syrupy and amber, the air carrying the faint bite of wood smoke from somewhere down the ranch road, the grass still green but beginning to suspect what was coming. A paper banner reading ELI TURNS TWO! drooped between two fence posts in a way that suggested the morning had been windier than anticipated.
Wren had been in Valor City for eleven days. Eleven days of unpacking boxes in the apartment above Pages & Prose, of learning which floorboards announced themselves and which were secrets, of cataloguing a bookshop inventory that the previous owner had organized according to a system thatappeared to be vibes. Eleven days of waking up to the sound of cheerfulgood morningsinstead of traffic and lying in the dark of an unfamiliar ceiling trying to decide if she'd made a catastrophic mistake or the best decision of her life.
The jury was still out.
"You've got frosting on your elbow." Her older brother materialized at her shoulder with a bottle of beer and the easy confidence of a man who had built something from the ground up and knew exactly where everything was.
Wren looked at her elbow. She did, in fact, have frosting on her elbow. It was a fact that their mother would have hissed at her for and sent her off to the nearest powder room to fix the shame of it.
Wren used her thumb to collect the dollop and then sucked the cream off her thumb.
"You're going to fit in fine here." Dylan's mouth did the thing it had been doing all afternoon. Not quite a smile. Not quite not a smile. Something that landed in the territory ofI can't believe you're actually here. He'd been doing it since she'd appeared on the ranch road two weeks ago with her car embarrassingly overloaded and her city coat already wrong for the weather. He hadn't said much then, just taken two of her heaviest boxes without being asked and carried them up the stairs while she pretended not to notice the slight adjustment his prosthetic required on the uneven steps, the practiced ease of it, the way he simply did it and moved on.
That was Dylan. He simply did things and moved on. Like when he'd announced he was joining the military instead of taking the helm of the family business, and his father had disowned him. Like when he'd come back from battle missing a limb, and his fiancée had broken the engagement, and their mother disowned him. Wren hadn't wanted to disown anybody, but she’d been banished to her room without a say in the matter.
That was years ago, and now she was standing here on the Purple Heart Ranch, the safe space her big brother had built for wounded warriors. After what she'd been through the past year, it's the first time she felt like she belonged.
"Mom and Dad called this morning," she said, keeping her eyes on Eli, who had now transferred his cake investigation to his hair.
Dylan was quiet for a moment. "What did they want?"
"To tell me I'd made a mistake." She took a sip of something lemony that one of Maggie's friends had pressed into her other hand earlier. "Dad said Preston is devastated."
"Hmmm." Her brother's tone had a flatness that was not neutrality.
That was the thing about Dylan, the thing she'd been slowly remembering across eleven days. Her big brother never pushed. He'd spent two months after her breakup simply being available, texting at odd hours, leaving a one-line message after she'd gone radio silent:whenever you're ready. He hadn't asked why she'd ended a four-year engagement to a man their parents considered a personal achievement. He hadn't told her what she should have done. He'd just been there, quietly, the way he'd apparently been building Purple Heart Ranch — steadily, without announcement, because it needed doing.
She'd taken a page out of his book and bought a bookshop with the money their aunt had left her. Like Wren, Aunt Elizabeth had loved books. She’d spent her days between the pages rather than out in society, like Grandmother Marybeth had insisted Wren's mother, and then Wren do. For the last eleven days, Wren had spent her days reorganizing the shelves of Pages & Prose, and the nights rereading her favorite works and making recommendation cards.
She exhaled. Looked out across the yard, the patchy lawn, the long fence line of the Purple Heart Ranch where horses movedwith the unhurried authority of things that had been here longer than any of them. There were people everywhere — couples, families, a cluster of men near the long folding table who had the contained, watchful quality of people who had learned to be present in a room without drawing attention. Ranch residents, she gathered. Veterans in various stages of the program Dylan ran, some of them with visible injuries and some of them with the kind that didn't show, all of them apparently welcome at Eli's second birthday because that was, she was learning, what Dylan had built here. Not a facility. A place. A home for other wounded warriors like him.
"He looks like you," she said, nodding at Eli, who was now attempting to climb a lawn chair with the single-minded ambition of the very small.
Dylan's not-quite-smile became an actual one. "He's got Maggie's eyes."
"He's got your stubbornness."
"That's not — yes, fine."
They stood together in the afternoon light, and Wren thought about the apartment upstairs from the bookshop, and the boxes that still needed unpacking, and the shelving system that needed overhauling, and the slow terrifying work of building something in a place where no one knew her yet. She thought about Preston, who had probably told her parents something calculated and incomplete about why she'd left, something that positioned him sympathetically and made her look like the difficult one. She thought about the way her mother had saiddon't be dramatic, Wrenwith such absolute conviction that drama was Wren's primary flaw, as though twenty-five years of loving her daughter had yielded nothing more specific than that.
She thought about the silence of the apartment at night, which was a different kind of silence than that of the city. Fuller, somehow. Less lonely.
"Can I ask you something?" She turned the paper cup between her hands. "When you decided to stay here. Was it — did you know? That this was it?"
"I knew it felt different. Quiet, but in a way that didn't feel like being alone." He glanced at Maggie, who was now holding Eli on her hip and pointing at a butterfly. "And then there was a reason to stay."
"I'm done with men. Specifically with men who work in finance. Numbers men. Honestly, with men generally." Wren picked a piece of cake off the edge of her plate and ate it with conviction. "The next man who gets anywhere near me is going to have to be Cyrano de Bergerac. He is going to have to write actual love letters. On actual paper. With actual sentences." She gestured with the fork for emphasis. "Complete sentences. With punctuation. Half the men in this country use full stops as passive aggression and commas as decoration."
Dylan appeared to be working very hard on something. She suspected it was not laughing.
"That is my standard now," she continued, warming to it. "I know it's unrealistic. I know I will die alone in the bookshop and Heathcliff will be the one to find me, and that is completely fine."
What neither of them noticed — what Wren was entirely and blissfully unaware of — was that in the group of men near the folding table, most of them carrying their plates and their conversations in the particular half-attentive way of people not quite off-duty, one of them had gone still. His root beer was halfway to his mouth. His gaze was on the middle distance. An expression on his face that was not quite readable and was not trying to be.
He had a notebook in his jacket pocket. He almost always did. He stood there for a moment. Set his root beer down. And then he reached for the pen.
