"What'd you do," he says. Not a question.
"What I always do."
He's quiet a second. "You know she's been telling everybody in town about some restaurant she wants to open on Birch. Woman doesn't scout commercial leases for a fling, brother."
"Yeah," I say. "I know."
I hang up before he can hear my voice do the thing it's about to do, and I sit in the dark with the dog and the smell of her cooking and the math I got exactly right and the life I just talked myself out of.
Six days. I had six more days and I threw them in the fire so they couldn't burn me first.
Smart play.
CHAPTER SIX
BIANCA
Two days since I drove off his mountain, and I've cried in three separate grocery store aisles.
My flight's Sunday. The cabin's mostly boxed. Friday night I sit on the floor with a glass of wine I'm not drinking and let myself feel every ugly inch of it.
Renata calls instead of texting, which means she means business.
"Okay," she says. "I'm gonna say the hard thing because I love you. You're heartbroken, and you have every right to be, that man was a coward to you. But babe. You were already leaving. You had a realtor. You had boxes. You moved the line on him and then you needed him to be braver than you about it."
"He called me a liar, Ren."
"He did. He was wrong and he was scared and you can be furious about that forever." A pause. "But what do you actually want? Take him out of it completely. Pretend he moved to the moon. What do you want?"
The answer's been sitting in my chest the whole time, and I've been too busy bleeding to look at it.
I want the storefront on Birch. I want my name on the glass and my food on the plates and a kitchen that's mine, in a town where people wave at you on the street. I wanted Crimson Hollow before I ever wanted the mountain man. I let one good thing turn into the only thing, and the second it broke I started packing my whole self up to follow it out the door.
I do that. I make a person my whole life and then disappear when the person does.
Not this time.
"I'm not getting on the plane," I tell her. "I'm signing the lease."
Renata screams so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear.
Saturday,Crimson Hollow throws its summer festival, and Main Street's shut down for it, food carts and string lights and half the county milling around. The realtor meets me outside the Birch storefront with the keys and the paperwork on a clipboard. My hand shakes a little when I take the pen, then steadies.
This is mine. Whatever else burns down, this is mine, and I built it. I'm about to sign when a ripple of silence passes through the crowd. Kieran is coming down the middle of the closed street.
The man who never comes to town. The one everybody calls the scary Shaw brother because he hasn't shown his face at this festival in years. He's moving through the whole staring crowd toward me, jaw set, carrying something wrapped in a movingblanket, and his ears are going red at the tips with every eye on him.
He stops in front of me. Sets the thing down. Pulls the blanket off.
It's a sign. Carved walnut, sanded smooth, oiled to that deep brown I'd know in my sleep. My name's worked into the grain in clean letters, and under it, smaller,Crimson Hollow. Days of work. He started it before I ever signed a thing.
There's a folded card tucked into the frame.
I built this the night you left, because I couldn't sit still and I couldn't call you yet. I didn't know if you'd want it. I made it anyway. Hang it or burn it. Either way it's yours. — K
My eyes blur. The realtor very wisely steps back.
"You came to the festival," I manage.
