“Yeah.”
I walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in. Turned the engine over. Hunter stood in the lot with his hands back in his pockets, and in my rearview, he was still standing there when I drove through the gate and pulled out onto the road.
The road from the ranch cut through open land, past fenced pastures and a few houses set back from the shoulder, the mountains pushing up on every side like walls. The highway was ahead. It went south to Wyoming, north to Canada, east or west to places I’d never been and had no reason to visit. All I had to do was pick a direction.
I didn’t have one.
Garnet Bend could be seen in the distance, then the main highway beyond. Before the town limits, a mom-and-pop store—Arrowhead Grocers—came up on the right, a speed limit sign, a few other buildings, and then a main street that was maybe four blocks long. I’d been here a few times during the past week, to grab a meal or necessities. I’d planned to get to know it better once I settled in. No need to now.
But there was a coffee shop on the main street I’d been in a couple times called Deja Brew. The lights were on inside. A woman with purple streaks in her hair was unlocking the front door, flipping the sign from closed to open. Early morning in a small town, and the coffee shop was the first heartbeat.
I decided to stop since I had no idea which direction I wanted to drive anyway.
I pulled over and cut the engine. Sat in the cab for a minute with my hands on the wheel, looking up and down the street through the windows. Garnet Bend really was a charming little town. The type of place I’d always seen myself settling down in. A week ago, this Warrior Security job had seemed like the perfect solution: small-town living while still doing what I was good at.
What Ihadbeen good at.
I got out of the truck. The sky had shifted while I’d been driving, the black gone to pale gray with the first real light of dawn coming over the ridgeline.
The main street was empty except for a few parked cars, a dog trotting along the opposite sidewalk with somewhere to be, and the sound of a truck downshifting on a cross street. The storefronts were still dark except for Deja Brew and a hardware store a couple buildings down across the street where someone was moving around inside.
I walked toward the coffee shop and pushed through the door. The inside was warm and smelled like fresh grounds and pastries, and I almost made it to the counter before I heard the swearing.
It was quiet swearing. Polite swearing, if that was a thing. The kind where someone had clearly committed to a word and then pulled back from it at the last second, landing on something that wasn’t quite the word they’d wanted but got the point across.
The almost-swear came from a woman at the community board mounted on the wall near the entrance of Deja Brew, trying to pin a piece of paper to the cork while holding a stack of bright yellow flyers, a tote bag sliding down one shoulder, and a coffee cup that was doing its best to escape from the crook of her elbow.
She wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot four. Her hair was red or auburn or somewhere in between, twisted up in a knot that looked like it had been done fast and with limited cooperation from the hair itself. I could see the freckles sprinkled across her nose from ten feet away.
She got one pushpin halfway into the board before the paper curled away. She tried to flatten it with her chin.
The flyers went…flying. They slid out of her grip like a deck of cards being shuffled by someone who didn’t know how, fanning across the floor in a spread that covered a solid six feet.
“Oh, son of a—fudge. Shi—shoot. Comeon.” She looked down at the flyers, then at the paper still half pinned and curling, then at the coffee cup wedged against her ribs, and I could see her calculating which disaster to address first.
I was already moving. I crouched and started gathering the flyers before the thought fully formed.
She looked down at me. “Oh. Thank you. That’s—thank you.”
I stood up and held the stack out to her. She took it with her free hand, and the motion knocked the tote bag the rest of the way down her arm. She caught the strap with two fingers and laughed. It was a real laugh, short and self-aware, directed entirely at herself and the small chaos she’d created in a coffee shop at five thirty in the morning.
“I had a system,” she said. “It was working until it wasn’t.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little myself. “Yeah. Systems sometimes do that.”
She looked at me. Up close, the laugh was still on her face, softening the angles of her jaw and the scatter of freckles across her nose. Her eyes were green, sharp and direct, and something about them caught me off guard.
Realizing I was staring, I glanced over at the community board. The paper she’d been trying to pin was just below my eye level, half attached and still curling at the bottom corner.
HELP WANTED:Pawsitive Connections. Ranch hand needed.Physical labor, repairs, animal care.Room and board + small pay.Contact Lark Monroe. Then a phone number with a local area code.
“Looking for a ranch hand,” she said. “If you know anyone who wants to work hard for almost no money and get bitten by a parrot, send them my way.”
“A parrot?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, he knows seventeen curse words, so he’s very talented.”
“Do you mean really bad curse words likeson of a—fudge?”
