Page 10 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

“Sadie!”

I gripped my suitcase handle so tight it began rolling into the back of my leg. Selma Lockhart emerged from the salon, a vision in tortoiseshell sunglasses and a linen jumpsuit the color of fresh sage. She was so tiny that she could have been mistaken for a child playing at being a grown woman, but as soon as she dropped the glasses, her dark eyes were full of the kind of laser-precise maternal warmth that had sustained me through the death of my own mother.

“Selma?” I did my best not to sound like I was about to start crying or run away.

She enveloped me in a hug before I could finish saying her name. Selma had always hugged me like she was determined to wring out every bit of sadness in my soul. I wasn’t prepared for how much that one gesture would flatten me. For a moment, it felt like I’d never left.

She pulled back and touched the sides of my face with both hands, searching for any trace of the girl I’d been. “You’re so grown up, so beautiful,” she said, her voice low and private, like she was telling me a secret.

I tried to smile, but my face felt stiff and out of practice. “It’s Botox,” I teased. “I can’t move my forehead.”

She laughed, then pulled me aside so that an elderly couple could maneuver past us on the sidewalk. “What are you doing here, mija? Nobody told me you were coming home.”

I hesitated, the truth already thick on my tongue. “Buddy’s in the hospital. He had a heart attack and a stroke.” I swallowed.

Her face changed so quickly it was almost magical to watch. The laugh lines collapsed into concern, and she pressed her hand to her chest as if to keep her heart from launching itself out of her body. “Mi Dios. I’m so sorry, Sadie. Is there anything we can do?”

“No, I just came from the hospital. He’s doing okay, for now.” I glanced down at my suitcase. “I was just going to get a room and go back and see him.”

“No, no, no. Absolutely not! You are coming back to the ranch.”

My stomach dropped out from under me. The last place I wanted to go was Lockhart Ranch. I’d spent nearly every day there during the six years Dawson and I were together. It was more my home than Buddy’s was. After my mom died, he just sort of retreated into the farm. He had three thousand acres of land, a Christmas tree farm, and a produce stand with vegetables and fruits we grew.

Every day, he got up before dawn and I wouldn’t hear him come back in until close to midnight. It was like being in the house and seeing me was just too painful for him.

“Oh no, I couldn’t.” I shook my head.

“You have to! My oldest son is getting married!”

Her oldest son. My brain snagged on that phrase, as if the words themselves had teeth and were tearing at the fabric of my thoughts. Selma’s oldest son was Dawson Lockhart—first boy I ever kissed, first boy to break my heart, first boy to make me believe that soulmates, fate, and perpetually entwined destinies were real things and not just the punchline of some cosmic joke.

I felt my cheeks go pale, betraying me, and I pressed a hand to the side of my neck, where the pulse thudded so hard I thought Selma might see it.

Dawson…getting married?! With clinical detachment, I noted the dull roar that had replaced all other sound in my ears, as though someone had filled my skull with seawater and was sloshing it around for dramatic effect. Waves of dizziness made it hard to focus on anything in the periphery, sharp, bright points of memory stabbed at me instead: the way Dawson used to rub the soft skin behind my ear with his thumb, the smell of hay and earthy musk on his flannel shirts, the way his hands were always warm even in the dead of February.

I tried to keep my face neutral. Maybe even a little bit bored, an, “I’ve moved on, see?” expression. I half-hoped Selma would let the comment float away, but Selma Lockhart was many things—tenacious, stubborn as a barnacle, emotionally clairvoyant—but subtle was not one of them. Of course she saw through me. She always had.

“Sadie, mija, are you okay?” Selma’s hand was on my arm now, gentle but insistent. She searched my face with those uncanny olive-green eyes. I could practically see her scanning my biomarkers for signs of distress, like a mom-shaped MRI. I forced my lips into a smile, but it was thin and brittle, threatening to fracture at any second.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I lied, my voice not nearly convincing enough. “I just…wow… a wedding.”

“Actually, they’re already married, they said I do over Christmas and this wedding is a surprise for the bride. His wife is just inside the salon. She has no idea that the ranch is getting set up as we speak. You have to meet her, you will love her,” Selma enthused.

Every cell in my body wanted to reverse course, to pivot on my boot heel and make a break for safe anonymity. But Selma Lockhart’s gravitational force had always been stronger than whatever cowardice lived inside me, so I stayed rooted there, blinking in the midday sun as she made introductions at a speed that could cause whiplash.

“And not only her…” Selma’s hand fluttered toward the salon. “She has a teenage daughter, and he has a five-year-old from his first marriage.”

The words did something to the inside of my stomach, a slow rolling twist that threatened to migrate up to my heart and choke it. I repeated the last part of her statement like a question because I didn’t trust I’d heard right, “First marriage?”

Selma’s face lost some of its lightness, the smile pulling gently into a frown. “Yes, mija. His first wife passed away during childbirth. Heartbreaking.”

A knot of guilt strangled me. I didn’t keep up with anyone from home, not even online. The only news I ever got was filtered through Buddy, and he hated talking on the phone. In fact, he had a talent for summarizing things down to two-word headlines: “Farm’s booming.” “Town’s overcrowded.” “Weather’s bad.” The messy, human complications never made the cut.

But this? This was a seismic shift. My mental map of Dawson had always stopped at the night we broke up, as if he’d been preserved in amber, untouched by the years and immune to the wounds of adulthood. I felt unreasonably betrayed to learn life had continued for him, that it included a wife and a child and even grief I’d never been invited to share.

“Who is he—" I started to ask, but the door to the salon swung open and a stunning woman with blow-dried, straw-gold hair stepped out. Her aura was one of chill, confident, self-possessed.

Behind her trailed two girls: one was the mirror image of the adult version who looked to be in her early teens, the other was the five-year-old with a cascade of curly hair and a gap in her smile wide enough to swallow whole blueberries.