Page 13 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

“I’m not here for the wedding,” Gio confirmed what I’d already suspected, that there was another reason he was there.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking between him and my mom, noting the tension radiating off both of them. It’s not that I cared he crashed my half-brother’s wedding. Originally, I’d planned on him coming as my plus-one, but he ended up having to work, and Angie inserted herself into that role. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, who died?” Damon asked, picking up on the weird vibes.

Speaking of weird vibes, as I stood there, goosebumps rose on my arm and the tiny hairs stood at attention. I felt myself being drawn to something, or someone, who caught my eye on the back porch. It was a woman, rather, the silhouette of a woman. Before any of the rest of my senses caught up with telling my brain who I was looking at, my body knew. The hairs on the back of my head and my arm stood straight up. My chest grew so tight I couldn’t breathe. My pulse raced wildly. All I could focus on was that blue dress moving in the breeze, the way the barn floodlights made the fabric glow, giving her an angelic aura. Every step the figure took made my pulse spike.

For a second, I doubted myself. It couldn’t be. But my body remembered even if my brain didn’t. Even from a hundred yards away, in the shadow, I knew it was her. I felt it in the cold sweat that prickled the back of my neck, the way my left hand went numb, the way my heart started rabbit-punching my ribs like it was trying to escape.

I didn’t move, didn’t breathe. For years, I’d managed not to think about how she’d move, or what she’d wear, or the sound her laugh would make if it ever punctured a room I was in. Now it was all I could do to stay standing.

“Sadie’s back,” Gio said, voice pitched low.

It was a bomb detonating in the middle of a barn too pretty for reality TV. The words didn’t echo, but they didn’t have to. I felt them hit, hard, right in the soft spot I’d spent a decade and change trying to cauterize.

There was a moment where everything around me seemed to drop to half-speed. I heard Damon whistle, low and impressed. I watched Gio’s face, the awkward, apologetic twist to his mouth as he waited for my reaction. But I didn’t feel any of it. All my senses had telescoped into a single, hyperaware focus.

Then my mom spoke, “I was coming to tell you that.”

“Sadie?” I breathed. Her name came out hoarse and dumb sounding. “She’s back.”

Damon whistled, a long, low note. “Holy shit, that’s a plot twist in a blue dress.”

I looked at my mom. Her eyes were shimmering with emotion, and it was not just pride in her perfect wedding or her freshly-minted daughter-in-law and granddaughters, but something sharper, something that made me think she’d orchestrated this surprise visitor.

“When? How? Why didn’t you tell me?” I stammered, hating the uncertainty in my voice, hating that I sounded hurt instead of pissed. But they were fair questions. Everyone else seemed to know.

“She just got here. Just got into town. She was resting in your room during the wedding,” my mom explained, and for a second her words landed on me like a memory, the way she used to orchestrate playdates or run interference when my brothers and I were fighting.

“In my room?”

My mom nodded. “I was going to tell you, but then I saw you brought someone, and Sadie said she was just going to rest, so I thought I’d tell you after, but then she was feeling up to coming out and…”

Damon clapped me on the back so hard I almost dropped my beer. “This is going to be epic,” he said, like it was a season finale and I was the only one who didn’t know the script.

I tried to process it. Not just that Sadie was back, but that she’d been back long enough for the news to circulate that Gio was coming to tell me, and clearly my mom knew. She’d been in my room. She’d been in my bed. Well, my childhood room and bed.

My eyes shot back to her. On the deck, Sadie stood, her arms folded, looking like a celestial creature. Her brunette hair was long, flowing down around her shoulders. The blue dress she wore perfectly matched the color of her eyes.

What was she doing here?

Why was she back now, after all these years?

Why had she been lying down in my room?

I felt like I was high, or in some alternate universe. Everything was too sharp, too bright, like my brain had been spiked with some emotional amphetamine. My thoughts couldn’t keep pace with the raw signals coming off my body—was I sweating? Shaking? Every cell vibrated with the faint, punishing memory of a thousand heartbreaks, all colliding at once.

I wanted answers, but I wasn’t about to wait for an explanation. Not from Gio, not from my mom, not from anybody. Instinct took over. I set my beer on the dessert table so hard it sloshed over the rim as I started for the deck, tunnel vision closing out everything but the blue aura where Sadie stood.

All I could see was her, backlit and unmovable, the same way she’d hovered in my mind for months, years, after she left town. Every step toward her was like stepping off a cliff I’d already fallen from once, but my legs moved without input from my brain. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I got to her, only that I had to say something, even if it was just her name, a syllable, anything to break the spell.

That’s when Angie intercepted me. She moved into my path with the reflexes of a trained ER doctor—rapid, precise, impossible to dodge. She smiled up at me with the same confidence that had landed her in my passenger seat of this shindig. “You owe me a dance, cowboy,” she said, the words sweet and sharp, curling her arm around mine and tugging me inexorably off course.

I tried to sidestep her, but she didn’t let go. “Angie, I⁠—”

“You promised,” she said, voice bright as Christmas tinsel.

For a split second, I considered pulling free, just yanking my arm back away and bulldozing my way through the crowd towards the embodiment of my life’s greatest mistake. I could have gone straight to Sadie, made a scene, finally let the mess I’d been keeping on ice spill into the open. But I didn’t. Because despite what people sometimes thought about me, I wasn’t an asshole. Not on purpose, at least. It wasn’t in me to disappoint someone who was trying to enjoy her night. Not if I could help it.