Page 42 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

A wind kicked up outside, lifting the smell of hay and sweat and the distant brine of the ocean and funneling it through the open barn doors. I took another sip of coffee, trying to get my mind straight, but it tasted bitter now. I set the cup down on a fence post so I wouldn’t spill it.

“Angie,” I started, and then stopped, because this was a conversation that required something beyond my usual grunt and nod repertoire. I looked at her—really looked—and I saw the tiny lines around her mouth, the tension in her shoulders. She wore her sunglasses like armor, but nothing could hide the way she braced herself for what was coming next.

I owed her honesty. However, I didn’t feel comfortable disclosing what had happened with Sadie the night before. That was no one’s business but ours. Not my mom’s. Not Damon’s. And not Angie’s.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get your message,” I said again, slower this time, hoping it would land. “To be honest with you, I’m not in a place to continue this.”

Through the lenses of her glasses I saw she blinked, once, twice, and then she took them off completely, tucking them into the scoop neck of her sport’s bra. Her eyes were sharp, intelligent. In that moment, I remembered all over again why I’d started seeing her in the first place. She was fun, and beautiful, and could run laps around most people in a conversation. But she wasn’t Sadie, and I think we’d both known that from the start.

“Is this because your ex is back in town?”

She asked it without a drop of bitterness, like she was confirming a clinical diagnosis. I almost laughed, because wasn’t that what she did for a living? Make things make sense, even if they hurt?

I nodded, voice rough. “Yeah. It is. I’m sorry, Angie.”

She looked down, fiddling with the bakery bag in her hand, and then back up at me, her eyes clear and steady. “You know, I’m not an idiot, Dawson. When I started seeing you, people told me about her. And I could tell something was going on with you when you saw her at the wedding. I just hoped because it had been so long that you’d gotten over her.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized again.

She exhaled a slow breath, processing. For a second, neither of us said anything, the barn filled with nothing but the sound of horses flicking their tails and the low, distant hum of a riding mower somewhere on the other side of the property.

“Can I ask you something?” she finally said.

“Sure.”

She squared her chin, the way I’d seen her do in the E.R. when she was treating a patient. “Are you in love with her, or are you just in love with the idea of her?”

I didn’t answer right away, because the truth was, I’d spent years trying to hammer that difference into a shape I could live with. But standing there, with the dust motes hanging in the air and Angie’s question echoing in my skull, I realized the answer was as obvious as it was pathetic.

“I’ve been in love with her since the sixth grade,” I admitted. “I wish I could say it was just an idea, but it’s not. I love her.”

She absorbed my answer without flinching, her face a masterwork of composure. Then she nodded, once. “Well. At least you’re honest.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated once more, because it was the only thing left to say.

She smiled at that, a sad, elegant little curve of her lips. “Don’t be. I’d rather hear the truth now than drag this out for months and then find you making out with your ex in the alley behind the movie theater.” She referenced the latest town scandal that had included the married mayor and his assistant, twenty years his junior.

We both laughed, awkward and short, but the ice broke enough for me to breathe again. She reached out and squeezed my bicep, a gesture of affection so casual and so final it felt almost like a blessing.

“I hope you get what you want,” she said, and meant it.

I watched her walk back to the car, her stride as unhurried as it had been when she arrived. She collected herself with the precision of someone who’d spent a lifetime being observed, got in, and drove off without looking back. The horses in the barn resumed eating as if nothing had happened, but it felt like a chunk of the world had just shifted three inches to the left.

For the first time in months, or maybe years, I felt lighter and more optimistic than I had any right to, and it scared me.

16

HORSES DON’T MISS PEOPLE

Sadie

The truck rumbled beneath my hands as I drove Herbie home, the morning light thin and gray, and I told myself that the hollow ache cracking open somewhere behind my sternum was probably just gas.

It wasn’t gas.

Dawson Lockhart—the boy who had once hauled me, laughing and shrieking, into the ocean at two in the morning and then had the audacity to tell me he was going to marry me for the first time while my lips were turning blue—had slipped out of my cabin before dawn without so much as a sticky note. Not a text. Not a coffee left on the counter. Not even a single dark hair on the pillow to prove he’d existed at all. Just gone, the way a good dream dissolves the second your alarm goes off, leaving you grasping at something you can’t quite name.

I’d done what any reasonable woman does when the man she never stopped loving vanishes into thin air. I’d laced up my shoes and run until my lungs burned, past every landmark this stupid, beautiful, suffocating small town had conspired to tattoo into my memory. Each stride felt like a protest against the uncertainty. My path traced the old logging roads, past the turnoff that led to the upper meadows and the beach where we’d once snuck out in the middle of the night to swim under the stars. I remembered how he’d shivered in the cold, laughing as he pulled me in, and how I’d thought, even then, that there was nothing in the world more solid than Dawson Lockhart.