Page 52 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

I didn’t know what to say. I barely knew what it was myself. The only thing I did know was that every time I saw her, it was like waking up from a coma and remembering your own name. “We’re figuring it out,” I said, my voice quieter than I meant it to be.

Dean smirked. “She’s definitely putting you through your paces. Saw her driving Herbie. Damon said you got it running for her again after you spent hours fixing up Buddy’s place.”

“She got Herbie?” Damon questioned. “I thought I saw her running this morning.”

I shrugged. “She ran to the farm and drove it back.”

Damon grinned. “You left before sunrise, and she had enough energy to go for a run.” He shook his head slowly and tsked three times. “You are giving the Lockhart men a bad name, if I spent the night with he⁠—”

“Do not finish that sentence.” I shot him a death glare.

And just like that, the conversation pivoted. Damon was a shit stirrer, but he didn’t have a death wish. He hopped on the auction topic, still trying to wind me up but not to the point that I was homicidal. “Do you think Angie will bid on me? You know, now that she got the warm-up brother out of the way, she’ll be ready for the main event.”

Dean, the more serious of the brothers, shook his head. “I think she’s dating that guy from the Chamber of Commerce. The one with the gelled hair who wears vests and rides a Harley.”

She was. We weren’t exclusive.

“I think she’ll bid just to mess with Dawson’s head,” Dylan predicted, his tone conspiratorial. “And then she’ll make you carry her purse for the rest of the night.”

“Joke’s on her,” I said, deadpan. “He can’t even carry his own wallet, much less a purse.”

Dad set down his glass with a clink, shooting me a look of rough sympathy. He was always a few beats behind in any conversation we were having. Usually, one to two topic lag time. “You know, it takes guts to admit you’re wrong. Or to admit you got your heart stomped. But it takes real guts to get back up and try again, son.”

Right, so he was still talking about Sadie despite us moving on.

There was a pause, the kind that might have turned sentimental or confrontational if not for Damon, who never let a moment go un-heckled. “So are you going to ask Sadie to marry you on the auction stage or at the closing fireworks for the biggest crowd?”

I wanted to marry Sadie, and I would do anything to make that happen, but asking her in front of the entire town when she hated any attention being drawn to her was the absolute worst idea in the world.

I glared at him. “I’d rather eat a live rattlesnake.”

Damon grinned. “I’m sure she can have that arranged, you know, for your penance.”

Even Mom laughed at that, her emerald eyes crinkling at the corners. It was the sound of home, the kind of laughter that made every other misery seem small. I wished I could bottle it for the days when everything felt like a fight.

As the plates emptied and the stories grew taller—Damon’s latest rodeo mishap, Dylan’s failed attempt to build a trebuchet out of scrap metal, Dean’s newest coaching disaster at the high school—the rough edges of the day started to smooth out. We were a noisy bunch, sometimes too loud for our own good, but it was better than the silence that waited outside these walls.

We started to clear the table when Damon asked, “Okay, so just to save Mom having to live tweet with updates are you having another sleepover with Sadie tonight or taking the night off?”

Muffled and scattered laughter came from Dylan and Dean as I firmly stated, “This family needs to set some healthy boundaries.”

There was a three second pause before my brothers dissolved into fits of laughter. I wasn’t joking, but that fact only made them laugh harder.

20

EMOTIONAL SUPPORT DISH TOWEL

Sadie

It was late. The hospital’s hallways were sapped of energy, and every fluorescent bulb had begun to hum in exhaustion, their light buzzing faintly beneath the soft snores and coughs of the sleeping patients. Visiting hours had ended an hour ago, but no nurse in this town would chase me out while Buddy was still restless and putting up a fuss, drifting in and out of consciousness with his medication. I was a buffer to curb his orneriness.

He looked so small in that wide bed, the loose hospital gown bunching around his ribs, the old tattoos on his forearms faded to blue-grey smudges. I waited until the night nurse changed his IV and he finally dozed, the gruff lines around his mouth softening, before I leaned over, kissed his forehead and made my way out of the room.

The world outside the hospital doors was flat and black, the lights in the parking lot painting everything sickly orange. The sky was already bruising purple, and the wind had that unsettled, high-pitched edge that meant a storm was rolling in off the ocean. I sat in Herbie for a minute, watching the trees in the median sway and shiver, and wondered if it would be a big one or just a quick burst to rattle the windows and clear the air. The bay always seemed to save its most dramatic weather for the moments when I needed clarity least.

On the drive home, past the industrial stretch of town and the old marina, I felt the first drops tap the windshield. Each one made a sound like a tiny pebble, and the wipers stuttered against the glass as if in protest. The Lockhart Ranch turnoff glinted in my headlights, and I was so exhausted, I was tempted to take it. But I needed to have a plan for Buddy’s future, and the only way to get that was to have a better handle on what was going on with the farm. The records I’d collected had given me somewhat of a financial overview, but I needed to figure out what the projections were for viable crops and harvest. So I kept going, the tires hissing over wet pavement, until I pulled up in front of the farm.

The house looked exactly as it had every night of my childhood, weathervane perched on top of the roof, porch swing swaying in the breeze, the front door’s chipped paint catching the beam of the headlights. I got out and shivered as I rushed to the door, which I noticed opened smoothly without resistance. When I stepped inside, I froze in shock at what I saw. Everything was wrong. Not in the catastrophic way I’d found it after Buddy’s fall—no shattered picture frames, no crusted-over dishes and weeks-old takeout containers, no coffee stains bleeding into the floorboards. It was the opposite. Instead, it was as if someone had pressed rewind and restored the old place to a snapshot of how it used to be: neat, lived-in, the evidence of a gentle hand in every detail.