Page 60 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

He grunted again, but it sounded different this time. “I always liked that boy. Good head on his shoulders.”

I smiled, thinking of Dawson’s scowl and the way it softened when he didn’t think anyone was looking. “Yeah, he does.”

Buddy’s hand twitched on the blanket. “You two got history.”

It wasn’t even a question. Just a flat statement of fact.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “We do.”

“You know what they say about history? It repeats itself, so just make sure that it’s a do si do you want to do again.” He nodded, satisfied with his warning. But then, as if a switch had been thrown in his brain, his face darkened. “Well, you don’t have to babysit me, Sadie Rose. Don’t go changin’ plans on my account. You got your own life to live. Don’t let an old man, or any man, drag you back here.”

His voice was climbing, the ragged edges of anger bleeding into his words. I saw his heart monitor spike on the readout, the beeping growing frantic.

I reached for his hand. “A wise man used to tell me, the past is history, the future is a mystery, right now is a gift, that’s why they call it the present. Let’s just focus on that,” I recited the words he always said to my mom during uncertain times with her health, which my mom would then say to me.

“You’re old enough to know, that’s the Disney version of that sayin’. Your Gigi Rose made me clean up my language after we had your mama.”

“Really?”

“Yep, what I used to say before we had little ears runnin’ around was, if ya got one foot in the past and one foot in the future, then you’re pissin’ on the present.”

My head fell back and I laughed. That actually sounded a lot more like Buddy. From what people said, Gigi Rose tamed Buddy quite a bit. He was a wild one before he met and fell in love with her.

Some people used to say that about me, they said I tamed ‘the heartbreaker,’ which I thought was funny since we got together when we were twelve. Still, I used to take pride in that, I felt special. Part of the reason I’d left when I found Dawson in bed with Vicki was embarrassment. My identity was being Dawson Lockhart’s girlfriend, his soulmate, the love of his life. And when that was threatened, I didn’t know how to face it.

Maybe Gio was more right than I thought. Maybe part of the reason I’d stayed away was so I could figure out who I was without Dawson, without the shadow of my mom and grandma, two Miss Valentine Bays, literal beauty queens, who I looked exactly like.

The thing was, I’m not sure I did find out who I was. I felt more myself the past week that I’d been back in Valentine Bay than I had the entire twelve years I’d been gone, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

24

BROS BEFORE BETRAYAL

Dawson

I’d rather wrestle a half-ton Hereford bull into a trailer than sit through another one of Damon’s monthly meetings but unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.

The cavernous, high-ceilinged conference room at the heart of Lockhart Ranch’s admin building was designed to awe, not foster intimacy. I suspected that was Damon’s point of using it, he was a man who believed in the power of spectacle, in the ritual of gathering the troops under a single roof and making even the most trivial of operational updates feel like an event. From where I sat at the U-shaped mahogany table, every wall of the room was hung with a hundred years’ worth of Lockhart family memorabilia—sepia-hued photos of ancestors in Civil War-era garb, black-and-white images of the ranch’s earliest days, a collection of rusted branding irons arranged in a monogrammed shadow box. A few of the newer frames featured Damon himself, his square jaw locked in a smile that looked genuine only if you didn’t know him, flanked by some up-and-coming state senator or local news anchor.

My left leg bounced with a restless energy that threatened to set the entire table vibrating while Damon droned on about quarterly projections for the vineyard expansion and the spa’s record-breaking bookings. I never envied Damon’s job, and I sure as hell couldn’t fathom why he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe it was because he’d always been more of a people person, or because he genuinely believed in the transformative power of spreadsheets and mission statements. Me? I would have rather spent the morning shoveling hay or fixing tractor engines, anything that involved animals or moving parts with a clear end result. The only “moving parts” in this room were the sycophantic heads nodding in time with Damon’s cadence, a peculiar ballet of deference that left me feeling like the walls were closing in.

Every so often, Damon would pause and look directly at me, as if daring me to contradict his claim that “consolidation of departmental reporting will streamline efficiency.” I never rose to the bait, mostly because I didn’t care, but also because I’d long ago learned that my opinions on process improvement were unwelcome unless they involved animal welfare or fire mitigation.

The only redeeming feature of these meetings was the presence of my mother, a diminutive force of nature whose appearance belied the fact that she could outwork any man on the crew. She sat two seats away from me, her posture prim as a schoolmistress. She held Minnie on her lap, scribbling on a color-coded legal pad while sipping black coffee from a chipped mug. During one particularly dull lull, she leaned over and whispered, “You look constipated. Are you going to survive this?” I snorted, and Damon glared at us both, but Mom just grinned, unrepentant.

We were half an hour into Damon’s color-coded PowerPoint when the boardroom door creaked open, and Dylan wandered in, looking every bit the prodigal son. My youngest brother had perfected the art of the unapologetic late entrance. Today he wore dusty Timberlands, a faded Seahawks tee, and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, the brim still bent from his high school baseball days. He carried with him a palpable sense of mayhem, like a tornado disguised as a human, and as he slid into the empty chair beside me, he offered a sideways grin.

“Sorry, got hung up with the fence crew,” he lied. We all knew he’d probably slept through his alarm, but nobody called him on it. Not even Damon, who ignored his entrance entirely and moved on.

Dylan pulled a can of energy drink from his back pocket, cracked it open with a daring fizz-pop, and whispered to me, “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you fake a seizure and get us out of here.”

“You still owe me two hundred from the Pereira fight,” I reminded him.

“I told you I’m good for it.”

“Yeah, you did, six months ago.”

I knew I was never going to see that money. If I kept a spreadsheet of all the money Dylan owed me from betting, borrowing, and bankrolling he’d be in debt to me in the tens of thousands. Luckily for him, Buddy taught me never to give anyone money you expected back, especially family. Which is why, while I gave Dylan shit, in reality, he owed me nothing.