Page 66 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

I braced myself.

Peter reached us, smiling with all the white-collar assurance of a man who’d never once considered that a woman might not want to see him. “Sadie!” he called, as if I might have missed him otherwise. He stopped less than a foot from me, then hesitated, apparently unsure if a hug was appropriate. After a tense beat, he went for it, pulling me into the kind of embrace that’s meant to be sweet but feels more like a financial acquisition. He smelled faintly of cologne and ambition.

I fixed my mouth into a neutral line. “What are you doing here?” I asked. My voice, famously unreliable in crisis, came out both too loud and too incredulous.

Peter’s smile faltered for a millisecond—the human equivalent of a buffering wheel—then returned to full strength. “I thought I’d surprise you,” he said. “I, uh, had some vacation days, and you didn’t respond to my last few messages, so…here I am.” He gave a little jazz-hands flourish, like a bad magician revealing a limp bouquet.

“Everything okay?” Selma cut in, her tone deceptively even. She placed a comforting hand on my elbow, her thumb making tiny, anchoring circles. The way she said it—each syllable crisp, each vowel perfectly weighted—made it clear that she’d already assessed Peter as a possible threat and was mentally sorting through her network for a nearby Lockhart males. If necessary, she could summon all four in under ninety seconds.

Peter was a lot of things, but I didn’t think dangerous was one of them. Persistent. Self-involved. Egotistical, sure. But I was certain this was not a case of him stalking me, he probably thought him showing up like this would be some grand romantic gesture, like in the movies. For context, one of his favorite films was Friends With Benefits starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, and his favorite scene from that movie was the flash mob at the end when they, spoiler alert, get together and profess their love for one another.

He thought proposals on jumbotrons and sky writing were romantic. I was sure in his head this was going to end in me swooning with delight. Unfortunately, that was not how this was going down. I was not happy to see him, and Selma was ready to unleash the wrath of the Lockhart Y-chromosomes on him if I just gave the nod. That wasn’t going to happen.

“I’m fine,” I said, “I just—didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I know,” Peter replied, grinning. “That’s the point of a surprise, right?” He clearly expected someone, maybe the universe, to give him a gold star for initiative.

“Um,” I said, realizing Selma was still waiting for a cue, “Mrs. Lockhart, this is Peter McKinley. My…friend from New York.”

Selma, ever gracious, offered her hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. McKinley.”

Peter shook it, possibly harder than necessary, and said, “You too, Mrs. Lockhart.”

“Oh, please, call me Selma.” She waved her hand dismissively and there was a glimmer of something in her eyes—amusement, maybe, or the satisfaction of confirming a hypothesis about finance bros she’d shared with me the week prior, that they were all self-involved A-holes.

A pause followed. A long one, in which Peter expected more introductions or pleasantries, but Selma simply smiled and waited him out. Finally, she patted my arm. “Well, I better go check on the boys as long as you’re good.”

I nodded, and she drifted away, her stride easy but her posture erect, like a bodyguard making herself available but not intrusive.

“Peter, what are you doing here?” I repeated my question.

“Honestly, I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

“Did you not get my messages?”

“Yeah, but I thought that was just, you know, self-sabotage, or you were worried I couldn’t handle everything you had going on here. I came here to tell you I can handle it and I’m not going to let you push me away like you push everyone else away. This is too good. I’m protecting you from you.”

It was a miracle I had ever agreed to go out with Peter in the first place. Even now, standing under the bunting and string lights of Valentine Bay’s jam-packed summer festival, I could barely recall why I’d ever found him appealing, let alone compelling. The rapport had been quick, I’ll admit that much. Our first date in Manhattan was a kinetic blur of wine bars and rapid-fire banter, Peter effortlessly steering the conversation from global markets to Broadway musicals to the best Michelin-starred ramen in Midtown. He had a confidence that bordered on the absurd, the kind of man who’d walk into a room and immediately act like he owned not just the room, but the entire building, maybe the city. Tall, put-together, objectively attractive in that upscale finance-guy way—expensive haircut, Italian shoes, bespoke suits that probably cost more than my old Subaru.

But time with Peter had the strange effect of making everything, including myself, feel slightly less real. At first, I assumed it was just the giddiness of new romance. Later, I realized it was more like being pulled into the orbit of a very shiny, very self-obsessed planet. I could never quite get his attention to settle on me for more than a few seconds at a time, unless I was telling a story about him or his work or something that would impress him. There was this running joke among his circle of friends that Peter had “Main Character Energy,” but if I was honest, he lacked the heart and depth you’d want in a protagonist. He was all surface-level charisma: cocktail party stories, gleaming white teeth, Ivy League credentials. Once, at a friend’s wedding, I watched him spend twenty minutes holding court about the physical and psychological effects of intermittent fasting, ignoring both the bride’s toast and my attempts to get him to dance. Afterward, when I told him I’d hoped to share a song, he’d blinked at me in gentle confusion, as if the thought simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Honestly, I’d always known that Peter was more interested in the idea of a relationship than the reality of one. He was the kind of guy who liked having a girlfriend the way some people enjoyed having high-end kitchen appliances: as a status marker, an indicator of taste and discernment, but not something you really took out and used unless company was coming over. I was convenient, presentable, and accomplished enough to check all the boxes on his personal spreadsheet, but I was never the main course. Our first fight was about how he’d RSVP’d us both to an out-of-state wedding without bothering to ask if I was available, then called me “overly rigid” when I explained I already had a work obligation. Our second fight was about how he’d posted a photo of us to Instagram with the caption “my better half,” even though we’d only been seeing each other for two weeks. He thought it was romantic. I felt like a prop.

And worst of all, this was the version of Peter I’d gotten when he was still pretending to be on his best behavior. The “honeymoon phase” was less a period of mutual infatuation than a series of gradual reality checks, each one a little less thrilling than the last. Eventually, his inability to listen, to empathize, to see beyond his own reflection, wore me down so thoroughly that it felt like there was nothing left to lose by breaking things off. Which I’d wanted to do for weeks before I’d even arrived in Valentine Bay.

So when he appeared in the middle of a small-town festival, unannounced and wholly uninvited, it was less a romantic gesture and more a testament to Peter’s singular superpower: his absolute, unshakeable conviction that the rules of normal human interaction did not apply to him. He’d texted me, sure, but when I hadn’t responded, he’d simply booked a flight and shown up, confident that his presence alone would be enough to smooth things over.

As I stood next to Peter’s crisp white shirt and glitzy watch, I realized that the only thing we’d ever really had in common was a shared allergy to boredom. He was a man in perpetual motion, and I’d been drifting, looking for a distraction. On paper, Peter was perfect: a checklist of desirable attributes, each one more impressive than the last, but on the inside, something essential was missing—a softness, an understanding, maybe even a soul.

I glanced at him, at the way he scanned the crowd with smug satisfaction, certain that he’d just pulled off a grand romantic coup. I thought about all the times I’d let myself believe that being with someone “good enough” was preferable to being alone. About all the little ways I’d shrunk myself to fit inside the lines of his life, how I’d learned to pretend that his dismissiveness was just a quirk rather than a warning sign. In the end, my relationship with Peter was less a romance and more of a placeholder, a way to pass the time until I could figure out what I actually wanted.

The wild thing was, I didn’t even feel sad about it anymore. I felt…nothing. Just the faintest flicker of relief, like the moment you realize a dental procedure is over and you survived without screaming.

“Peter, we’re not together anymore. I broke up with you.” The words spilled out faster than I could reel them in.

Peter’s eyes went wide, then narrowed, calculating. “Whoa…Sadie, wait. What? Where is this coming from?”

I could feel the noise and color of the festival blurring around us, like the whole world was rubbernecking our disaster, even though I knew that was all in my head and no one was paying attention. “It’s been over,” I said, softer but no less sure. “I’ve told you that.”