Page 77 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

Buddy grunted. He walked stiffly through the house, touching surfaces as if to prove they were real. He stopped at the wall of family photos, some ancient, some new. I’d rearranged them, added some candid shots from the hospital, and printed out some I found on the town’s Facebook page. He stared at it for a long time.

“You shoulda just left it,” he said finally, voice cracking a little. “The place was fine.”

I shook my head. “It just needed a little TLC.”

He walked over to the couch, which had new upholstery. “Looks like Martha Stewart broke in and threw up on the place.”

I smiled nervously. “You hate it?”

He was silent for a beat. “No. Just not used to it.” He collapsed into the recliner and looked up at me, jaw set with the defensive pride of a man who’d never asked for anything. “I’ll pay Dawson back for all of it, and you too,” he said. “Every penny. You can let him know. It might have to wait till next season, because I don’t think I’ll be able to make much profit this season, but I’ll repay every dime.”

“You don’t have to pay anyone back.” I wanted to laugh, or cry, or maybe both. Instead, I handed him an envelope. “But if you did, I think this season is going to do very well.”

He frowned, suspicious, then opened the folder. Inside was the business plan I had written while he was in the hospital. I’d run the projections, analyzed the competition, and even called in a favor from a friend at the university’s agricultural extension. With the new upgrades, the farm was on track to break even by fall—and if we kept up the momentum, it might even be profitable by the end of the year.

He read the first few pages but stopped when he got to the employment portion. “What’s all this?”

“I hired a few people.” I forced myself to sound confident. “Part-time, just for the season. They’re good kids. Hard workers. The produce stand is open again, and we’ve added a delivery system and baskets, which is proving to be very profitable. I’m rolling out my marketing plan.”

Buddy looked up, incredulous. “Marketing plan?”

I nodded, pulling out my phone. “Watch this.”

I swiped through the TikTok page I’d created for Shepard Farms. The most recent video was a time-lapse of the barn being painted, set to an upbeat country song. Another video showed a line of teens at the produce stand at the Grand Re-Opening, doing blind taste tests of heirloom tomatoes, their reactions exaggerated and hilarious. There was a “guess the fruit” contest, and a “pie-eating challenge” that had gone semi-viral among the local high schools. The comment section was a war zone of playful teasing and hometown pride.

Buddy watched, jaw slack, as I scrolled through the posts.

“People are coming to the stand just to try and beat the high score,” I explained. “If you guess the fruit right, you get a bundle for it and your photo goes up on the wall.”

He didn’t say anything, so I opened up the Instagram page. It was full of photos, tourists posing in front of the new selfie mural I’d commissioned, local kids with their arms full of apples. There was a shot of him at the hospital, flipping off the camera with surgical tape still on his arms.

Buddy’s eyes narrowed. “I told you, no photos in the hospital.”

I grinned. “It’s got over a thousand likes. You’re basically famous. Look how many people are rooting for your recovery.”

He scrolled through the page, then set the phone down, shook his head, and stared at the business plan again. “Produce stand’s never turned a real profit.” He cleared his throat, voice low. “Not since your GiGi Rose ran it.”

I took a breath, steadying myself. “That’s because you never charged enough. Or advertised or diversified. Look, we’re selling out almost every day. I’m running preorders for Thanksgiving pies. We’ve got a waiting list a mile long for those preserves Gigi Rose used to make, the ones mom taught me. I even set up online orders.”

Buddy’s face twisted, skeptical, but not dismissive. He turned a few more pages in the plan, then looked up at me, question in his eyes.

“That’s not all,” I continued, heart pounding with anticipation. “I want to make Shepard Farms a real destination. For Halloween, we’re doing a haunted house in the old chicken coop, a maze in the cornfield, hayrides on weekends.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute, letting the quiet buzz of the fridge fill the room. There was a tension to his silence, a white-knuckle grip in the way his hands clenched and unclenched on the armrests of the recliner. I let him have the time. Buddy Shepard wasn’t a man of many words, he was a collector of silences, an archivist of unsaid things.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” he finally said, his voice smaller than usual. When I looked over, he was blinking hard, eyes shining with unshed tears as he stared down at the papers in his hands. “I’m not gonna be able to keep up with it when you leave.”

“I did have to do it, actually,” I argued, and my voice wobbled more than I wanted. “I had to do all this. Because you’re my family, and this is our home.” I took a deep breath. “And don’t worry about keeping up with it, because I’m staying.”

Buddy’s head jerked up, startled, like he’d just realized there was a second person in the room. “You’re what?”

I swallowed. “I’m not going back to New York. I’m staying here. In Valentine Bay.” There was no going back now, so I bulldozed ahead. “I know it’s not what you wanted. I know it’s hard for you, with me around. But I’m not leaving. I want to be here. I want to work for the farm, and I want to be with Dawson, and I’m sorry if that’s… if I’m too much for you.”

His face contorted in a way I’d never seen, like he was trying to laugh and cry at the same time. “What the hell are you talking about? You’re not makin’ a lick a sense.”

I felt heat rising in my cheeks, and I was suddenly eight years old again, blurting out the secret I’d hidden in my sock drawer, which was I’d found a pack of cigarettes and thought I’d smoked them because I’d put them up to my mouth, I had no clue you had to light them. “I’m staying. I love Dawson and want to work on the far⁠—”

“Not that.” He waved dismissively. “The part about me not wanting you here.”