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Me:

Reminded me that I'm temporary. Which I knew. But knowing and feeling are different languages and I'm apparently bilingual.

Sage:

I'm closing the cafe early. Wine at your place. Non-negotiable.

I put my phone away and start arranging pumpkins.

The morning air is sharp with frost. I stack with the precision of a woman building armor out of gourds. Each one placed exactly where the sightline maps say it should go. Control is the only thing keeping me from falling apart, so I control what I can.

A family drives past on the road. The mom calls out, "Is this the festival? It's so beautiful!" I wave, smile, tell her Friday at ten. She drives away happy. I go back to stacking pumpkins with the focused intensity of a woman who is definitely not thinking about a man's stupid big hands holding her face while he failed to say what she meant to him.

Bear wanders over from the property line. He drops a stick at my feet. Looks at me. Looks at the cabin. Looks back at me.

Cinderella pumpkins in the front for the photo backdrop. Sugar Pie pumpkins in bushel baskets for the cooking demonstration. Connecticut Field pumpkins along the hayride route. Specialty gourds in the artisan display corner.

My hands know this work. My body knows the rhythm of lifting and placing and stepping back to check the sightlines. This is what I'm good at. Building something beautiful out of raw materials and stubborn optimism.

The man in the cabin doesn't know what I am. That's his problem.

I know exactly what I am.

By afternoon, the field is ready. Two thousand pounds of pumpkins arranged in a display that makes the south field look like it was designed for this purpose. Like the land was waiting for someone who saw its potential instead of its past.

Sage shows up at five with wine and Venus from Tangled Roots, who takes one look at my face and says, "Girl, sit down. I'm doing your hair while you tell me everything."

So I sit in my kitchen while Venus works her magic on my twists and I tell them about the steak dinner, about the sex, about the phone call, about the eggs he made that are still sitting on the counter because I couldn't eat them and couldn't throw them away.

"Men," Venus says, "communicate like broken radios. All static and fragments and you have to tune in sideways to catch the real signal. He's scared, Harper. Scared men say temporary when they mean please stay."

"That's a generous interpretation."

"I've been interpreting men in this town for seven years. Trust the read."

CHAPTER FIVE

EMMETT

Three things happen on Thursday that break me open.

First: Bear won't come inside. He spends the entire day lying at the property line between my land and the south field, watching Harper work. Every time she crosses his sightline, his tail thumps the ground. Every time she walks toward the driveway, he stands up. When she finally leaves at dusk without coming to the cabin, he turns and looks at me with the most accusatory expression I've ever seen on a dog.

Second: I find her flannel. The one she wore to dinner. It's hanging on the hook by the back door where she must have put it yesterday morning. It smells like her. Cinnamon and vanilla and something warm underneath that's just skin. I stand there with a piece of flannel pressed to my face like a man who has completely lost the plot.

Third: Sage Douglas walks into my workshop at four in the afternoon, sets a coffee on my workbench, and looks at me with the kind of calm fury that only a woman who's been running a small business in a small town for fifteen years can manufacture.

"You've got about thirty seconds to explain why my friend was crying over pumpkins last night before I lose my professional composure," she says.

"She was crying?"

"After a bottle and a half of wine, yes. She told me what you said to Silas. The favor part. The temporary part."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant. You were protecting your land and your feelings and probably your dead father's memory, and all of that is valid and I understand it. But Harper doesn't know your whole story, Emmett. She knows the version you gave her, which is the version you give everyone: the short one. The one that keeps people at arm's length so you never have to watch them leave."

I stare at her. Sage Douglas, who has never said more than "black coffee?" to me at Bean and Bloom, just opened me up like a textbook and read from the chapter I keep locked.