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“I would have.”
“That’s why I didn’t give it to you.”
Main Street still had no power, but the shop windows glowed. Battery candles lined the window at Callahan’s Books, and tiny white bulbs framed the pastry case inside Sweet Provisions. Donnelly Hardware had one crooked strand because Frank considered decorating somebody else’s responsibility but refused to leave his store dark. Up and down the street, every merchant had dragged out the emergency lights they had bought and forgotten.
The block ran on double-As and stubbornness.
He stopped beside my car in the community center lot, under the one light that works. “Friday at noon,” he said. “Planning meeting.”
“I’ll be there.”
I got out and cleared the windshield with my sleeve because my scraper had been in the shop since March. By the time I got the engine started, Griffin had pulled away. I sat there with the heater roaring and seventeen unread messages from people who loved me.
I put my hand up and touched my mouth. Then I put it back on the wheel, and drove the four hundred yards home, and did not read a single one of them until morning.
CHAPTER 10
NORA
Three hours of broken sleep did not make kissing Griffin seem like a worse idea. That felt like a failure of both sleep and judgment.
Every time I woke, I replayed the kiss and the moment I stopped it. I had stopped because I wanted him enough to be frightened by what might come next.
At six, I gave up trying to sleep. I made coffee I didn’t drink and walked down to Sweet Provisions. Staying in my apartment meant being alone with thoughts I no longer trusted.
Pearl was behind the counter with flour up to her elbows. She took one look at me and wiped her hands on her apron. “You look like something the cat declined to drag in.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
She pulled a cup off the stack without asking, filled it, and added four sugar packets, which is how I take it and how the entire street knows I take it.
“The roads didn’t reopen until ten,” I said.
“You don’t open until nine, and you showed up here at six fifteen. This is about Griffin.”
“Maybe I wanted coffee.”
“You’re staring at it like it offended you.”
Pearl came around the counter, sat on the stool opposite me, and folded her arms. “What happened in the barn?”
“He was—”
I stopped in the same place I had when I tried to tell her about his hands.
Pearl held up two fingers. “That’s twice.”
“Twice what?”
“Twice you’ve started to describe Griffin and forgotten how to finish a sentence.”
“I can finish a sentence.”
“Good. Start with, ‘We kissed in the barn.’”
My hand jerked. Coffee sloshed over the rim and spread across the counter. Pearl handed me a towel without blinking. “I watched you build yourself back from nothing,” Pearl said after I wiped it up. “I watched you start laughing again. And I will gut Griffin Cole like a fish if he gives you one more reason to wonder whether you get to keep what you’ve got.”
“He’s not going to hurt me.”
