Hero Next Door (Gibson Hollow #3)

Chapter 1

One

Swayze

@jenna.m.carter: are you serious right now??

@ashleytravels: this is actually so disappointing.

@taylorreed659: you built your whole brand on “doing good” and THIS??

@emilyrose21: unfollowed.

@davidl84: people got hurt and you’re just silent??

@: this is why i don’t trust influencers anymore

@ryan_smith: you had ONE job.

@lindseyann: the silence is saying everything tbh

SWAYZE

Forty-three hours without sleep. Three continents. Four airports.

The state highway wound through the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina in long, patient curves, carrying me through the tail end of an autumn I’d missed from the other side of the equator.

Maples gone copper and gold, ridgelines soft with haze.

Six weeks ago, I’d pulled up this same route on my laptop in a rented flat in Auckland and felt something click into place the way things sometimes did.

That low hum of yes, this one. I’d found Gibson Hollow through a post by Kella Harmon, the romance novelist with the football-player husband, who’d been documenting the town’s rebuild after a catastrophic flood.

The need was real, the cause was good, and the mountains were beautiful.

I’d booked the rental the same afternoon.

That was six weeks ago. Before.

I didn’t let myself finish the thought. There was a long list of things I wasn’t letting myself finish right now, and thinking about Before was at the top of it.

The plan had been to show up and find the most useful thing I could do, the way I always had, in dozens of countries, for going on six years.

Show up. Pay attention. Figure out where to point the platform.

Except I didn’t have a platform anymore.

The GPS sent me on a chip-sealed county road up the mountain.

My eyes felt like someone had filled them with sand.

My body had stopped registering hunger somewhere over the Pacific and moved straight into a kind of hollow, distant nausea.

I passed a dozen houses in various states of repair, the fresh lumber and tarped rooflines evidence of the flood and the long climb back from it.

Everywhere held the exhaustion of a place still mid-recovery.

The rental had promised a wide front porch and a mountain view. I’d imagined sitting out there with tea, figuring out what came next. I was still holding onto that. Thirty-six hours of sleep, a hot shower, and a porch. In that order. Everything else could wait.

I focused bleary eyes on the road ahead, searching for a mailbox proclaiming 1837.

The eclectic collection of vehicles crowding driveways—trucks and SUVs and the occasional sensible sedan—reminded me that it was Thanksgiving Day.

My own family was three hours east in Eden’s Ridge, gathered at my sister Paisley’s place.

Not one of them knew I was back in the country, let alone close enough to join them for Mama’s famous spread.

I intended to keep it that way until I had some version of a plan, or at least until I could say the words out loud without my voice doing something embarrassing.

Avoiding that particular confrontation was worth missing out on turkey and dressin’ and Mama’s to-die-for sweet potato casserole with the pecan streusel topping.

1524 flashed by and I slowed to a crawl, scanning for driveways among the dense clusters of trees lining both sides of the narrow road.

“1701. 1748.” I glanced across to the other side of the road and finally spotted 1837 on a mailbox that had lost its battle with rust and was listing hard to one side.

Huh. Maybe they’d had a spate of bored teenagers hurling pumpkins at Halloween or something equally destructive.

That sort of thing had happened back home in Georgia when I’d been growing up.

Idiot teenagers with too much time on their hands, looking for something to entertain themselves in a small town where nothing much ever happened.

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS announced in its emotionless drone.

I turned into the gravel driveway, which was narrower than I’d expected.

Trees pressed close on both sides, branches reaching overhead to form a canopy, so I eased my way down the rutted drive at a crawl, trying to enjoy the romantic sense that I was entering my own personal Shangri-La tucked away from the world.

That was exactly right, wasn’t it? I was in desperate need of a haven.

A safe place to hide from the world and all its judgmental eyes.

I emerged from the tunnel of overhanging trees and slammed hard on the brakes as the house came into full view.

This was not the house from the online listing.

Instead of the pristine white clapboard farmhouse that had drawn me in with its promise of cozy furniture and welcoming rocking chairs on a wraparound porch, I was looking at its horror movie cousin.

Paint peeled from almost every visible surface in long, curling strips.

The porch itself sagged in the middle, with one decorative eave gaping open like a gap-toothed grin.

The landscaping was scraggly and overgrown at best, and outright dead and brown in many places, as if no one had touched it in months.

“This is absolutely not happening,” I muttered, gripping the steering wheel tighter.

I rolled the car closer, glancing around the barren yard, which was little more than packed dirt with patches of struggling grass.

The stunning mountain view that had sold me on renting this particular house was nowhere to be found, blocked by overgrown trees.

The only reason I didn’t immediately throw the car in reverse and turn around, certain it was all some terrible mistake, was that I spotted the distinctive garden gnome lock box sitting on the porch beside the sagging screen door, right where the check-in instructions had promised it would be.

Parking in one of the bare dirt spots I assumed was designated for that purpose, I thumbed open the rental app on my phone with shaking fingers and found the lock box code in the confirmation email.

“Right. Only thing to do is check it out.”

I dragged myself from the car on unsteady legs and crossed the patchy yard to the chipped ceramic gnome. I dialed in the four-digit code with deliberate care and heard a satisfying snick. A tarnished brass key fell out into my waiting palm.

So, not a mistake after all. An outright bait and switch.

Squeezing my eyes closed against the sting of exhausted tears, I breathed out slowly. “Maybe the inside will be better. Maybe it’s just the exterior that needs work.”

The inside was decidedly not better.

The sofa sagged dramatically in the middle, dark stain spreading across the faded floral slipcover.

The armchairs looked excavated from someone’s attic circa 1971 and left to fossilize.

Harvest gold appliances. Chipped laminate.

When I cracked the oven door, a scorched black bubble of something unidentifiable stared back at me from the bottom rack, and I shut it again.

Shag carpeting in the back rooms, the transition marked in silver duct tape.

The bathroom had rust stains that suggested years of patient neglect, and the air held a damp, musty undertone that made me wonder if they’d ever fully dried out after the flood.

The bedroom was at least marginally clean.

In six years and across six continents I had never encountered a more brazen misrepresentation of a rental property.

I sat down on the edge of the dented mattress. Outside, the light was going gold and thin the way it did at the end of a November afternoon. My stomach gave an insistent growl of protest that I hadn’t eaten anything resembling real food in longer than I could remember.

“I will find you something. Anything edible. And then we’re sleeping for a solid day,” I muttered. “I promise.”

I was so bone-deep exhausted I was negotiating out loud with my own stomach. Clearly a sign that what I actually needed, before food or sleep or anything else, was to hear a friendly voice.

I pulled out my phone and called Sophie.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hey, you.” Her familiar Scottish burr did something immediate to the back of my throat.

I could picture her exactly, settled into her favorite chair in the library of Ardinmuir Castle, Connor’s ridiculous ancestral home, its stone walls and drafty corridors somehow the coziest place I’d ever been.

I glanced around the water-stained ceiling, the peeling wallpaper, the harvest gold appliances visible through the doorway. The contrast was almost funny. Almost.

“Are you there yet?”

“I made it.” I looked around the room. “The house is a disaster. Like, genuinely uninhabitable levels of misrepresentation.”

“Oh, no.”

“It’s fine. I’m going to sleep here tonight and deal with it tomorrow when I have functional brain cells.” I paused. “I just needed to hear a friendly voice.”

A beat of silence. Sophie knew. I hadn’t told her much—hadn’t been able to get the words in the right order yet—but she knew enough. She didn’t push.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “How are you doing? Really?”

“I’m forty-four hours without sleep and sitting on a mattress that has a person-shaped dent already worn into it by some previous poor bastard.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye socket.

She made a sympathetic sound. In the background I heard the particular creak of that library chair, the distant echo of stone floors, and felt a pang for the version of myself who had last sat in that castle.

The one who’d somehow managed to see that Connor had always been half in love with Sophie and that Sophie, quiet and fierce, felt exactly the same.

That Swayze had meddled cheerfully and shamelessly until he’d pulled his head out of his ass, and had felt entirely pleased with herself about it.

That felt like someone else’s life now. Someone who still believed she knew how to make things better.

“Ask me again when I’ve slept,” I said.

“Deal.” A pause, softer. “You’re going to be okay, Swayze.”

I didn’t answer that. Couldn’t quite yet.

“Get some sleep,” she said. “Call me whenever you surface, aye?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Tell Connor I said hi.”

“I will. And Swayze—I mean it. You’re going to be okay.”

I ended the call and sat there another moment in the failing light, in the dented bed, in the wrong house, at the end of the longest day of my life.

Then I trudged back outside to the car to drag in my overstuffed suitcases.