Chapter 3
Three
DECLAN
Return of the Prodigal Son
The white colonial looked smaller than I remembered, but that might have been a side effect of spending the last eight years in Manhattan, where anything with a yard was considered a mansion.
Mom’s flower boxes were empty for winter, but she’d already hung wreaths on every window.
Because of course she had. Martha Hayes didn’t do anything halfway, especially at Christmas.
I turned off the engine and sat in the sudden quiet, my hands still gripping the steering wheel.
Three weeks ago, I’d been a rising star at Morrison, Kline & Associates, billing eighty hours a week and pretending I thrived on the pressure.
Two weeks ago, I’d had a panic attack in the middle of a deposition and spent twenty minutes hyperventilating in a courthouse bathroom stall while opposing counsel waited for me to return from having “the shits”. Yeah. That was way less embarrassing.
One week ago, I’d walked into my senior partner’s office and asked for an indefinite sabbatical.
“Burnout’s a real thing, Hayes,” Richard Morrison had said, barely looking up from his computer screen where he was probably billing someone three hundred dollars an hour for answering emails. “Take the time. Figure out what you want. Partnership track will still be here when you get back.”
The unspoken ‘if you get back’ had hung in the air like a noxious fart of unfulfilled expectations.
So here I was, thirty-one years old with a law degree from Columbia, a corner office overlooking Central Park, and a bank account that could buy this entire street, house-sitting my parents’ place while they lived their best retired life in Sarasota.
Because apparently, when your perfectly successful life imploded from the inside out, you went back to where it all started and hoped something would make sense again.
I grabbed my bags from the trunk and walked up the front path, noting how Mrs. Patterson across the street was definitely curtain-twitching from behind her Christmas-themed drapes.
Small towns never changed. By tomorrow morning, everyone would know exactly when I’d arrived, what I was driving, what I was wearing, how long I’d stayed in the driveway before going inside, and probably what I’d had for breakfast. The Everdale Falls gossip network had always been more efficient than any social media platform.
The key was under the ceramic frog, exactly where it had been since I was twelve years old and was deemed old enough to be home alone after school, but not responsible enough to carry a key around with me.
Fair decision. Some things never changed in Everdale Falls, which was either deeply comforting or mildly depressing, depending on your current relationship with progress and personal growth.
Inside, the house smelled like cinnamon potpourri and whatever furniture polish Mom had been using since the Carter administration.
Everything was exactly as I remembered—same floral couch that had witnessed countless homework sessions and PlayStation tournaments, same family photos marching up the staircase in chronological order, same wooden bowl on the kitchen counter that had held car keys and loose change for decades.
I dropped my bags and walked through the rooms, reacquainting myself with the geography of my childhood.
The living room where Matt and I had built elaborate LEGO cities.
The kitchen where Mom had attempted to teach me to cook with varying degrees of success and kitchen fire incidents.
The back porch where Dad and I had spent summer evenings talking about everything and nothing while watching the sun set behind the mountains.
My old bedroom had been converted into Mom’s craft room, complete with a quilting station that looked like mission control and enough yarn to stock a small textile factory.
Dad’s study was now a reading nook with a recliner that appeared capable of swallowing a person whole and never releasing them back to productive society.
The guest room would have to do, which was fine.
I wasn’t planning to stay long anyway. Just long enough to figure out whether I wanted to go back to New York and resume my perfectly successful, soul-crushing career, or find some alternative that didn’t involve panic attacks disguised as diarrhea in courthouse bathrooms.
I was unpacking my suitcase—noting how my expensive suits looked ridiculous hanging in a closet decorated with baseball-themed wallpaper from 1987—when I heard a car door slam next door.
The sound was followed by voices, muffled but animated, which piqued my curiosity enough to glance out the window.
And then I froze completely.
Holly Winters was standing in the driveway of 45 Maple Street, pulling luggage from the trunk of a Honda Civic that had clearly seen better days and possibly better decades. But it wasn’t the car that made me stare with the intensity of someone who’d forgotten how to blink—it was her.
Jesus Christ.
The slightly overweight teenager who used to follow me and Matt around like a determined puppy with pigtails and an endless supply of questions had grown into.
.. well, into a woman who could stop traffic on Fifth Avenue during rush hour.
Her dark hair caught the porch light as she moved, longer now and piled up in a messy bun that still had the kind of casual sophistication that suggested she’d learned things about being an adult woman that teenage Holly had only dreamed about.
Even from my second-floor vantage point, I could see she’d gained curves in all the right places—and I mean all the right places.
Even under the oversized hoodie and sweatpants, I could see her fuller figure in all its glory.
She moved with a confidence that was entirely new and completely mesmerizing, like someone who knew exactly how good she looked and wasn’t apologizing for it.
I watched her pull a suitcase from the trunk. When she straightened and pushed her hair back from her face, the gesture was unconsciously elegant, the kind of natural grace that some women spent years trying to cultivate.
This was not the Holly Winters I remembered.
The Holly I remembered. She’d been sweet and smart and occasionally annoying in the way that best friend’s little sisters were specifically designed to be. I thought she was cute back then, a bit chubby, but cute and bubbly, and it suited her.
This Holly—this grown-up, curved-in-all-the-right-places, moving-with-confident-grace Holly—was an entirely different category of problem.
I watched as Mr. Winters immediately took charge of the heaviest bags with the kind of paternal efficiency that suggested this homecoming had been eagerly anticipated. Mrs. Winters supervised and chided Holly’s dad to lift with his knees.
Holly laughed at something her dad said, and the sound carried across the narrow space between our houses.
I remembered that laugh—bright and infectious and completely genuine, the kind of laugh that made everyone around her smile, whether they wanted to or not.
Some things never changed, even when everything else transformed beyond recognition.
She glanced toward my parents’ house, probably noticing the lights I’d turned on, and I stepped back from the window before she could spot me lurking like some creepy neighbor conducting unauthorized surveillance. Which, technically, I suppose I was now.
From my new position slightly behind the curtain—because I was apparently a thirty-one-year-old man with the emotional maturity of a teenager when it came to surprisingly attractive neighbors—I continued watching as Holly organized her luggage with the kind of systematic efficiency that suggested she approached most things in life with strategic thinking.
Even from a distance, I could see her gesturing as she talked with her parents, hands moving expressively in the way she’d always done when she was excited or nervous or working through complicated thoughts.
Some habits were apparently eternal, which was oddly comforting in the midst of my current life crisis.
What was less comforting was the way my body was responding to this new version of Holly Winters. Seeing her as a confident, gorgeous woman was making those old feelings that I tried to deny seem quaint by comparison. Chubby, sweet and bubbly was all grown up, and it was fucking with my head a bit.
This was problematic for several reasons, not least of which was that I was supposed to be using this sabbatical to figure out my career crisis, not to develop complicated feelings about my best friend’s sister.
Matt had always been protective of Holly in the way that older brothers were genetically programmed to be, and I had no interest in testing the limits of our friendship by explaining that I’d spent the last twenty minutes cataloging everything attractive about his sister.
Plus, Holly was clearly dealing with her own situation. All the boxes and suitcases suggested she was moving back home in some kind of life transition that probably didn’t need the complication of her childhood neighbor developing an inconvenient attraction.
I forced myself to step away from the window and return to unpacking, but I found myself listening to the sounds of her homecoming with more attention than was strictly appropriate.
The slam of car doors, the murmur of family conversation, the eventual quiet that suggested they’d moved all the boxes inside where I couldn’t accidentally eavesdrop.
The silence left me alone with the realization that my sabbatical had just become significantly more complicated.
I’d come to Everdale Falls expecting to spend a few weeks in quiet contemplation, maybe doing some hiking, possibly reading all the books I’d been meaning to get to for years.
I’d envisioned peaceful mornings drinking coffee and watching the mountains, the kind of restorative solitude that would help me figure out whether I wanted to return to corporate law or find some alternative that didn’t require anxiety medication.
What I hadn’t anticipated was having the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen arrive next door at practically the same time I did, looking like every fantasy I’d never admitted to having and probably dealing with her own complicated life situation that would make any romantic interest from me inappropriate and poorly timed.
The universe, it seemed, had a sense of humor about my attempts at simple solutions.
I finished unpacking mechanically, hanging up clothes and organizing toiletries while my brain processed this new variable in my carefully planned retreat from reality. Holly Winters, grown up and gorgeous and living thirty feet away from my temporary bedroom window.
This was either going to be the most awkward few weeks of my adult life, or.
.. what? What was the alternative? That I’d somehow work up the courage to approach her, that she’d be interested in reconnecting with her brother’s old friend, that we’d discover some kind of meaningful connection beyond my appreciation for her physical transformation?
The realistic answer was that I’d spend the next few weeks being politely friendly while privately struggling with inappropriate attraction to someone who probably remembered me as that older kid who’d tolerated her presence during summer afternoons and helped her with algebra homework when Matt was too impatient to explain things properly.
My phone buzzed with a text, interrupting my spiral into romantic pessimism. The message was from my assistant back in New York: Morrison asking about your return timeline.
Already? For fuck’s sake. I’d been gone a day.
I stared at the message for a long moment, thinking about my corner office and my pending cases and the partnership track that was supposedly waiting for my return.
Three weeks ago, those things had felt like the most important elements of my life.
Now, sitting in my childhood bedroom while processing the reality that Holly Winters had grown up into someone who could probably distract me from any amount of career ambition, those Manhattan priorities felt distant and oddly irrelevant.
I typed back: Timeline still TBD.
Which was true, even if my timeline calculations had suddenly become more complicated than simple career contemplation.
I set my phone aside and returned to the window, noting that the Winters’ house had settled into nighttime quiet.
When was the last time anyone had been that excited to see me come home? When was the last time I’d felt like I belonged somewhere specific rather than just occupying expensive real estate?
The questions were uncomfortable enough without adding Holly-related complications to my already uncertain future planning.
But as I finally turned away from the window and prepared for my first night back in Everdale Falls, I couldn’t shake the image of her confident smile or the way she’d moved with such natural grace.
Couldn’t stop wondering what had brought her home, whether she was planning to stay, how she’d react to discovering that her childhood neighbor had returned at exactly the same time.
Some coincidences felt like fate testing your commitment to making good decisions.
Others felt like opportunities disguised as complications.
Time would tell which category this particular coincidence belonged to, but either way, my quiet sabbatical had just become infinitely more interesting.
And possibly infinitely more dangerous to my peace of mind.
As I settled into the guest room bed and listened to the familiar sounds of Everdale Falls at night—wind through the mountains, the distant hum of the highway, the occasional car door from neighbors returning home—I realized that coming back here had already changed something fundamental about my perspective on what I wanted from life.
Maybe it was the reminder of what home felt like when it was chosen rather than just convenient. Maybe it was the contrast between a small-town community and Manhattan isolation.
Or maybe it was the reality that Holly Winters had grown up into someone who made me question everything I’d thought I knew about my priorities and my future.
Some homecomings were definitely more complicated than others.
Especially when they involved discovering that your best friend’s little sister had become the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen, and you had absolutely no idea what to do about it.