Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
MAC
The last place I wanted to be right now was The Sweet Spot, but my sisters hadn’t given me much choice. Hudson wasn’t the only one leaving today—Nat had a plane to catch, too. And since the four of us hadn’t been able to spend much time together since she’d gotten home, we were taking advantage of a post-school drop-off breakfast date.
Nat felt okay leaving town since Daddy had been released from the hospital and was on the mend with strict orders from Dr. Harris to lie low, start a modest exercise program, and cut out unhealthy eating and stresses. All of which he absolutely hated.
He also hated the fact that the doctor suggested he take at least six weeks off. But Momma wasn’t even satisfied with that number and was pushing for more. A lot more. Like…retirement-more. Nothing like near-death to scare one into action—or inaction, as the case may be.
I didn’t know what that meant for Havenbrook or my place as acting mayor, but I’d fill in for as long as they needed me to. And they did. It was something I kept repeating to myself, shoving down my negative self-talk. Trying not to let myself dwell on my deepest insecurities.
“You’re mopey as all get-out today,” Rory said, practically shoving me through the door. “I know Hud’s leavin’, but surely y’all’ve already planned the next time you’ll see each other.”
No, we hadn’t. We hadn’t so much as spoken since last night before I’d been pulled away. Which meant I’d never gotten a chance to talk to him about his proposal. Which was probably a good thing, because I still didn’t know what I’d say.
Last night, I’d had to practically drag Edna out by the hair with Gran assisting. And after I’d gotten Gran to promise to keep tabs on Edna and not let her out of her sight, I had had to go back in and smooth things over with Earl as well as Henry, the manager at the VFW where we’d had the party.
Luckily, the place had been mostly empty when the yelling match had started. Although, to be fair, even if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have scared away the patrons. If anything, word of the fight had brought them in.
By the time I’d gotten it all settled, Hudson had been gone. And he hadn’t reached out since.
I loved him with a ferocity I barely knew what to do with, but I didn’t know how to make it work. I didn’t know how to be in love with someone, how to give them all of myself, while still giving more than I had to the town and my family. Trying to prove myself once and for all.
I turned around and glared at my bossy, overbearing older sister. “Quit pushin’ me around like I’m one of your minions.”
Rory just rolled her eyes and swept a flyaway strand of hair back from her face. “Not sure how else to get you movin’. You’re draggin’ your feet more than Ella did this mornin’ before school.”
“Speakin’ of Ella,” Will cut in. “Has she had any more trouble with that boy she punched?”
Nat hooted and clapped her hands together, as if this were the first time she’d heard the story and it hadn’t been recounted a dozen times since she’d been home. “God bless that girl.”
Rory heaved a sigh. “Not as far as I know. That girl’s lips are sealed tighter than a tick on a dog’s ear. I have to resort to gettin’ most of my info from her best friend’s momma.”
Since the remodel, The Sweet Spot had been hopping, especially with the addition of the tables they’d put in to encourage customers to sit and stay awhile. With the line to order nearly at the door, the four of us grabbed a table and decided to wait until it died down a bit.
I sat and went through the motions, pretending to listen to my sisters chatter on, while in actuality I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Hudson. On him leaving. On him asking me to leave with him.
On him telling me I wasn’t needed in Havenbrook.
Those words had cut deep. Sliced my heart right in two. It was one thing to have your insecurities staring you in the face, whispering in your ear every chance they got. But it was something else entirely to have the person you loved more than anything confirm them aloud.
I knew he hadn’t done it maliciously. He probably had no idea that what he said had hurt me as badly as it had. Hudson didn’t do cruelty, and certainly not to me.
Hell, for years, he’d been attempting to atone for a stupid accident when we were just kids. The night I’d told him it was over, I’d found yet another marble on my kitchen counter after he’d left. No note. No fanfare. Just him, thinking about me. Loving me.
“Okay, seriously,” Nat said, poking me in the side. “What the hell is wrong with you? We’ve been talkin’ about my alien abduction for five minutes, and you haven’t so much as blinked.”
I looked up, finding all three of my sisters staring at me. Concern blanketed Will’s face—which meant Avery hadn’t spilled to her best friend, thank God—Rory was irritated, and Nat just looked amused. As much as I would love my sisters’ perspectives, I still wasn’t so sure I could give voice to my deepest insecurity. Not when each of them had an active role in its inception in one way or another.
“Mac?” Will asked, placing a hand over mine and squeezing. “Is it about Hud? Are y’all okay? I noticed y’all didn’t talk much last night.”
“Yeah, what the hell was that about?” Nat sat forward, resting her folded arms on the round table. “I figured y’all would’ve been fucking like crazy since it was his last night. Or was it some role-play thing? Y’all pretend to be strangers and then fuck like crazy?”
“ Natalie ,” Rory hissed, shooting surreptitious glances over her shoulder to make sure no one overheard. From the looks our table was getting, everyone in the shop definitely had.
Nat just rolled her eyes and waved a hand. “We’re all adults here, Rory. I thought Nash extricated that stick from your ass? I’m gonna have to tell him his technique needs a little work if you’re still this uptight.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort! He…techniques me just fine.”
Nat and Will burst out laughing, and even I couldn’t stop a soft chuckle from spilling out. Rory just shifted in her seat, her face turning a lovely shade of red as she attempted to glare at us.
“Y’all are the worst,” she said.
“The best ,” Nat corrected, then turned to me and poked me in the side. “Now, unless you wanna hear more about how well Nash techniques our sister, you’d better start talkin’.”
I met each of my sisters’ gazes, finding nothing but underlying concern even if they tried to pull it off as something different. They may’ve had a tendency to overlook me, but I never doubted they cared for me. Loved me. Okay, maybe Rory, but that was history and had been for a while.
So, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes briefly, and then said the one thing that had been plaguing my heart for as long as I could remember but I’d always been too scared to voice aloud. “I’m not needed here.”
Will’s brows drew in, her head tilting to the side. “What do you mean? Like, right now? Town hall’s gonna be crazy in about an hour. Give it time.”
I breathed out a laugh and shook my head, staring down at the table. “I’m not just talkin’ about town hall, but no one can deny I was the last person y’all thought about for that job.” I met each of my sisters’ gazes and watched the dawning recognition, along with underlying guilt, in their eyes.
I didn’t want them to feel guilty, but I did want them to understand.
With a shrug, I said, “I’m the last person y’all think about for anything. It’s always been my place in the family, and I thought I’d made peace with it. But then Hudson…” I swallowed down my words and crossed my arms over my chest, donning my only means of armor. “You know what? Never mind. It’s dumb. It’s my issue, and I’ll deal with it.” I pushed to stand. “Y’all ready to eat?”
“Um… no. ” Rory yanked me back into my chair by the hem of my sweater. “I’m ready to hear what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”
God, how did I even begin to explain to my sisters all the times they’d left me behind—both figuratively and literally? All the times they looked to the others for what they needed, but not to me.
Never to me.
I could chalk some of it up to being the natural course of things that evolved over the years. We were all adult women and had our own lives, our own friends, our own support systems. But both Hudson and Will had been mine, and they’d both left me at one time or another—Will doing it twice, too wrapped up in Finn to pay attention to much else. Very clearly not feeling the same need for me as I did for them.
To my horror, tears stung the backs of my eyes. As much as I tried to swallow down the lump that was suddenly in my throat, it just grew and grew until my chest felt so tight, I was sure there was no place left for my emotions to go but out.
What a perfect time to have an emotional breakdown—while in the most hopping morning location in all of Havenbrook. A place that just happened to be owned by the love-of-my-life-but-not-boyfriend’s family. A not-quite-boyfriend who was leaving in mere hours.
The thought of that only amped up my emotions, and it took all my focus to hold my shit together. My sisters were speaking to me and someone’s phone rang, but I couldn’t pay attention to anything else but trying to hold myself together.
Unable to do it any longer, I stood again, my chair sliding back and scraping against the floor in my force to escape. “I need to?—”
“What?” Rory asked, her voice high-pitched and laced with panic. She held her phone up to her ear, her eyes wide. “How long ago?”
I exchanged glances with Will and Nat before focusing my attention back on Rory, my urge to flee taking a back seat to the terror in Rory’s voice.
“And you’re just callin’ me now ?” she yelled, paying no mind to the other customers that looked on in curiosity. “Well, get the damn sheriff down there! And the rescue team!” Her eyes went wide, her face blanching. “What do you mean, there’s no rescue team? Who’s gonna find her?”
At the first mention of a rescue team, my training kicked in. A calm washed over me, erasing every emotion I’d been bogged down with and replacing them with adrenaline.
“Rory. Rory, ” I said again, shaking my sister when she didn’t respond. “What’s happening?”
“Ella. She’s—” She cut herself off, a sob breaking free.
I took the phone from her hands and held it to my ear while Nat and Will surrounded Rory. “Who is this?”
The person on the other end of the line cleared their throat. “Mrs. Price, the principal at Havenbrook Elementary. I was just informin’ Ms. Haven that we have a situation down at the school. Ella’s gone missin’. And we…we have reason to believe she’s somewhere in the woods.”
The wooded property near the school was across the street and nowhere near the playground. It was also thousands of acres large and did not have warning flags dispersed around to help guide my niece.
“Call Sheriff Halsey immediately and have him meet me at the school. And tell him to bring as many officers as he can find.”
“I—I don’t have the authority to demand that.”
“ I do. This is Mackenna Haven, acting mayor. And I expect every available pair of hands to meet me at the school.” Without saying goodbye, I ended the call and sprang into action.
“Rory.” I gripped my crying sister by the shoulders and gently shook her until I finally had her attention. “I need you to try to remember for me. What was Ella wearin’ today? Was she in something bright?”
“She—” Rory swallowed, her voice shaky. “She was in jeans and a light-up Christmas sweater. That one you got her. I told her it was too early to be wearin’ it, but she loves those things as much as you do.”
I smiled. “Good. That’s good.” I put my arm around my sister and guided her to the door. Time was wasting. “It’ll help us find her in the cover of the trees.”
Or if we couldn’t find her until after dark.
I kept that thought to myself, though, because Rory was barely holding it together as it was.
“I need to be there,” she said, almost in a daze. Suddenly, she spun around, her eyes wide. “Nash! I need to call Nash.”
“Already handled it, crazy pants.” Nat’s voice was warm despite her words. “He was halfway to a job in Parkersville, but he’s speedin’ back this way. And I’ll let the sperm donor know, too,” Nat said, referring to Rory’s ex-husband.
“Y’all get her to the school.” I shuffled Rory into my sisters’ arms. “I’ll head over in my Jeep.”
I left off the fact that I needed my car because I needed the rescue bag I always kept inside, complete with first aid kit. Rory’s mind was no doubt already producing horrifying scenarios, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to add to them.
The four of us burst out the front door, Will, Nat, and Rory heading toward Will’s car, while I went in the opposite direction. Or I tried to, anyway. Instead, I ran face first into a body that smelled an awful lot like home to me.
“Kenna?” Hudson asked, holding me out by the shoulders to steady me. With one look at my face, his brows drew down and his spine snapped straight, his eyes darting over my shoulder to where my sisters had fled before scanning the space around us. A soldier on alert. “What’s wrong?”
I swallowed down my fear, focusing instead on the job I had to do. “It’s Ella. She’s lost in the woods by the school.”
Recognition dawned on his face. The only woods by the school were the same ones we’d hiked through to get to the Ridge. The same ones experienced hikers needed classes on just to traverse. And my eight-year-old niece was roaming them by herself.
As much as it hurt to be this near Hudson and not be able to fall into his chest and take comfort from him, I couldn’t now. Time was wasting, so I had to shove all of it down and focus on the task at hand—finding my niece and bringing her back safely.
I was ready for this. I was trained for this. And, for once, I didn’t doubt my ability to do it.