Chapter 45
Forty-Five
Wren
The Harvest Festival dawns clear and cold, the light gold and everyone’s breath showing. I run the whole thing on four hours’ sleep, three bite marks, and the steadiest heart of my life.
I can feel them. That’s the part I’m still getting used to, this first morning after.
The bond’s a low warm hum under everything now, three separate signals of where-you-are that don’t switch off.
Cal’s off by the main stage hauling tables, bright and easy.
Eli’s running the safety walk-through with the search-and-rescue crew, steady as a pulse.
Rhett’s somewhere near the coffee, up to something, obviously.
I don’t have to look to know where any one of them is.
It should feel like too much. It feels like the exact opposite. It feels like never being lost again.
The bake tent is the thing that gets me, though.
It’s Marigold’s. Her design, her poles, her hand-painted RISE & SHINE banner that Della dug out of the storage loft and hung without telling me, so I walked in at dawn and had to go stand behind the ovens a minute to get my face right.
Marigold ran this tent for years. Now it’s full, floor to canvas, two hundred cider donuts, ninety loaves, four sheet cakes, a line already curling out the flap.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever built, and she built it first, and I get to carry it.
I talk to her a little, quiet, over the fryer, the things I don’t say out loud.
Told you I’d keep it going. Didn’t disappear after all.
You’d have hated how right you were about this town.
The morning’s a blur of the good kind. The whole town turns out in flannel and fall light.
Mrs. Alder installs herself beside the caramel apples as self-appointed quality control and terrorizes the volunteers.
The Pelham twins run a betting pool on the pie contest and get caught by the pie judge, who is also a Pelham.
Kids everywhere, half of them in dogs’ sweaters, half the dogs in kids’ hats.
Dot Hale moves through it all like a general who’s already won the war.
I sell out of cinnamon rolls by ten and start the emergency batch.
Every hour or so, one of my alphas drifts through to steal a kiss and a day-old.
The town has decided this is the most charming thing ever to happen in the county and applauds each occurrence.
The one bit of real drama, if you can even call it that, comes at noon.
Somebody at the funnel-cake stall two tents over lets a fryer get away from them. There’s a whoosh, a flare of flame up the side of the rig, a yelp. And before the crowd’s finished turning to look, before I’ve even got my heart up into my throat, it’s over.
My three are just there. I don’t know how they cross the distance that fast. Eli’s got the extinguisher, Cal’s killed the propane, Rhett’s already hauled the stall kid back by the collar, and the whole thing is out, dead, done, in about ten seconds flat, smooth as a dance they’ve run a thousand times, because they have.
The flame’s gone before the funnel-cake guy finishes swearing.
Nobody’s hurt. Nothing’s lost but a batch of batter and everyone’s heart rate.
The whole festival, which has stopped to watch, lets out one breath and then a cheer, because that’s the town’s second-favorite thing after the romance, watching its firemen be exactly what it keeps them around for.
My three wave it off, easy, already turning back to whatever they were doing.
Cal catches my eye across the crowd and winks, like it was nothing, like they didn’t just put a fire out between one breath and the next.
I damn near propose on the spot. My whole body lights up with a want that’s got nothing to do with the fire and everything to do with three men who make saving the day look like a shrug. The bond hums, smug, on all three channels at once. Later, I promise it. There’s a festival to finish first.
At two o’clock I count the cash box behind the tent flap, twice, because the first time through I don’t believe my own arithmetic.
Marigold’s ledger called it to within a couple hundred dollars — twenty-two years of Octobers telling her exactly what this town shows up hungry for.
The tent just bought the shop its winter.
Most of an oven, too. I stand there a second with the zipped bank bag hugged to my chest like a warm loaf, doing the only math that has ever once come out on my side, and I look up at her banner and let her have the told-you-so.
The dessert auction is the last event, late afternoon, the light gone amber, the whole town packed in around the little stage.
It’s a fundraiser, Marigold’s baby, the firehouse and the bakery run it together.
The deal is simple. Local bakers donate, folks bid, the money goes to the fire department, and everybody pretends the bidding is about the pie and not about who’s sweet on whom.
It’s been a matchmaking event in disguise for decades.
Dot told me. Dot’s extremely proud of it.
I donate a lemon tart. Marigold’s recipe, off the softest card in the box, the one Mrs. Alder’s sister taught her forty years ago. I make it perfect. It’s the best thing in the case, and I say that with total humility.
Dot auctions it last, on purpose, the little schemer, holding it up in the gold light. “Miss Wren Bailey’s lemon tart,” she announces. “Marigold’s own recipe. Who’ll start us off?”
“Twenty,” says Cal, immediately, far too loud.
“Twenty-five,” says Rhett, from clear across the crowd, not looking up from his coffee.
The town starts to laugh.
“Thirty,” Cal says, glaring across at him.
“Fifty,” says Eli, quietly, and the crowd oohs because Eli never says anything, so when he does, it lands like a gavel.
“A hundred,” says Rhett.
“A hundred and, hold on—” Cal’s visibly doing math on his fingers. “All of it. Whatever he said, plus every dollar I have on me.”
The whole festival is howling now. Dot’s wiping her eyes.
And I stand by the stage watching three grown alphas, my three, bid against each other for a lemon tart in front of God and everybody, and I finally catch what they’re doing.
The loud, ridiculous, public thing, done on purpose because a bakery, a firehouse, and a whole town are watching.
There’s no better place on earth to say it.
“Okay, okay.” Rhett holds up a hand, grinning, and turns to the crowd instead of the stage.
“Full disclosure, since we’re not fooling a soul.
We’re not really bidding on the tart. Well.
We are. It’s a hell of a tart. But mostly we’re informing the town, official-like, that the baker comes with it.
She’s ours, we’re hers, all three, bonded and everything.
So you can all quit taking bets.” He looks at me, and the joke goes soft at the edges.
“That do it, trouble? Official enough for you?”
The whole town turns to look at me. Every last flannel-wearing, cider-drinking one of them, plus Dot, plus Mrs. Alder, plus Marigold’s banner snapping gently overhead.
The old me, the one who came here to be nobody, would have died on the spot. Would have wanted the ground to swallow her. Would have gone small, deflected, and found the nearest exit.
I climb up on the stage instead. I take the microphone right out of a delighted Dot’s hand.
And I say it to the whole town, in the gold afternoon light, under my aunt’s banner.
“It’s official. They’re mine. Sold, to the three idiots in the back, for all the money Cal has on him.
” I grin. “Tart’s still fifty bucks, Cal. Pay the fund.”
The place comes apart. Cheering, whistling, the Pelhams weeping without shame, Mrs. Alder banging her cane in approval, Della with both hands pressed to her face.
My three shove through the crowd toward the stage, and I can feel all of them coming, three warm signals converging on me at once, and I don’t move an inch, because for the first time in my life I don’t want to run from the thing barreling toward me. I want it to arrive.
They reach me at the same second, and it becomes an undignified four-way pileup on a festival stage that this town will be dining out on for a decade.
Somewhere over Cal’s shoulder I catch Della’s eyes on us, smiling, and then her eyes drift, without her meaning them to, toward a big search-and-rescue guy by the cider stand who isn’t looking back. But that’s Della’s business, not mine.
This one’s mine. The bake tent’s full. The festival’s running. My aunt’s banner’s flying overhead. Her lemon tart just sold for fifty dollars and a public declaration. And I’m standing on a stage in the middle of a town I came here to disappear into, thoroughly and permanently found instead.
Best festival I’ve ever run.
I’ve run exactly one.