Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
LUKE
Eight Months Later
“What, um—” I peered up through the giant gaping wound in the living room ceiling, through the second floor and the attic beyond, to where a few snowflakes leftover from last night’s blizzard drifted across the twilight sky. “What happened here?”
The man-child beside me coughed lightly. “Well. I, ah… I think you’ve got a brand-new hole in your roof, Mr. Williams.”
I nodded slowly. “Yup. Thank you, Murray. Yes. Now that you say it, I do believe it is a hole in the roof.” I stared up some more. “Any insight into how it might have gotten there?”
“Oh. Well.” Murray pulled his hat down more firmly over his ears and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
He was tall—half a foot taller than my five-eight frame, at least—but still just nineteen and gawky as all heck.
He craned his neck and peered up also, like the answer might be written in the heavens.
“Uh, I figure… I figure it’s ’cause this bit of roof ain’t where it’s s’posed to be? ”
He kicked lightly at the large pile of snow, plaster dust, and rotten wood that stood like a miniature Matterhorn in the middle of the wide-planked hardwood floor.
Murray was not wrong. The plaster and lath were not where they were supposed to be. Nor where they’d been just the day before.
But then, many things seemed out of place in the postapocalyptic “fairy-tale adventure” I’d “embarked on” last summer… including, I sometimes thought, me.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” I agreed gravely, staring down at the pile of junk. “Murray, excellent observation.”
He beamed. “Do you know, I’m kinda starting to maybe understand why old Ben Pond gave his house away in that essay contest last year?”
I chuckled ruefully. “Yup. Funny how that happens, huh?”
I hadn’t understood it either when I’d first won.
I’d been too excited at the prospect of living in a historical treasure, owning acres of land where I’d raise sheep and host fiber arts retreats, and having a whole town full of new friends, to really question why a man would just give away his family’s property to a stranger and leave town.
My friends back in North Carolina had wrinkled their noses and said if things sounded too good to be true, they probably were… but I’d known better. Unexpected good things happened at least as often as unexpected bad things, especially if you worked hard and kept an eye out for them.
That was why, when I’d first parked my old hatchback out front last summer, I’d thought I’d found my own little slice of heaven.
The building looked incredibly square and incredibly sturdy.
Three stories of cream-and-gray stone were capped with a slate roof and four—four!
—chimneys that stood like sentries looking over the yard.
Ivy grew lazily up the columns that supported the portico over the mammoth front door.
The yard had been a bit overgrown, sure, but I wasn’t foolish enough to expect perfection.
In fact, I’d been gleeful at the idea of getting my hands dirty before school started in the fall—clipping the bushes, mowing the grass, getting the barn ready for the three rare breed Romeldale sheep that were due to arrive in just a few weeks’ time.
I’d sent a picture to my mom, and she’d immediately replied, “You got your Happily Ever After, baby! Congratulations!” which was exactly how I’d felt.
I thought I’d found my place—the place where I could make a difference and have a purpose. The place where all my half-formed dreams were waiting for me. I’d found a ready-made home.
Then I’d unlocked the front door with the big skeleton key the lawyers had given me.
It had opened with a creak… and the entire doorframe had fallen into the front hall with a thud, startling a flock of birds that had flown out of the house and directly at my face, resulting in a manic do-si-do that had left me sunny-side-up in the yew bushes beside the front steps.
I’d gotten wise pretty quickly after that.
“Have you thought about maybe getting the roof… fixed?” Murray suggested tentatively.
Something about his hesitation made me smile. “I have, I promise. It’s the next item on my list. But it’s a very long list. But I’m a man with a short bank account.”
“If you want, when I come take care of the sheep tomorrow, I can bring you over a big tarp, just in case it snows again,” Murray offered. “Can’t hurt, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said tiredly. “That’d be great.”
“I can try to put it up for you, too—”
“Oh, no. Heck, no. That’s dangerous. I’ll take care of it.”
I wasn’t sure how the fudge I’d get a tarp on a three-story-high roof either, especially on my own in the snow, but I was sure I could figure something out.
“And don’t forget to tell me how much I owe you for the last two weeks, okay? I know you’ve got a tuition payment coming up.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Mr. Williams.”
I squeezed Murray’s shoulder in acknowledgement.
And since the front door still didn’t have operational hinges, I steered him toward the back door through the ruins of the kitchen—a room which managed to pair cracked Formica and a crumbling, soot-stained brick fireplace in an aesthetic I was calling Early Eclectic Hovel, which was gonna become trendy any day now.
“You remember I said you should call me Luke, right?” I said once we’d stepped out into the cold night. “You’ve been taking care of my sheep and plowing my driveway for months now. And when you feed a man’s ruminants, it bonds you, Murray. In many cultures, we’d be family.”
Murray snickered. “You’re really funny, Mr. Williams. I—” His face fell comically.
“Oops! Luke. Forgot already. Sorry! It’s just that all Olin ever says at home is ‘Mr. Williams does’ this and ‘Mr. Williams said’ that, so it’s hard to remember.
You’re his favorite teacher, you know, and my parents are really happy with how much he’s learning. ”
“Aw. That’s nice to hear.” I taught first grade, so I didn’t have a lot of competition for the “favorite teacher” title, but it was nice to hear that people thought I was doing a good job… even though I was sure certain other parents would disagree.
I couldn’t help glancing across the snowy fields that separated my property from Sunday Orchard and the family of sweet, gorgeous lumberjacky types who lived there. I quickly looked away before my thoughts could linger too long on one lumberjacky type in particular: Webb Sunday.
Not everybody has to like you, I reminded myself. It’s okay.
Murray kept talking. “And for sure you’re Aiden Sunday’s favorite teacher… even if you did kind of lose him that one time and Webb got all upset.”
I sighed. “I was doing my job,” I mumbled in protest, though it didn’t seem to matter how many times I repeated it since Webb didn’t seem inclined to hear me, and neither did anyone else. “And I didn’t lose him.”
“Sure.” Murray nodded sympathetically. “You just sort of… misplaced him.”
I sighed again.
Murray wasn’t entirely wrong.
I wasn’t a person who had regrets—mistakes were just learning opportunities, after all—but I greatly, profoundly, completely, entirely regretted listening to Principal Oliver last fall when she’d told me to let Aiden Sunday leave school with his mother though I knew the boy lived with his dad.
In my defense, I’d only been in town a couple of months.
I hadn’t understood the contentious custody dispute brewing between Webb Sunday and his ex-wife.
I definitely hadn’t understood that Amanda Sunday was known in the Hollow for being thoughtless and irresponsible and that Principal Oliver was one of her only remaining local friends.
I’d simply gone along with what my boss told me, despite an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.
But Webb hadn’t cared about any of that when Aiden hadn’t gotten off the bus that afternoon. He’d lost his mind. And roughly four months and eight attempts to explain myself later, Webb still crossed the street when he saw me coming, so he clearly still held me responsible.
The worst part was, Webb wasn’t the only person in town who wasn’t joining the Luke Williams fan club. I got the idea that the rest of the folks in the Hollow didn’t quite know what to do with me either.
People were friendly, of course. Heck, I didn’t think folks around here knew how to be unfriendly. They always smiled and said hi. Waved back when I waved first. Chitchatted if I initiated it. Nobody was overtly unkind to me ever.
But also I definitely didn’t feel like I was one of them. Not yet.
And being an outsider didn’t just mean that my social calendar was absurdly empty, it also had a real impact on my ability to do… well, anything related to my house.
The renovation loan I’d tried to get from Pippin Hollow Credit Union had been denied due to a length-of-residency clause that no one had mentioned when I’d first applied.
I’d tried to sell off a portion of my newly acquired land to finance the repairs, and I’d been told I needed a “clean title”—which apparently meant getting someone to search through a billionty years of Ben Pond’s family’s history and mark out the lot lines.
The only lawyer in town, Curt Simons, had claimed a conflict of interest and referred me to a guy in Two Rivers, who’d taken my retainer and promptly stopped returning my calls for three months.
It had taken a minute for me to connect the dots, but then I’d understood.
The Sundays were Little Pippin Hollow. Their family had lived on their land for centuries, and everyone in town—even someone as new as me—knew that if you wanted a person to coach kids’ soccer, or contribute to your fundraiser, or help build your barn, Webb Sunday was the man to ask.
So if Webb didn’t like me, it made a strange kind of sense that the rest of the town would keep me at arm’s length, too. I couldn’t even be mad about it, because it was the kind of small-town loyalty I’d craved to be a part of…
It just stank that I wasn’t a part of it.
But I kept hoping that if I worked hard and stuck around long enough, things would change.