2. Jessica
Jessica
The silence woke me up.
Not an alarm. Not the garbage truck that hit my street at five forty-five every Tuesday and Thursday like clockwork.
Not the upstairs neighbor and his apparent nightly commitment to rearranging every piece of furniture he owned.
The silence. The actual, physical absence of sound pressing against the windows of my apartment in Copper Creek, Texas.
It was as if the whole town had collectively agreed to shut the fuck up and let a person think.
It was amazing.
I lay in bed for a full minute just listening to it. Birds. Something distant that might have been a tractor or might have been nothing. The creak of the building settling into itself the way old buildings do when they're not in any particular rush. That was it. That was the entire soundtrack.
And Hunt. Standing at the sink in that clean shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and the water dripping off his hands.
The jaw that had sharpened into something that belonged on a magazine cover and had no business belonging to a man who rebuilt transmissions for fun.
The shoulders that filled the doorframe.
Those brown eyes coming up to meet mine across the kitchen and the way they'd held — steady, warm, seeing everything the way they always had, except now they were sitting in the face of a man who was so absurdly, unfairly, suddenly beautiful that my brain had stalled in his mother's kitchen like an engine that had been flooded.
I groaned into the pillow.
The quiet boy who used to let me steal half his sandwich and never said a word about it.
The kid I left behind at eighteen with the baby face and the shy eyes and the hands that were always busy.
That boy had grown into something that I hadn't seen coming and that I wasn't mad about. Not even a little bit.
I rolled onto my back, stared at the ceiling, and let myself sit with it for a moment.
Just the warmth of the surprise. The very welcome, very unexpected, very delicious surprise of coming home to find that my best friend had turned into the most beautiful man in the state of Texas when I wasn’t looking.
In New York, my nervous system had been running a background program for ten years called Ignore Everything, and it had been so efficient that I'd stopped noticing how much energy the ignoring took.
Now the program had nothing to process. And my body — my stupid, traitorous body that apparently had opinions it hadn't consulted me about — responded by exhaling so deeply that my ribs ached.
Like lungs remembering what full actually felt like.
I got up. Padded barefoot to the kitchen — temporary, furnished, nothing in it that belonged to me except the coffee maker I'd shipped ahead because some things are non-negotiable.
I made it strong and black and stood at the kitchen window and drank it, and the loosening in my chest was still there.
The same feeling that had hit me on the porch the night I arrived — the relief I wouldn't name, the exhale I hadn't earned.
Quieter now. More like a hum than a revelation.
I stood next to it the way you stand next to a bonfire — close enough to feel the warmth, far enough to pretend you're not drawn to it.
The window looked out over a street with three cars on it.
In Manhattan, I could see three hundred from my bathroom window, and every single one was angry about something.
I drank my coffee. Strangely, I didn't feel restless.
I used to feel restless here — in my teeth, in the balls of my feet, the constant itch of a girl built for speed living in a town that operated at walking pace.
Now the walking pace felt like mercy, and I wasn't ready to think about what that meant.
The suitcase was still open on the bedroom floor, half-unpacked from the night before, and I knelt beside it and pulled out the pale yellow sundress Mom had seen on Instagram eight months ago and texted me about — oh Jessica Lee, that yellow is your color — the one that had hung in my New York wardrobe ever since, waiting for an occasion that never came.
The occasion had arrived.
I yanked it over my head, tied the sash, ran my fingers through my hair in front of the mirror. My hands weren't quite steady as I put on my lipstick, but I told myself it was the coffee.
I drove the six minutes to my parents’ house with the window down, letting the sweet honeysuckle scent the flitted through Miller’s Road filter through the cab.
I pulled up at the curb and killed the engine and stayed where I was a second with both hands on the wheel.
The porch swing was moving, and there wasn't enough wind for that, which meant Mom was already in the kitchen window watching me sit in this truck.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and held them there hard, because I wasn't walking up that path with mascara on my cheekbones after a decade away.
There would be questions. There would be an investigation.
I wasn't, under any circumstances, having an investigation before breakfast.
My parents' house smelled the same.
Butter and flour and something with cinnamon already in the oven and the particular warmth of a kitchen that has been loved every single day for thirty-five years.
It hit me in the doorway, and something in my chest just..
. unlocked. This feeling I wasn't expecting and didn't have a plan for.
Relief. Not small relief. Not oh-good-I-made-my-flight relief.
The kind that buckles the back of your knees and makes your whole body understand it's been clenched for months.
I was home.
I didn't know I needed to be home until the smell told me.
"Oh, baby." Mom's hands were on my face before I'd crossed the threshold.
Flour on her fingers, warm palms cupping my jaw, pulling me down because Evelyn Williams was five-foot-two and had never let that stop her from anything.
She wrapped her arms around me, and I folded.
Just folded into her. My face in her neck and her hand on the back of my head, and she smelled like vanilla and Tide and every safe thing I'd ever known.
I held on longer than I meant to.
She let me.
Dad waited his turn because that was his way.
When Mom finally released me, he stepped in and pulled me into his chest — one arm, solid, his chin on top of my head — and the squeeze said everything his mouth didn't. I'm glad you're here, and I missed you, and I love you, delivered in the language of Ed Williams, which was physical and economical and required no translation if you'd spent your whole life learning it.
I had to rearrange my face after that because I wasn't going to cry over a hug and baked goods at eight in the morning.
"Let me look at you." Mom held me at arm's length, her eyes doing that full-body scan that mothers perform in under two seconds with military-grade accuracy. Her mouth flattened. "Jessica Lee."
Here we go.
"Sit down. You look thin."
"Good morning to you, too, Mom."
"Are you eating? You're not eating. I can tell. A mother can tell." She pointed at the table with a flour-dusted hand. "Sit."
I sat. A plate appeared in front of me before my ass fully made contact with the chair.
Eggs, scrambled, the way she'd been making them since I was six — a little butter, a little cheese, salt that she measured with her heart instead of a spoon.
Toast cut into triangles because Evelyn Williams didn't serve square toast to her daughter and never had and never would.
"Jessica Lee, eat something."
I ate something. The eggs were perfect. Of course they were.
My eyes stung. I ate my eggs.
"So the Henderson place," Dad said, settling into his chair and unfolding the paper. "Still got that rooster."
"No."
"Attacked the new mail carrier last Tuesday."
"That rooster is immortal," I said through a mouthful of toast. "It will outlive us all."
Mom set a glass of juice beside my plate without being asked.
"Dorothy Sullivan says they should have it removed.
That it's a liability. She has about fourteen opinions about that rooster, and she shared every single one at the pharmacy last week, and Margaret Hendricks had to pretend she had a phone call just to escape. "
"Dorothy Sullivan has fourteen opinions about everything," Dad said, not looking up from the paper. I bit back a laugh.
"I saw her yesterday. She looked at me like I was a tax return she hadn't finished auditing," I said.
"Give her time." Mom's voice carried the warmth of a woman who had lived in this town for forty years and understood its rhythms the way she understood rising dough. "She looked at Callie Monroe the same way when Clay Blackwood brought her home. She came around."
"How long?"
"Eight months."
"I'm a master at winning people over. I’ll have her wanting to be best friends in half that time."
Mom laughed. Dad's paper rustled — his version of a laugh.
And somewhere in the middle of it — somewhere between the rooster and Dorothy and Mom refilling my juice without asking — Mom slid a plate in front of me without a word.
A cinnamon roll. Fresh from the oven. The size of my fist, still warm, the glaze melting down the sides in slow rivers.
Mom's cinnamon rolls were legendary. Thick, pillowy rolls that pulled apart in layers, and she had been making them exactly the same way since I could walk.
I took a bite, and it was a truly religious experience.
"Mmmm." The sound came from somewhere deep and primal and entirely beyond my control.
My eyes closed. My shoulders dropped. The cinnamon was warm and buttery, and the bread was so soft it barely needed chewing.
I took another bite. "Oh my God." The glaze was on my fingers, and I licked it off because this wasn't the time for manners. This was the time for surrender.