Wildwood Hearts (Wildwood Meadows #1)

Prologue

Easton

The summer before I left Wildwood Meadows, the heat came early.

The kind that made the air heavy and the sawdust stick to your skin.

Levi Holt always said you could tell what kind of man you were by how you handled summer work.

“If you can sweat through a July afternoon and still be decent company, you’ll make it just fine,” he’d told me once, handing me a hammer.

“Don’t cut corners,” he said, measuring a board. “A man’s work is what stays when he’s gone. Might as well do it right.”

I’d rolled my eyes, fifteen and too full of pride. “You sound like a damn fortune cookie, Levi.”

He laughed, deep and easy. “That right there’s your problem, Easton. You’re in too big a hurry to be older than you are.”

I sank the nail anyway, to prove I could do it just the way he’d shown me.

When the last board was laid, we sat side by side on the new steps, the smell of cedar thick in the air, our boots dusted with sawdust. Levi handed me a bottle of root beer from the cooler, cold and sweating in the heat.

“You’re good at this,” he said. “Building things. You could make something of it if you want.”

“Yeah?” I tried to sound indifferent, but my chest had gone tight. No one but Levi Holt had ever told me I could be something before.

“Yeah,” he said again. “You’ve got hands that know how to make something stay standing.” He paused, looking out over the fields. “That’s a gift, son. Don’t waste it.”

I didn’t know then that it would stick in my head for years. It would echo every time I picked up a hammer, every time I tore something down or built something up again.

By the time I graduated, I’d packed up and left Wildwood Meadows, thinking I’d build something bigger somewhere else.

I told myself I’d be back for the following summer.

I was, once or twice. Then life got away from me.

Work. Distance. Pride. I’d wanted to build something for myself to prove I could.

And one day, Levi Holt was gone. An accident. Just like that.

The sound of the phone call still lives somewhere in the back of my skull — Wade’s voice, tight and brittle, saying words that didn’t make sense at first. After that, I stopped coming home. I figured maybe the hurt would fade if I stayed gone long enough.

But grief doesn’t fade. It waits. It builds, like pressure behind a wall you never fixed right.