Chapter One
Thirteen Years Later
Piper woke up to her screams, sweat pouring from her body.
The nightmares were always the same. She watched her parents’ deaths over and over again for the past thirteen years.
Sometimes the man who pulled the trigger, murdering them both, had a face, and sometimes he didn’t.
She went to enough therapy sessions to know that she was intentionally blocking out his face, not wanting to see the evil that took her parents from her.
Each time she woke from the nightmare, she felt like that scared twelve-year-old girl all alone in the world.
Sure, she had her Aunt Lorna, who raised her after her parents’ deaths.
Her grandmother, Agnes, didn’t put up much of a fight to keep her in New York.
Once Lorna showed up, the day after her parents’ murders, the police released her into her aunt’s care.
Lorna told Agnes that she wanted to take Piper back to Colorado with her and raise her as her own.
Piper expected her grandmother to raise a fuss, but she was surprised at just how much her father’s mother didn’t seem to care.
Sure, she shed a tear when asked to identify her son and daughter-in-law’s bodies, but she seemed cold and distant the rest of the time.
Aggie didn’t even hug Piper goodbye when she left the police station.
She told her that she wished her well and if Piper ever needed anything, to please let her know.
Lorna showed up the next day to claim Piper and take her back to Colorado.
She was a mess, crying as if she had witnessed the murders herself.
As for Piper, she hadn’t cried since she got into the officer’s car.
It was as if her tears dried up. Even though all the questioning and having to identify the two men who took her parents away from her, she never shed a tear.
Her therapist later told her that it was okay for her to grieve in any way that felt normal to her.
There was no right or wrong way to mourn her parents.
Life felt both normal and completely changed once she and Lorna got back to Colorado.
They settled into the routine of her small town, and Lorna even moved into her parents’ home.
It was next door to the ice cream shop, and it made life easier on Piper not to have to give up the only home she ever knew.
Lorna didn’t want to uproot Piper’s life any more than it already was, so her aunt gave up her small apartment to move in with her.
Lorna tried to run the ice cream shop for a few months but found the new responsibility of raising Piper and running a business to be too much.
Piper agreed with Lorna that closing the shop was the only way to go.
Lorna got a job at the little library in town, and the two seemed to manage.
When Piper turned sixteen, she got a waitressing job at the diner in town.
It was the only local place to eat out, so business was usually decent.
It felt good to be able to help her aunt out with the tips that she made.
People would ask her when she was going to reopen her mom’s shop, to which she would smile and shrug.
She toyed with the idea but wasn’t sure if she even wanted to stay in Harvest Ridge.
When she was eighteen, she received a letter from her parents’ lawyer telling her that a trust had been set up for her by her parents before their deaths.
She was to inherit a small sum of money when she turned twenty-one.
The question was, what to do with it? She graduated from the local high school and took a month to travel around the country with Sunny.
The two lived in the back of Sunny’s VW Bus, and Piper couldn’t remember being happier.
The last time she felt happy was with her parents.
That summer, Sunny told her that she was going to take over her grandmother’s bakery back in Harvest Ridge.
The bakery, Bee’s Buns, and Piper’s parents’ ice cream shop were in the same building.
Since Lorna shut down the ice cream shop, the bakery stood next to the boarded-up ghost of a building.
Sunny had a dream that she and Piper could join forces and reopen the ice cream shop.
“We’d be invincible! We would corner the market on sweets in town,” she said.
Sunny was relentless in pushing Piper to take a chance and a leap of faith for a change.
Piper agreed, partially to shut Sunny up and partially to accept her best friend’s challenge.
Piper never backed down from a dare, especially one issued by her best friend.
So, they moved back home and got to work effectively, ending their summer of freedom.
Piper decided to live in her childhood home since it was convenient to the ice cream store and well—free.
She and Sunny chose bright paint colors for both stores.
Sunny painted her entire store a lime green color with black accents.
The inside of the bakery had black and white photos of baked goods that Sunny took.
Her best friend was probably the most talented person Piper knew.
Sunny persuaded Piper to paint the ice cream shop hot pink with white stripes.
At first, Piper was against anything so girly, but after they were finished, she had to admit that her parents’ old shop came back to life.
The place never looked better. She didn’t want any reminders of what life used to be like when her parents were by her side.
Reminders of what she lost were too painful.
She wanted the shop to have a fresh start, just like her.
She renamed the place Scrumptious, leaving the past behind.
In her back office, she kept a small picture of her and her parents—the only reminder that Piper could bear to have around.
She didn’t want to rest on her laurels on what her parents built.
She wanted to show the town what she could do; this was her chance.
The town welcomed Piper and Sunny’s new places with open arms. The one thing about Colorado was that people ate ice cream even in the dead of winter.
Her days were filled with hard work serving people and smiles from friends and neighbors.
Piper’s nights were another story. She would walk a few feet to her little house, which Sunny also convinced her to paint hot pink to match the shop, and lock herself away from the outside world.
She could feel herself withdrawing from everyone around her, but she was too afraid to put herself out there.
Her aunt persuaded her to go back to her childhood therapist. Honestly, being told that regression is normal when your brain suffers from seeing something as horrific as your parents’ murder was somewhat comforting.
She could at least work to try to claw her way back to the present.
It would just take some hard work and a lot of billable hours paid to her therapist. Lorna decided to get a place of her own in the summer after Piper turned twenty-three.
She told Piper that she needed to see what life had in store for her.
She couldn’t blame her aunt for wanting to find a place and live her life.
After all, Piper was an adult now. On her days off, Lorna helped around the shop, and Piper was grateful for the company.
Working and running a business alone proved to be just that —lonely.
Sure, she could run next door and hang out with Sunny, but both shops were usually pretty busy.
The only thing that kept Piper going was the thought of Thursday.
That was the one day of the week that the entire town shut down.
It was like the old days when everything would be closed on Sunday, and people were forced to spend time together.
Piper decided to put her therapist’s recommendations into practice and go on a special outing each Thursday.
Sometimes she would drag Sunny or Lorna with her, and sometimes she would go it alone.
She was learning how to assimilate back into society, forcing herself out of her home’s comfort zone.
She knew that reopening her parents’ shop would take its toll on her mental health; she just didn’t realize how much of a homebody she became until she forced herself out each week.
At first, the trips out were almost painful.
She found herself watching her phone, hoping for any excuse to go back home and shut the outside world away.
But she reconnected with old friends from high school and even went to lunch with some of them.
Over time, she learned to enjoy her Thursdays and eventually looked forward to her days off.
Sunny was just as much of a driving force behind pushing Piper back into the land of the living as her therapist was.
God bless her, Sunny didn’t expect anything in return.