Cara
Iwrapped both hands around my glass and kept my eyes down, studying the condensation gathering at the base like it was something worth reading.
I was early for sister night, and Jasper was behind the bar.
I’d told myself, when I first sat down, that I wouldn’t look at him.
That lasted about four minutes. He had his back to me now, reaching up to replace a bottle on the high shelf, and I let myself take him in the way I couldn’t when he was facing me—the width of his shoulders under a plain grey shirt, the controlled economy of how he moved.
Efficient and unhurried like someone who’d had years of training in how to carry himself in a body that could do damage if it needed to.
The Marines had taken whatever quiet, contained quality he’d had at seventeen and sharpened it down to the bone.
His forearms were something I’d been carefully not thinking about all evening. Corded, tanned, his shirt sleeves pushed to the elbow in a way that shouldn’t have been as distracting as it was. I looked away before he turned back around.
He worked the bar the way he did everything else, present but contained.
A woman three stools down said something that made her friend laugh, angling herself slightly in his direction, and Jasper smiled at her—quick, charming, something that reached his mouth and stopped there.
He refilled her glass without leaning in.
No lingering. No reciprocation of whatever she was offering.
Just that pleasant, distant grin, and then he moved on, because the grin was clearly a courtesy, not an invitation.
I’d seen him do it three times tonight. Same smile. Same warm, closed door. The woman it was aimed at practically leaned into it and got nothing back—just that pleasant, practiced curve of his mouth, and then he’d moved on, like the smile was a courtesy he extended and immediately withdrew.
Then I’d walked in.
He’d looked up from whatever he was doing behind the bar, and for a half-second the polite mask slipped—or maybe it didn’t slip so much as dissolve, replaced by something more direct, more personal.
He’d smiled at me like he’d decided something and wasn’t bothering to hide it.
It was slow and deliberate. A smile that had a history behind it.
It hit me square in the chest before I’d taken three steps into the room.
It was an attraction that didn’t ask permission, that bypassed every reasonable argument I’d carefully constructed and went straight for the part of my brain that remembered exactly how it felt to sit across from him at fifteen years old and think, with complete and devastating certainty, that I was in serious trouble.
I took a sip of my drink and reminded myself that I was a grown woman who had built an entire life since high school and no longer succumbed to schoolgirl crushes. It didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.
Paige appeared beside me, leaning against the bar with the ease of someone who owned the place and never forgot it. She glanced once toward Jasper, then back at me with an expression that said she noticed everything.
“What’s going on with you?” she asked lightly. “And him.” She jerked her head in Jasper’s direction with a small smirk.
I sighed. Paige Darlington was in her element—tall, blonde, confident, completely at ease in a space she ruled. She had oldest-sister radar that never shut off, the kind that caught things before they became problems.
“Nothing,” I said automatically.
She lifted a brow. Just one. A warning.
“Uh-huh. Okay. Sure. Nothing.”
I shrugged and took another sip. “I’m just tired.”
“This is not tired,” she leaned close and whispered. “You’re distracted. By my bartender. Who seems to be equally distracted by you. Spill it.”
I didn’t answer because she wasn’t wrong, and Paige had always been dangerous when she was right.
Growing up, I’d always known I had four sisters—even if the word half technically belonged in front of it.
We were scattered across Honeybrook Hollow, connected by a shared last name and a father we didn’t talk about unless we absolutely had to.
Our grandparents refused to let that be the story.
They were firm, relentless, and entirely uninterested in excuses about complicated families or hurt feelings.
Summers together. Holidays spent at their house or at The Honeybrook Inn.
Random weekends that became traditions. The monthly Darlington Family Weenie Roast, which no one was ever allowed to skip.
They were determined that we would grow up as sisters—not polite acquaintances bound by blood, but real family.
To them, the idea of granddaughters drifting apart because of a man who couldn’t stay faithful was unacceptable.
Their stubborn, unwavering love stitched us together in ways none of us could have managed alone.
Paige followed my gaze briefly, then hummed under her breath. “Huh.”
“Don’t,” I warned.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. I know that huh. You’re thinking plenty. You’re probably speculating too. Maybe even planning what to say when you’re proven right.”
“It’s all good. You don’t have to tell me now.” She smiled, the kind that meant she would absolutely remember what she saw tonight. “I’ll know everything soon enough. Be prepared for gloating.”
My next oldest sister, Piper, would’ve already decided this was romantic.
Lucy would be turning it into a story in her head.
Eliza would pretend not to notice while quietly standing guard.
And I was the one who felt things deeply and had learned early not to ask for more than was offered.
I never told anyone I used to crush on Jasper—not then, and not now.
Some things I’d kept close, not out of embarrassment but out of protection, the way you don’t describe a fragile thing aloud because putting it into words makes its absence more real.
“Are they still coming?” Paige asked.
“In a bit,” I said. “Piper texted; she’s running late. Lucy’s finishing something. Eliza said is also running late.” I was no longer interested in sister night. I wanted to go home and ruminate on Jasper and his smile at me when I walked in. So very high school of me.
Paige nodded. “You okay to wait?”
I glanced back at Jasper without meaning to. He was wiping down the counter. When he looked up and caught my eye, that openness was still there. No retreat. No more careful neutrality.
My chest tightened. “I think I’m done for the night,” I said.
Paige studied me, then nodded. “Go home. We’ll reschedule.”
“Thanks.”
I stood to leave but hesitated. That was the part I didn’t let myself think about too much—the half-second where leaving felt harder than it should have, where something in me pulled back toward the bar and the man behind it.
But I managed to shake it off, hugged her quickly, grabbed my bag, and kept my eyes forward as I crossed the room.
I didn’t look back. I knew better than to trust myself if I did.
The drive home took me through the quiet heart of Honeybrook Hollow, the sky bruising into dusk above the rooftops.
Porch lights flickered, windows glowed warm against the cooling air.
Sycamore Street rolled past in familiar fragments—the darkened shopfronts, Piper’s bakery already closed, the soft hum of life settling in for the night.
I drove, hands steady on the wheel, letting the town move around me while my thoughts stayed stubbornly fixed on the bar I’d just left.
Honeybrook Hollow had always been good at holding history in plain sight.
Tonight, it felt like it was watching me carry mine home.
This town had never been big enough to keep secrets, and it certainly wasn’t big enough for separate high schools.
Kids from here, Willowmist Falls, and Sweetbriar all ended up funneled into Sweetbriar High—same buses, same classrooms, same shared history, whether we wanted it or not.
Back then, the towns felt farther apart than they really were.
Ten minutes could feel like another world when you were a teenager without a car. But everyone still knew everyone else.
I turned onto Sycamore and slowed without meaning to, the way I always did when I came to the shop from this direction.
I liked seeing it from the street. I liked imagining how it looked to people who didn’t know it the way I did—just a bookshop on a corner, lit warm against the dark, the painted sign above the door catching the light, the window display I’d spent an hour arranging visible through the glass.
I’d done it in deep burgundy and gold this week, a stack of mystery novels fanned around a ceramic crow and a scattering of dried leaves I’d collected.
A small string of copper lights framed the window, which I’d put up last weekend and which looked, if I was being honest, exactly as good as I’d hoped.
Three ceramic pumpkins sat along the window ledge—cream, rust, and deep green—each with a flameless candle glowing inside, steady and warm and visible from the street in a way that made the whole corner look like somewhere worth stopping.
I sat at the corner for a second longer than the empty road required, just looking at it. Then I turned into the alley and pulled into my reserved spot behind the building. I grabbed my bag, locked the car, and headed for the back door, already feeling the shift from town to home.