Chapter 1
Harper
The U-Haul made a sound like a dying goose every time I shifted into third, and I had been shifting into third for six hours, and by the time I crossed the county line into Clover Ridge I was singing along to a Dolly Parton song through tears that I was telling myself were just from the air conditioning.
The air conditioning was not the problem.
The air conditioning was not, in fact, even working.
The air conditioning had committed suicide in a Cracker Barrel parking lot outside Knoxville and I had been driving with the windows down ever since, and my hair was a situation, and my mascara was a situation, and the front seat of the U-Haul was a situation because somewhere around hour four I had eaten a bag of pretzels and a Slim Jim and a sleeve of Oreos like a feral raccoon and the wrappers were everywhere, and I had a half-empty Big Gulp of Dr Pepper sweating between my thighs because the cupholder had broken in Chattanooga.
This was not how I had pictured coming home.
I had pictured coming home, when I'd pictured coming home, with a successful bakery behind me and a fiancé in the passenger seat and a small ladylike SUV in a color called driftwood or bone and a Pinterest board on my phone titled Christmas at Mama's: Tablescape Ideas .
I had not pictured coming home thirty years old and broke and dragging a yellow rental truck full of mixing bowls and grief down Main Street like a one-woman parade for everything that had gone wrong in the last eight months.
Clover Ridge looked exactly the same.
I want to put that down because there's something cruel and kind about it both at once, the way a place will refuse to change for you.
It looked the same as it had at Christmas, and at Christmas the year before, and the Christmas before that, all the way back to when I'd been five years old and my mama had put me up on her hip outside Pearl's Diner and pointed across the street at the courthouse and said that's where me and your daddy got married, sugar .
The trees down Main were the same. The diner sign was the same.
The Methodist church on the corner was the same, with the same crooked weather vane on the steeple that the deacons had been threatening to fix since the Clinton administration.
The flower shop on the corner of Main and Magnolia had a new awning — blue striped, very pretty — and a hand-painted sign that said Bloom in script, and I knew without being told that was Briar's place.
Cade had told me. Cade had told me a lot of things on the phone over the last six months when I'd cried to him about Nashville, and one of them was that the brothers had all started settling down with women who'd showed up in town one by one over the last couple of years, and Briar was the first, and the flower shop was beautiful, and I should go see it when I got home.
I drove past it slow. I made a small private promise to myself that I would go in there tomorrow.
My storefront was three doors down.
I want to be honest about my storefront.
My storefront was a disaster. My storefront had been a sandwich place that had gone under two years ago, and then a vape shop that had gone under last fall, and now it was just a long narrow rectangle of dust and bad fluorescent lighting with a counter at the back and a kitchen behind that and a single bathroom that smelled, when I'd first gone in, like a small animal had died in the wall.
The realtor had been a woman named Connie who had said bless your heart in roughly the same tone you'd say bless this mess to a toddler with cake in its hair, and she had let me have the lease for nine hundred dollars a month because she felt sorry for me, which was the kind of charity I was going to take and not ask any questions about.
I parked the U-Haul out front. I sat there for a minute with my hands on the steering wheel.
The thing about losing a business is that nobody tells you how it feels in your hands.
They tell you about the money, and they tell you about the lawyers, and they tell you about the credit, but they don't tell you about your hands.
My hands had built a bakery in East Nashville.
My hands had pulled three hundred croissants out of an oven on the Saturday before Christmas and laid them out in the case with the steam still coming off them.
My hands had piped Happy 50th, Linda on more anniversary cakes than I could count.
My hands had signed the lease and signed the loan and signed the partnership papers with a woman named Joelle Bryant who had a smile like a knife and a vision board on the wall of her apartment and who had stolen forty-three thousand dollars from our shared business account in February and vanished off the face of the earth, and now my hands were on the steering wheel of a U-Haul in front of a vape-shop-turned-sandwich-shop-turned-empty-rectangle in my hometown, and they were shaking a little, and I was thirty years old, and I was very tired.
I cried for maybe ninety seconds.
Then I wiped my face with the bottom of my t-shirt and got out of the truck.
Cade pulled up before I'd even gotten the rolling door open on the back.
I heard his bike a block away — I'd know the sound of my brother's bike with my eyes closed in a snowstorm, that particular grumbly throaty noise it made when he was downshifting — and by the time I had the U-Haul's back door cranked up he was already off and walking toward me with his arms out and that big stupid face he made when he was trying not to be emotional in public.
"Hey, sis."
"Hey, big man."
He hugged me. Cade hugs the way he does everything, which is wholeheartedly and a little too hard, and he picked me up an inch off the sidewalk and squeezed and put me back down and looked at me with my chin in his hand the way he'd been doing since I was ten.
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"You're skinny."
"I'm not skinny, Cade, I'm just tired."
"You're skinny, Harp. Mama's gonna feed you."
"Mama can feed me but she cannot bully me into being okay before I'm ready."
He looked at me a long second. He's three years older than I am and he has our daddy's quiet eyes, and there are about four people on this earth who can read me with that much accuracy, and Cade is two of them.
He nodded, like he'd taken what I'd said and put it in a box for later, and then he turned and looked at the storefront.
"Okay," he said. "It's a project."
"It's a project."
"You sure you don't want Mama and Daddy to know you're moving back?"
"I want them to know I moved back when I have something to show them. I want a sign on the window and bread in the case and an apron on, and then I want Mama to come down here and see it. I don't want her to come down to a vape shop and start crying."
"She's gonna cry no matter what, Harp."
"Yeah, but I want her to cry happy."
He laughed at me. He pulled his work gloves out of his back pocket and put them on. "Alright. We unload. I called in some help. Briar's gonna bring you flowers, Nadia's coming by with some leftover decoration stuff from the gala, and Boone's gonna come out and help with the heavy lifting."
I dropped the moving blanket I'd been holding.
I bent down to pick it up because it was easier than letting Cade see my face just then.
"Boone's coming?" I said into the blanket.
"Yeah. Why?"
"No reason." I straightened back up. I had my face on. "I just hadn't seen him in a while."
"Christmas before last."
"That's a year and a half, Cade."
"He's been here. You're the one who hasn't been here."
This was both a fair point and not a fair point, and I was not in a fighting kind of mood about it, so I let it go.
I let it go and I helped Cade get the loading ramp down and I climbed up into the dark hot interior of the U-Haul and I started passing boxes down to him and I told myself, very firmly, with all the conviction I had, that I was not going to do anything stupid about Boone Dalton today.
It is important for me to be honest about Boone Dalton.
I have been in love with Boone Dalton for six years.
I knew the day it happened. I can tell you the date if you'd like, and I can tell you what I was wearing, and I can tell you the smell of the brisket on my mama's smoker, and I can tell you that there was flour on my cheek because I'd been rolling out pie crust since five in the morning and I was too tired by the time the party started to check a mirror.
It was a Saturday in late June, six years ago, and I was twenty-four years old and home for the weekend from Nashville, and I was hauling plates of food out to the porch where my brother and his best friend in the world were sitting in rockers like they'd been sitting in those exact rockers their entire lives — which, more or less, they had been.
I had handed Boone a plate. Our fingers had brushed across the rim.
He had looked up at me. I had smiled at him.
He had looked at me.