Chapter 27
The chestnut walked the full parade route on Monday without stopping once.
Down Main Street, past the pharmacy, past the hardware store with its propped-open door, past the sandwich boards and bunting and the two kids throwing a tennis ball against the courthouse steps.
Past the sound system being tested at the town square, which crackled and popped and sent a burst of feedback echoing off the storefronts.
Past all of it, head level, ears forward, stride easy.
Curtis walked beside her with a loose lead, glancing back at Wyatt every few steps like he was waiting for something to go wrong. Wyatt walked behind them both, hands in his pockets, watching the mare’s hindquarters for any sign of tension.
There wasn’t any. Her tail swung freely. Her weight was even. She moved through the noise and color and activity of a town three days from its biggest event of the year like she’d been doing it her whole life.
She hadn’t.
Three weeks ago, she’d planted her feet at a trash can and refused to move. Two weeks ago, she wouldn’t load on a trailer. Ten days ago, she’d spooked at a flag near the pharmacy and swung her hindquarters into the street. Now she walked past the same flag without turning her head.
Patience. That was all it had been. Not training, not technique, not some trick Wyatt had learned from a book or a clinic. Just showing up every morning, being the same thing, and letting the horse decide when she was ready.
Some mornings, she made progress. Some mornings, she went backward. Wyatt stood in the gravel and waited either way, because that was the only thing he knew how to do. And it had been enough.
Pop would have liked this horse. He would have liked her stubbornness, her independence, her refusal to be pushed past what she was ready for. He would have called her a thinker—his highest compliment for a horse, because it meant the animal was making decisions instead of reacting.
Curtis turned the chestnut at the intersection and started back up Main Street. Wyatt followed. As they passed the diner, he glanced through the window. Betsy was behind the counter. Cal was on his stool. And Meghan was in the booth by the window, watching them through the glass.
She saw him looking. She didn’t wave. She just held his gaze for one second—steady, warm, private—and then looked back down at whatever was in front of her. Coffee, probably. Her notebook. The morning routine she had built around this place and these people and, increasingly, him.
Wyatt kept walking. The chestnut kept walking. Curtis kept walking. And the town watched them pass—from storefronts and counters and benches.
It wasn’t just that the town was watching the horses. They’d been doing that since the first walk-through. But now, the town was watching him and Meghan.
It had started small. Betsy refilling their mugs at the diner without being asked, setting both cups down at the same time and looking at neither of them.
Cal, who never spoke to anyone under sixty, tipping his hat when Wyatt held the diner door for Meghan on Saturday morning.
Jessica Payne at the library, asking Meghan how parade prep was going and then glancing at Wyatt with a smile she didn’t bother to hide.
Greg Morrison had been the most direct. He’d stopped by the staging area on Friday to check some construction detail Richard had assigned him, and on his way out, he’d walked past Wyatt’s truck, where Meghan sat on the tailgate with her notebook.
“About time,” Greg had said.
To Wyatt. In front of Meghan.
Then he’d gotten in his truck and driven away.
Meghan had looked at Wyatt. Wyatt had looked at the ground.
Neither of them had said anything, but her mouth had done the thing it did when she was trying not to smile—the corners pulling in, her jaw tightening just slightly—and he’d had to walk to the corral and check on a horse that didn’t need checking.
He wasn’t used to being seen. That was the truth of it. He’d spent most of his adult life on the edges of this town—driving through on his way to a call, stopping at the diner or the hardware store, getting his hair cut in a chair that wasn’t the one he wanted.
He was Hal Haynes’s grandson. The farrier. The quiet one with the truck. People knew his name and nodded when he passed, and that had always been enough.
Meghan had changed that. With her, he was visible.
Not because she drew attention. She wasn’t loud or flashy.
She didn’t do anything that made a room look twice.
But she was known. She grew up here. She cut half the town’s hair.
She was woven into Hope Hollow in a way Wyatt, with his Knoxville childhood and summer visits and three years of full-time residence, was not.
Being with her put him inside something he had been standing next to for years. He didn’t mind.
That surprised him. He’d expected the visibility to feel like pressure—the weight of small-town attention, the conversations at Betsy’s counter and in the checkout line at the pharmacy and over fences in backyards.
He’d expected to feel exposed, the way the chestnut used to feel exposed when she walked past something she didn’t trust.
But this didn’t feel like pressure. It felt like belonging. Like the town had looked at the two of them and decided, collectively and without discussion, that this made sense.
Wyatt and Meghan at the diner. At the staging area. On the tailgate of his truck. A thing that fit. And the fitting was acknowledged with refilled coffee cups and tipped hats and two-word verdicts from Greg Morrison.
About time.
Wyatt helped Curtis load the chestnut onto the trailer. The mare walked up the ramp, stepped inside, and stood quietly while Curtis latched the bar. She’d decided the trailer was safe, and the decision held.
Wyatt stood in the lot and watched the trailer pull away.
The morning was warm. The parade was in three days.
The horses were ready. The town was ready.
The bunting was up, the route was marked, the sound system worked despite its best efforts, and Richard’s whiteboard had been photographed, laminated, and distributed to every committee member.
Wyatt walked to the diner and pushed through the door. Meghan was still in the booth, notebook open, pen in hand. She looked up when he came in.
“She walked the whole route,” he said.
“I saw.”
He slid into the booth across from her. Betsy appeared with a mug and the coffeepot. She poured, set the pot on the table, and walked away without a word.
Cal, on his stool, didn’t turn around. But his hat tipped forward, just slightly. Wyatt saw it.
Meghan reached across the table and put her hand on his. A small thing. Public. In a diner with windows facing Main Street, where anyone walking past could see.
Wyatt turned his hand over and laced his fingers through hers. Betsy, behind the counter, did not look up. But the coffeepot found its way back to their table twice more that morning, and each time, both mugs were filled to the top.