Chapter 28
She hadn’t planned it. She’d driven out to buy peaches—Wyatt had mentioned wanting to grill them again before the Fourth—and Elissa was standing at the tomato table, squeezing a Roma.
“Hey,” Meghan said.
Elissa looked up, smiled, and set the tomato down. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“I was wondering if you’d tried the white peaches yet. They just came in.”
They shopped together.
Peaches. Tomatoes. A bag of green beans Elissa said she was going to cook and Meghan suspected she’d forget about until they went soft in the back of the fridge.
The farm stand was quiet for a Wednesday—only a couple of tourists at the honey table and a woman with a toddler on her hip examining strawberries.
They paid and walked to the parking lot. Elissa’s car was next to Meghan’s, so they stood between the two vehicles with their bags, the way they always did. Not quite ready to leave, not quite committed to staying.
“How’s the parade coming?” Elissa asked.
“Richard has a laminated schedule. Multiple copies.”
“Of course he does.”
“He also has a backup schedule in case of rain. And a backup to the backup.”
Elissa laughed.
Meghan smiled.
The banter was easy between them—familiar, comfortable, the kind of exchange that required no effort because the friendship underneath it had been load-bearing for twenty years.
Meghan shifted the bag of peaches to her other hand. The moment was right there. She could feel it. The opening. The pause. The space in the conversation where a different kind of question could fit.
She’d been holding it since Friday night on the sidewalk, through a weekend of silence and a week of turning Brynn’s sentence over in her head, and she was tired. She needed to let it out, but carefully.
Whatever was building between her and Brynn—the coffee on the counter, the slow Tuesdays, the five words on the sidewalk that had cracked Meghan’s story open—was fragile. New growth on old damage. Pulling Elissa into it felt too much like asking her to choose a side.
“Can I ask you something?” Meghan said.
Elissa’s expression shifted—a slight settling, a readiness. She’d been friends with Meghan and Brynn long enough to know what that tone meant.
She set her bag on the hood of her car. “Sure.”
Meghan looked at the peaches in her hand. Then the mountains. Then Elissa.
“Did something happen to Brynn?” she asked. “Something I don’t know about.”
She said it carefully. Just the question, stripped to its frame, leaving room for Elissa to answer however she needed to.
Elissa’s mouth opened, then closed. She looked down at the tomatoes in her bag, then back at Meghan. Her hands went to her pockets, came back out, folded across her chest. She took a breath and held it one beat too long before letting it go.
“I can’t answer that for her,” Elissa said.
“I know.”
“It’s not my story to tell, Meghan.”
“I’m not asking you to tell it.”
Elissa held her gaze for a long moment. Her jaw worked slightly, like she was chewing on words she couldn’t swallow and couldn’t spit out.
“You should ask Brynn that,” she said.
“I’m trying.”
The words came out quieter than Meghan intended. She heard them land between the two cars, and the weight behind them surprised her.
She was trying. She’d asked Brynn on the sidewalk if she was okay, and Brynn had answered with words that broke the world open, then said never mind and walked home.
Meghan had been standing in the aftermath ever since, holding pieces she couldn’t assemble, wanting to cross a line she had spent eight years building.
Elissa heard it. Whatever was in Meghan’s voice—the tiredness, the effort, the slow recognition that the story she had been telling herself for years might be wrong—Elissa heard all of it.
“I know you’re trying,” Elissa said.
They stood in the parking lot. A truck pulled in behind them.
The woman with the toddler came out of the farm stand, the child now holding a strawberry in each hand.
Normal morning with normal sounds—the world going about its business while two women stood between their cars and talked around the edges of something neither of them could say out loud.
“Keep trying,” Elissa said.
Two words. Simple. Weighted.
Meghan nodded. She picked up her bag of peaches. Elissa picked up her tomatoes.
“Saturday?” Meghan asked.
“Saturday. If we’re not all buried under Richard’s laminated schedules.”
Meghan smiled. Small, but real.
They got into their cars. Elissa pulled out first, lifting a hand as she turned onto the road. Meghan sat in the driver’s seat with the peaches on the passenger seat and the green beans she’d probably also forget about in the back.
She looked at the mountains through the windshield. Keep trying. Elissa knew something. That was clear now. Not suspected. Confirmed, as much as it could be without Elissa saying a single word she shouldn’t have.
She’d been holding Brynn’s story for years, the way she held everything—carefully, quietly, without letting the weight of it show. She’d watched Meghan and Brynn for years and never once betrayed either of their confidences.
But she’d said keep trying. Which meant the conversation was worth having. Which meant whatever waited on the other side of Brynn’s words was real and important and something Meghan needed to hear—not from Elissa, but from Brynn.
Meghan started the car and pulled onto the road.
The parade was in two days. The fireworks were in two days.
Wyatt was waiting for her at the staging area.
The town was decorated and scheduled and laminated within an inch of its life, and in the middle of all of it, Meghan was holding a question she didn’t know how to ask and an answer she wasn’t sure she was ready to hear.
Keep trying.
She would.
She just didn’t know when.