Chapter 30
The morning started at six.
Meghan set up her station in the staging area behind the Baptist church—a folding table, a borrowed mirror, and the kit bag she’d been hauling to every parade prep session for three weeks.
She’d learned early on that people who worked with horses for a living did not think about their hair.
After the first week, she’d added bobby pins, a lint roller, and a travel-size bottle of the holding spray Dorothy Nolan called “the good stuff.”
The deputies arrived first.
Four men, pressed uniforms, hats in hand. She had already measured them, already knew their collar sizes and how they wore their hair, but she checked each one anyway—smoothing a collar, tucking a stray edge, brushing lint off a shoulder. They stood stiff and patient while she worked.
Curtis’s wife came next, wanting the pin curls they’d discussed three times by phone and twice in person. Meghan rolled and pinned and sprayed while Curtis stood by the trailer in his cavalry uniform and pretended not to watch his wife getting her hair done.
The reenactment riders filtered in after that. A woman in a riding habit wanted a low bun. A teenager needed French braids that would fit under a helmet. One of the men asked if Meghan could “do something about this,” gesturing at his entire head, and she trimmed his sideburns and called it done.
By 8:30, everyone who needed touching up had been touched up, and Meghan stood at the edge of the lot with her kit bag over her shoulder, watching the staging area become a parade.
The horses were lined up along the corral fence.
The sheriff’s four quarter horses, groomed and tacked, their riders mounting in a row.
The Percheron, hitched to the carriage Dan had polished until the black lacquer caught the morning sun.
The grand marshal—Cal Maddox, who’d apparently lost whatever argument he’d been having with Richard—sat in the carriage in a sash he clearly wished he could remove.
His expression suggested he was already calculating how long until this was over.
The reenactment riders spaced themselves according to Richard’s laminated diagram, which three of them were consulting at the same time. Curtis’s wife was in the carriage behind Cal, pin curls intact, waving at nobody in particular.
And the chestnut stood at the end of the line. Calm, still, her coat brushed to a shine. Curtis was in the saddle looking like a man who’d been given a gift he wasn’t sure he deserved.
Wyatt was with the Percheron.
He stood at the big mare’s head, one hand on the bridle, checking the bit and browband and the decorative brass fittings Meghan had helped select two weeks ago. He wore a clean shirt—not new, but clean, tucked in, sleeves rolled to the forearm the way they always were.
His hair was shorter than when she’d first cut it, trimmed again last week in her chair. His chair now. A thing she thought about more than she was willing to admit.
He looked up and found her across the lot. Thirty feet of gravel and horses and people in costumes between them, and his eyes found hers like there was nothing in the way.
He nodded. She nodded back. That was enough.
Richard appeared from somewhere with a bullhorn he didn’t need and a clipboard he absolutely did, and the staging area shifted into motion.
Sheriff’s patrol first. Reenactment riders next.
Then the carriage with Cal and the Percheron, followed by the floats, the marching band, and everything else Richard had been orchestrating since January.
The parade stepped off at ten. Meghan walked to Main Street and found a spot near the pharmacy, where she could see the procession coming down the hill.
The town was out. All of it, or close enough.
Families in lawn chairs. Kids on shoulders.
The bench outside the barbershop occupied by four men Meghan had known her entire life.
Betsy standing in the diner doorway with her arms crossed and a dish towel over her shoulder.
Elissa and Sadie together near the bookstore, Sadie waving a small flag she had gotten from somewhere.
The sheriff’s horses came first. Four abreast, steady, their hooves on the pavement making a sound like slow applause. The crowd clapped. A child squealed.
The horses didn’t flinch.
Then came the reenactment riders, spread out along the route. Curtis rode the chestnut, sitting tall, the mare stepping through the noise and crowd and flags as though she’d been born for this. As though three weeks ago she hadn’t refused to walk past a trash can.
Then the Percheron. The big mare came around the corner pulling the grand marshal’s carriage, her feathered feet falling in that heavy, measured rhythm Meghan had watched a dozen times at the staging area.
Cal sat in the carriage, looking like a man enduring a dentist appointment. The crowd loved it. Someone shouted his name, and Cal lifted one hand—barely, just enough to qualify—and the crowd cheered louder.
Wyatt was beside the Percheron, walking at her shoulder, one hand on the bridle, the other at his side.
He wasn’t looking at the crowd. He was watching the horse.
Her ears, her stride, the set of her head.
He was making sure, being steady, doing the thing he’d spent a month preparing for with the quiet focus of a man who cared more about the work than the applause.
Meghan was proud of him.
The word arrived without warning. She was standing on the sidewalk outside the pharmacy, watching him walk past with a sixteen-hundred-pound horse and a carriage full of reluctant grand marshal, and the word that came to her was proud.
She’d watched him build this. Patient mornings, the willingness to start over every time the chestnut refused. And here it was, walking past her in the sun.
The carriage passed.
Wyatt didn’t look at her. He was focused, eyes on the Percheron, hand steady on the bridle.
But as he moved past the pharmacy, his free hand—the one at his side, the one the crowd couldn’t see—lifted two fingers.
The same gesture he’d made from the truck that first night, driving away from the salon with a haircut he hadn’t planned on.
Meghan smiled.
The floats came next. The middle school marching band, slightly out of tune and fully committed.
The garden club’s truck, decorated with crepe paper and live flowers already wilting in the heat.
Richard’s convertible—because of course Richard was in a convertible—with a banner that read HOPE HOLLOW FOURTH OF JULY CELEbrATION and Richard waving with both hands like he was running for president.
Meghan watched it all. The parade, the crowd, the town doing what it did every summer—coming together, showing up, filling the sidewalks with lawn chairs and children and flags.
The same storefronts. The same mountains rising behind the rooftops. The same people she had known since she could remember.
Then, through the crowd on the opposite sidewalk, she saw Brynn. She stood near the hardware store, alone, arms folded loosely across her chest. Watching the parade quietly, from a slight distance. Taking it in without making herself part of it.
Their eyes met. Across Main Street, over the heads of children and through the gaps between passing floats, Meghan looked at Brynn and Brynn looked back.
Neither smiled. Neither looked away. The parade moved between them—band, float, another float—and each time the gap cleared, they were still looking.
Meghan lifted her hand. It was barely a wave. More like an open palm held at her side for one second. An acknowledgment that she was here, that Brynn was there, that the distance between them was measured in more than the width of a street.
Brynn lifted hers back. Same quiet acknowledgment from the other side of a road neither of them had crossed in years.
Then a float passed between them, and when it cleared, Brynn had turned back to the parade. Meghan turned back too.
The marching band rounded the corner. Richard’s convertible headed toward the square. The crowd clapped, and the sun was high, and the town celebrated the way it celebrated everything—together, loudly, with laminated schedules and bunting and a reluctant grand marshal who would rather be fishing.
Meghan stood on the sidewalk and felt something shift—the way a bone shifted when it had been set wrong and someone finally moved it toward the place it was supposed to be.
She wasn’t there yet.
But she was closer.