Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Colter
@rainfallreader: OMG she’s alive! We’ve missed you so much!
@greenthumbgrace: Been following since the beginning and I KNEW you wouldn’t have promoted them if you’d known. Welcome back!
@theatrekid4lyfe: Is that your brOTHER in the background of that rehearsal video?? THE John Patrick Bell??
@smalltownsteph: Gibson Hollow looks amazing. I’m adding it to my travel list!
@honestabe2024: Takes guts to come back. Respect.
@bookishbeth: You’re helping raise money for a LIbrARY. How can anyone hate on that?
@wanderlustwendy: That firefighter though
@mamabear3kids: Mistakes happen. What matters is how you handle them. You’re doing great.
I glanced in the rearview mirror at Oakleigh, who was telling some elaborate story about the science project she and her lab partner were planning. Something about volcanoes and chemical reactions that sounded like it had the potential to go very wrong.
“So then Mr. Hendricks said we could use the parking lot if we promised to clean up after, and I was like, obviously we’re going to clean up, we’re not monsters—”
“That’s great, sweetheart,” Swayze said from the passenger seat.
Oakleigh paused mid-sentence. “Are you actually listening?”
“I was totally listening. Volcanoes. Parking lot. Not monsters.”
I caught my daughter’s eye in the mirror. She rolled hers in return.
Swayze’s thumb moved across her phone screen, her brow furrowed in concentration. The glow painted shadows under her eyes.
“Anyway,” Oakleigh continued, louder now, “we’re also going to set off fireworks and adopt a llama to keep in the science lab.”
“That sounds awesome.”
“Swayze.” Oakleigh’s tone was more amused than annoyed.
She looked up, blinking. “What?”
“I said we’re adopting a llama.”
“Oh.” Color crept into Swayze’s cheeks. “Sorry. I’m being rude.” She turned the phone face-down on her thigh, but her fingers drummed against it.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, just checking on something. The pre-sale numbers are—” She stopped herself, shook her head. “It’s fine. It can wait.”
But thirty seconds later, the phone was back in her hand. Her thumbnail worried the edge of her case as she scrolled.
I turned onto the road leading up to Grandma’s place. “We don’t have to stay long if you’ve got work stuff.”
“No, I want to be here.” She said it with conviction, but her attention drifted back to the screen.
“I just need to respond to this one message. From a follower in Ireland who’s asking about international shipping for the theater tickets, which doesn’t make sense because it’s a livestream, but—” Another few taps. “Okay. Done.”
The phone went dark. She set it in the cup holder between us with deliberate care, like she was putting down something dangerous.
“There. Present now. Tell me about the llama, Oakleigh.”
My daughter laughed, warm and genuine. “There’s no llama.”
“Dang. I was getting excited. Did you know in some places they use llamas to guard vineyards?”
“Really? Do they, like… spit on invaders?”
“I have no idea. But they’re actually pretty big, so I know if I had one charging me, I would not be sticking around to wait for it to reach me.”
The discussion of weird guard animals continued until we reached Grandma Elsie’s, where the usual contingent of vehicles were already lining the drive. Sunday dinner meant controlled chaos, and today was no exception, as proved by the sight that greeted us as we stepped into the house.
“Alright, listen up!” Dean stood on a chair in the living room, wielding a Nerf Mega like some kind of foam-dart general.
“Teams are as follows—Bodie, Alia, Ramsey, and Fletcher on blue. Me, Gunner, Uncle Dee, and Blair on red. Emmaline and Elena are sitting this one out because pregnant and sensible, respectively.”
“I’m sensible,” Blair protested.
“You literally brought your own weapon.” Elena patted her wife’s arm.
Blair hefted a modified Nerf Rival with what looked like an extended magazine. “I like to be prepared.”
“Colter, Swayze, Oakleigh—you’re with me,” Dean continued.
Swayze looked up from her phone. “What?”
“Nerf war. For dish duty assignment. Losing team does dishes.”
“Oh.” She glanced at her screen one more time before tucking it into her back pocket. “Right. Okay.”
Oakleigh was already armed with her favorite pink and purple blaster, bouncing on her toes. “We’re going to destroy them.”
“That’s my girl.”
We scattered through the house. The rules were simple—get hit, you’re out. Last team with someone standing wins. Grandma had cleared the breakables years ago, after Fletcher accidentally took out a lamp during a particularly enthusiastic campaign.
I crept through the kitchen, scanning for movement and heard Oakleigh’s footsteps upstairs, lighter and quicker than anyone else’s. Ramsey’s bulk made him easy to track through the dining room.
A flash of movement caught my eye. Gunner, trying to flank from the hallway. I fired twice. The first dart went wide, but the second caught him square in the chest.
“Damn it.”
“Better luck next time, brother.”
The sound of rapid fire came from the living room—Blair’s modified monster, no doubt. Someone yelped, then Alia’s victory crow echoed through the house.
I caught sight of Swayze in the study, but she wasn’t exactly hiding. She stood near the window, phone in hand again, thumb moving across the screen. She held her Nerf gun loosely in her other hand, barrel pointed at the floor.
Fletcher came around the corner, saw her, and fired.
The dart hit her shoulder. She barely flinched.
“Got you!”
“Oh.” She looked down at the foam projectile that had bounced off her and landed on the rug. “Right. Yeah. I’m out.”
Relief flickered across her face as she headed for the kitchen. The safe zone. Where the eliminated gathered to watch the rest of the carnage unfold.
I pursued Fletcher instead, but my head wasn’t in it anymore.
The battle raged for another ten minutes. Dean’s team won after Blair managed to take out both Bodie and Ramsey with a single, perfectly angled ricochet shot that I was pretty sure violated at least three laws of physics.
“Dishes for blue team!” Dean declared.
“We demand a recount,” Ramsey said.
“You demand to do dishes?”
“Fair point.”
I found Swayze in the kitchen, leaning against the counter. Her phone screen glowed between her hands.
“Checking scores?” I asked.
She startled. “What?”
“The Nerf war. See who’s winning?”
“Oh. No, I—” She turned the phone toward me briefly.
Some kind of social media dashboard with numbers and graphs.
“Just monitoring engagement rates for the latest post. We’re getting incredible reach in the UK, which is wild because I posted it at like two in the morning their time, but apparently insomnia is universal. ”
“Sounds good.”
“It is good. Really good.” But she said it almost like she was trying to convince herself. “The presale numbers are exceeding projections. We might actually be able to fund not just the library restoration but also some additional programming. Books for kids, maybe a literacy outreach—”
“That’s great,” I said, and meant it.
She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yeah.”
Oakleigh bounded into the kitchen. “Dad, did you see Blair’s shot? It was insane.”
“I saw. Remind me never to make her mad.”
“Smart man,” Blair called from the dining room.
Swayze’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, and I watched her attention fracture again, pulled toward whatever notification had just arrived.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Just need to—”
“It’s fine.”
But it wasn’t, not really. Because this had been happening more and more over the past week. The divided attention, the constant checking, the way she seemed relieved to step away from whatever we were doing to return to her screen.
She’d built something incredible with her platform. I knew that now, had seen the scope of what she’d created. The way people responded to her, trusted her recommendations, felt connected to her.
And I was starting to wonder if a small-town life—if I—could ever be enough to compete with that.
“Y’all better get in here before this food gets cold!” Grandma Elsie’s voice carried through the house with the authority of a five-star general.
The stampede toward the dining room was immediate. Someone—probably Gunner—nearly took out a side table in his haste. I ran interference for Oakleigh through the bottleneck at the doorway, where half the family was trying to squeeze through at once.
Swayze followed behind us, phone still in hand. She typed something quickly before sliding it into her pocket as we reached the table.
Platters covered every available surface. Roast chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, and rolls that were still steaming. Grandma had outdone herself, as usual.
I ended up between Oakleigh and Dean, with Swayze across from me next to Blair. Elena sat on Blair’s other side, shooting a fond look at her wife as she reached for the green beans.
“So, tell them about the stretch goals,” Blair ordered.
Swayze’s face lit up in a way I hadn’t seen all afternoon.
“Right! Okay, so we hit the original fundraising target three days ago, which means full restoration of the library building. But the ticket sales keep coming in—someone in Australia bought twenty tickets just this morning—and we’ve already blown past the first stretch goal. ”
“Which was?” Alia asked.
“Rebuilding the children’s section collection. New books, updated curriculum materials, everything that got destroyed in the flood.”
“That’s amazing,” Emmaline said.
“It gets better.” Blair’s grin was pure satisfaction. “We’re less than five thousand away from the second stretch goal.”
“Teen section,” Swayze jumped in. “Young adult fiction, graphic novels, and study materials. Things that actually matter to kids that age, not just whatever dusty classics someone thought they should read.”
Oakleigh perked up. “Will there be manga?”
“Absolutely, there will be manga.”
My daughter looked at me with an expression of pure vindication. “See? I told you the library needed manga.”
“You were right,” I said.
“And if we hit the third stretch goal,” Blair continued, “we’re looking at a dedicated tech center. Computers, tablets, Wi-Fi hotspots that people can check out if they don’t have internet at home.”
“How close are we to that one?” Bodie asked.
Swayze pulled out her phone, swiped a few times. “About eighteen thousand. But we’ve still got two weeks until the show, and presales are accelerating. I posted a behind-the-scenes video from rehearsal yesterday that got over two hundred thousand views. The engagement rate is insane.”
“Two hundred thousand,” Ramsey repeated. “Wow.”
“It’s wild, right?” She scrolled through something, her dinner forgotten.
“And the comments are so supportive. People asking how they can help, wanting to know more about Gibson Hollow, about the flood recovery. Some guy in Norway said he’s planning a whole trip to North Carolina just to visit after the show. ”
“That’s incredible,” Alia said.
Blair nodded. “We’re thinking about putting together some kind of visitor’s guide. Capitalize on the interest while we have it. Show people what makes this town special.”
“What a marvelous idea,” Elena said.
“Oh!” Swayze’s eyes widened at something on her screen. “Someone just bought fifty tickets. Fifty. That’s—hold on, let me do the math—”
She and Blair leaned together over the phone, talking numbers and conversion rates and reach metrics. The excitement in Swayze’s voice was unmistakable. Real. This mattered to her, made a difference in a way I could see and understand.
The rest of the table had moved on to other conversations, but I watched her. The animation in her gestures as she explained something to Blair. The way her whole face transformed when she talked about the impact, the good they were doing.
She’d told me that part of her life was over. That she was done with the platform, the influencer world, all of it.
But looking at her now—watching the way she came alive when talking about reach and engagement, the way her fingers flew across her phone screen with practiced ease, the natural confidence that radiated from her when she was in her element—I couldn’t shake the growing certainty that she’d been wrong.
This wasn’t over for her. Not by a long shot. Maybe it never would be.
And where did that leave us? Out of sync, certainly.
I was a single dad with a daughter who needed stability, routine, and a father who showed up every single day.
My life was measured in school drop-offs and bedtimes, in checking homework and making sure Oakleigh ate more than just chicken nuggets.
Swayze’s life was measured in views and shares, in opportunities that could spring up anywhere, anytime.
But was that a temporary situation or the writing on the wall? Was this just a bump we could navigate, or were we fundamentally incompatible in ways I’d been too hopeful—or too stubborn—to see?