Chapter 2
MILO
That wasn’t exactly how I hoped seeing Sadie again would go.
I’d convinced myself she might see it the same way I did—that we were kids, ill-equipped for the permanency of difficult decisions.
But there was an edge to her politeness that didn’t belong to the Sadie I remembered.
The one who stood in English class, her cheeks flushed and her brown eyes bright, and said, “I want a life that feels like motion. Not rushing, not running away—just moving toward something that matters.”
Back then, I thought I was doing exactly that.
Football mattered. Success mattered.
So I left everything else behind.
Coach Ryland’s voice fades to background noise as he rehashes old wins, watching me for nods I easily give.
I take the opportunity to glance around Ruthie’s Café. It hasn’t changed. The same worn linoleum and metal chairs that scrape against it. The same smell of grease and salt. My eyes trace the walls of newspaper clippings highlighting Dusty Hollow football, but then I notice something different . . .
“Hey, Coach,” I interrupt, pointing over at the collage of blue and red. “What’s that?”
His gaze follows my finger and he grins. “Your wall.”
“My wall?”
Coach Ryland stands, and I follow him toward what I now see are print-outs of articles and photos of me in my New York Giants uniform. A sharp pang vibrates within me as I look at the version of myself I sacrificed everything to become.
“You didn’t think we’d stop cheering for you, did ya?” he asks, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezing. “You’re our boy.”
I only played pro for two years. The beginning of my third year, I took a hit that destroyed my knee, and yet everyone here sees my career for what I won and not what I lost.
I swallow hard, nodding. “It was great catching up, Coach, but I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”
His mouth tilts up in a smile. “I haven’t stopped believing in you, kid.”
“I’ll try not to let you down,” I answer with a half smile.
“You never have,” he says, then squints. “Except for that one game where your running yards disappeared in the second half.”
A breath of a laugh spreads my lips a little wider. “Thanks, Coach.”
I walk out of the café, scanning the streets, and see Matt starting to close the grocery store for the day.
“Hey, Matt!” I yell while jogging across the street.
“Milo. Thought you’d be with Sadie,” he muses.
“She . . . uh . . . wanted to go herself,” I reply.
He shrugs. “Sadie’s not one to ask for help. She’s the one who helps.”
I nod, running my hand through my hair. “So she’s still volunteering at Firefly Farms?”
Matt laughs, opening the door and waving me in even though the sign is now flipped to closed. “Not just Firefly Farms. Sadie Summers is practically everything to everyone. Last year she won the Dusty Hollow Citizen of the Year award . . . for the sixth year in a row.”
I follow Matt into the old building.
“And she’s working for her dad?”
Matt crosses his arms, turning to me. “Can I ask you an honest question?”
Matt’s forehead is creased, and I spy silver roots in his orange hair, but it’s the way he says the words—as if there were sides to the Sadie-and-Milo breakup and he’s protecting Sadie. I understand it, even respect it. Sadie deserves to be protected.
I swallow down regret and nod. “Yeah.”
“Why are you back?”
“If I tell you that, the entire town will go up in flames with gossip.”
“You think rumors haven’t already been lit?” he questions.
“Good point,” I reply.
Small towns are good for many things. Skinny dipping in the kiddie pool during the summer is the only spike in crime during the year, and everyone is always happy to lend you a cup of flour when you’re baking cookies for the Sugar & Spice & Everything Nice Bake-Off, where Sadie always took home a ribbon for those chocolate chip cookies.
But small-town gossip, it’s a sin the most devout churchgoers still participate in.
“I missed Dusty Hollow and wanted to see if my life still fit here.” I give the half-truth with another half grin.
“Hm,” he mutters.
“I just—” I cut off my own words, thinking about Sadie. How I could see her smile in the crowd even when she wasn’t there.
Matt tilts his head, a slightly amused look on his face.
“Is Sadie . . .” I stammer, “seeing anyone?”
Matt’s mouth slips into an incredulous grin as he starts to walk toward the cash register to take money out of the drawer. “Would that bother you?”
I arrived in Dusty Hollow two days ago, but it didn’t feel like home until I saw her.
“No,” I say too quickly.
“You know how small towns are.” Matt counts the money out. “Everyone’s either related, dated, hated, or sworn off.”
Matt married his high school sweetheart years ago. Nadine Stewart. Jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes. She was nine years older, but all of us elementary boys practically melted on the spot when she winked at us.
“How’s Nadine, by the way?”
“She’s sunshine and beautiful babies,” Matt replies. “We have seven now. They cling to her like melted butter on toast, and I can’t blame them.”
“I’m happy for you, Matt,” I reply. “It’s good to see dreams still come true in small places.”
“Dreams are only as small as your mind, although sometimes a larger budget would be nifty,” he teases, and I smile at the word nifty, hearing his father in it more than him.
But I guess that’s what time does to you.
It changes you into the people you love most, and I remember how much Matt loved his dad.
Matt puts the money into a blue bag.
“Is it too late to make a purchase?” I ask.
“Lemonade popsicles are still in the same freezer,” he answers.
“How did you—”
He chuckles. “It’s on me. Anything for Sadie. Just . . .” He pauses. “. . . give her time. You just got here.”
I nod and walk the familiar aisle back to the wall of freezers. I used to buy Sadie a lemonade popsicle every Saturday. She loves lemon. Or at least, she once did.
It’s been years, but seeing Sadie in that yellow sundress, her skin freckled by the Texas sun, made something in my veins hum more energetically, and I felt like that same young boy I once was, who wanted to get his life together so he could make that girl smile at him.
She is everything I remember.
Everything I held on to all these years, even when she wasn’t mine to hold.
I walk back to the front. “Thanks, Matt,” I say as I lift the popsicle.
He lifts his chin. “And in case my answer wasn’t clear, no, Sadie isn’t seeing anyone that I know of.”
I nod my appreciation and walk out of the grocery store. Main Street is as familiar as the rest of the town—from the American flag flying high above the bank to the same potted petunias that are planted every year decorating the sidewalks.
I watch a man in a backward ball cap with dark stubble outside the hardware store and realize it’s Grant Williams. He was a couple years younger than me and a heck of a wide receiver.
I jog over to him. “Grant! It’s good to see you.”
His green eyes widen as he crosses his arms. “Milo. You’re here.”
“I guess you haven’t heard. I’m back to teach and coach at the high school,” I reply.
He glances down at the popsicle in my hand before he says, “I hadn’t heard.”
“You still working for your dad?” I nod toward the hardware store.
He shakes his head. “It’s mine now. Dad gave it to me a couple years ago.”
“Wow,” I say. “Grant Williams, businessman.”
“Yep,” he replies, putting his hands in his pockets.
A thick silence builds between us. We’re just two men staring at each other. We may have played football together, and he was in Emma’s class—Sadie’s younger sister—so we crossed paths plenty, but we knew each other without ever really knowing each other.
“Well, I’m sure I’ll see you around, then,” Grant finally says. “Welcome back.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I reply quickly. “Good to see you, Grant.”
He turns to head back into the hardware store, and I walk toward my truck.
The truck my grandpa handed down to me when I was sixteen.
It’s rusted a bit around the wheel wells, and sometimes you have to convince it to start up when it’s been sitting a little too long, but I can still hear Sadie’s laughter in the cab and sometimes catch a whiff of vanilla—a sweetness that lived on her skin and in her hair.
The hinges groan when I open the door, and it seems to argue again when I shut it behind me. I turn the key in the ignition, and when I look up, I see Sadie’s Volkswagen Beetle beginning to cross Main Street.
She’s carefully looking back and forth, creeping across the asphalt. When her eyes land on me watching her from my truck, she abruptly looks away and speeds up, disappearing in seconds.
It took me time to come back—time to put back the pieces of myself that fell apart, exposing the shaky ground I’d built my future on. Now that I’m finally here in Dusty Hollow, I’m wrestling with a new possibility. The one where Sadie Summers might not want to give me another chance.