2. Chapter 2
Chapter two
Wyatt
The boy in the red truck hit the boy in the blue truck at roughly four miles an hour, which is not enough speed to hurt anybody, but it turns out enough to end a friendship.
“He backed into me,” the blue truck says. Luke Ferris, seventeen, currently louder than the situation calls for.
“You were parked over the line.” Red truck. Danny Wexler, same age, arms crossed like this is a courtroom.
I crouch by the bumpers. There's a scratch on the blue truck the length of my thumb. Nothing on the red one that I can find, though I check twice, mostly because Danny's watching me check like the verdict matters more than the truck does.
“Anybody hurt?”
Both of them seem surprised by the question.
“No, sir.”
“Then here's what's going to happen.” I stand, dust my knees off.
“You're both going to trade numbers. Danny, you're going to call your dad's insurance guy Monday morning, not your dad, so you learn how it works.
Luke, you're going to help him do it, since you've got a truck full of vape smoke I'm choosing not to smell right now.”
Danny goes red. Luke goes redder.
“Nobody's writing a ticket,” I say. “Nobody's calling anybody's parents unless the number's high enough to matter, and it's not. You handle it like adults, I don't hear about it again. Deal?”
They shake on it in the parking lot of the feed store, which is more than most grown men manage after a fender bender. I watch them drive off in opposite directions, slow, careful, checking mirrors like they've never checked a mirror in their lives.
That's most of the job, if I'm honest. Not the part people picture when they hear sheriff. The part where you catch two kids before eighteen turns into a bad habit, and you do it without making either one of them feel small in front of the other.
Deputy Ortiz is leaning against the cruiser when I get back, sunglasses pushed up on his head, scrolling his phone with the kind of grin that means trouble for somebody.
“You seen this?”
“Seen what?”
He turns the phone around. It's a photo — a woman in a wedding dress, veil and all, caught mid-stride in high heels on some city sidewalk, looking like she's trying to outrun the camera.
The headline underneath says something about a runway designer and a runaway bride.
I don't recognize the face at first, not really, not with the veil half over it and the resolution bad enough that it could be anybody in white running down any street in America.
Then I do.
Fifteen years disappears in about half a second.
She looks like she's running the 40-yard dash in a wedding dress—hair coming loose, cheeks flushed, one hand gathering up enough skirt to keep from tripping over it.
But there's no mistaking her.
Savannah.
“That's not—” I stop myself before I finish the sentence. Start over, careful. “Where'd you get that?”
“My wife sent it to me this morning. It's everywhere.”
Ortiz is still grinning, oblivious, the way a man is when he doesn't know what he's holding. “Left her own wedding. Whole thing. Groom, guests, cake, all of it. Just ran away.”
“That's Savannah Blake.”
“That's what the caption says. You know her?”
I keep my face where it's been for the last ten minutes.
Steady.
“Grew up with her.”
“Small world.”
He's already back to scrolling, already bored with it, moving on to whatever's next in his feed.
“Anyway. Good story for a slow day.”
“Good for her,” I say, and mean it, mostly, and get in the cruiser before my face has a chance to do something Ortiz would ask about.
Main Street's doing what it's done most weekdays for the eight years I've been sheriff. Stonebridge isn't a rough town. Most days my job is fender benders, parking complaints, the occasional neighbor dispute, and somebody's livestock ending up where it doesn't belong.
Millie's got the café door propped open, two old-timers arguing about the Titans on the bench outside the hardware store, and Mrs. Delgado waves me down about her mailbox getting clipped again by the recycling truck.
I promise her I’ll talk to the county. I mean it.
She'll remind me if I don't, the way she has for six years running.
By the time I make it to the office and back out again, three different people have brought up the photo without me asking.
The hardware store guys think it's romantic.
Mabel Harris at the pharmacy wants to know if Savannah's staying in town, and Pete Lawson tells me I ought to quit standing around and go talk to her.
That's Stonebridge.
You don't need the internet here.
You need Millie's café and about forty-five minutes, and the whole town has already decided how they feel about a woman they never knew or haven't laid eyes on in fifteen years.
I don't offer an opinion to any of them. I don't need to. My chest is already feeling tight.
I've gotten pretty good at pushing Savannah aside when her name comes up. Today is different.
I saw her.
A photograph shouldn't make that much difference.
But it does.
Iron Ridge Farm is quiet when I pull in, except for the goats, who are not where goats are supposed to be.
The farm has been in our family for three generations—an old farmhouse, barn, orchard, beehives, vegetable garden and enough pasture to keep us busy.
Dad and I run it now, with plenty of help from Ellie whether we ask for it or not.
“They're out again,” Dad calls from the porch, not moving, like this is somebody else's problem.
It is not somebody else's problem. It's mine, and it's three of them, standing in the middle of the vegetable garden eating something I was saving for the fall stand.
Moose beats me to them, mostly by getting underfoot and barking at nothing useful. Ellie's chasing a chicken across the yard with her arms out like she's going to catch it by sheer will, laughing so hard she can barely run straight.
“Uncle Wyatt, Henrietta's loose!”
“Henrietta's always loose.”
“She got out through the fence again. I tried to fix the latch but Grandpa said I'd pinch my fingers.”
“Grandpa's right.”
I get the goats back behind the fence — the latch again, I keep meaning to replace it and keep not getting to it — and by the time I'm done Ellie's given up on Henrietta and is sitting on the porch steps with Moose's head in her lap, both of them looking equally pleased with themselves.
“Grandpa said you had a call about a truck accident,” she says.
“Wasn't much of one.”
“Were they hurt?”
“Nope. Just their pride.”
She nods like that settles something important. Nine years old and already better at reading people than half the deputies I work with. She's still got dirt on her knees from the chicken chase and a leaf caught in her braid. I reach over and pull it out.
I go out to the workshop before dinner, because my hands need something to do and the leather doesn't ask questions.
It's a backpack, half finished, the kind I've made maybe thirty times now—simple lines, brass hardware, a strap I'm still not happy with.
I've got the panel clamped and I'm working the needle through when Dad comes in without knocking, two glasses of iced tea sweating in his hands.
“Figured you could use one,” he says while handing me a glass.
“Didn't ask for one.”
“Didn't have to.”
He settles onto the stool across from me, watches me work for a minute without saying anything.
That's Dad.
He'll sit through a whole silence if the silence is doing the talking for him.
“You hear about Savannah,” he says finally. Not a question.
“Ortiz showed me the picture.”
“She ran clean out of her own wedding.”
He says it careful, like he's testing how it lands. “That's a hard thing to do. Takes more nerve than most people give it credit for.”
“I imagine it does.” I keep my eyes on the stitch. If I look up right now he's going to see something I'm not ready to hand him.
“You think she'll come home?”
That one catches me off guard, because I hadn't let myself think that far yet.
Home. Stonebridge. Here.
“I don't know,” I say, and it's the truth.
“Maybe. If she needs somewhere that isn't New York for a while.”
“You gonna see her, if she does?”
“I'm sure I will.”
I pull the thread through, start the next stitch.
“Kind of hard not to, in a town where everybody knows everybody else's business before the person involved does.”
Dad doesn't laugh, exactly, but something around his eyes does.
“That obvious, huh.”
“Millie had three theories by nine a.m.”
“That's fast, even for Millie.”
He takes a slow drink of his tea.
“You thought about what you're gonna do, if she shows up here?”
I set the needle down and give him my full attention, because this part I want him to hear straight.
“I'm not going to do anything, Dad. She just walked out on her wedding, got photographed running down a Manhattan street in her wedding dress, and now the whole world gets a front-row seat.
If she comes home, it's not because of me.
It's because this is the one place that's still standing after whatever happened up there.”
I pick the needle back up.
“I'm not going to be the reason she's got one more thing to sort through.”
“Didn't say you would be.”
“I know how this goes. I see her, I decide fifteen years didn't happen, and for five minutes I'm twenty again, thinking maybe this time she'll stay.”
Dad doesn't say anything.
I pull the thread through harder than I need to.
“But fifteen years did happen. And she'd be standing in the wreck of something that just fell apart two days ago. She doesn't need some guy she used to love deciding her coming home means something it doesn't.”
“Some guy.”
He lifts one hand.
“You’re not some guy, Wyatt.”
“She needs somebody steady,” I say. “Not somebody with an agenda.”
“And you don't have one.”
“I didn't say that.”
The stitch goes crooked. First one all night. I don't fix it.
“I said I'm not going to act on it.”
Dad's quiet for a while after that, turning his glass in slow circles, condensation running down onto his jeans and him not caring.
When he finally talks again, it's soft, the way he gets when he means something all the way through.
“Your mother used to say the hardest thing about loving somebody is knowing when to step back and when to step up. Said most men only ever learn one of the two.”
He stands, presses a hand to my shoulder on his way past.
“You've had step-back down for fifteen years, son. Don't forget the other one exists.”
He leaves the tea glass on the bench, still half full, and goes back up to the house.
I sit out there another hour after he's gone, longer than the backpack needs, longer than any reasonable person would call working. Moose wanders in at some point and settles by my boots like he can tell I need the company, even if he doesn't know why.
I keep telling myself the plan is simple. Keep my distance, if she even comes. Let her have this — whatever this turns into, whatever she's running from, whatever she needs Stonebridge to be for her — without me showing up in the middle of it wanting something.
It was a good plan twenty minutes ago. It's still a good plan now.
I set the backpack aside, only half finished, and head up to the house. Ellie's got the porch light on for me, same as always.
I should probably stop thinking about Savannah.
I already know I won't.