13. Nash
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nash
Founders’ Day in Buckhorn is the kind of event that makes you forget you live in a town where everyone knows your business, because for one afternoon, they’re too busy celebrating their grandparents’ business.
Main Street is dressed up, trying to impress a newspaper photographer.
Garlands loop around the gazebo rails. Strings of warm white lights crisscross the square even though it’s broad daylight, because Buckhorn has never let practicality ruin a tradition.
There’s a banner stretched between two lampposts that reads FOUNDERS’ DAY: HONOR THE PAST, and underneath it someone’s added a smaller sign that reads EAT THE CHILI.
The chili smells of cumin and smoke. A fiddle is going somewhere near the church steps, the notes bright and fast as if the musician is trying to outrun winter.
Kids dart between booths and tables holding paper cups of cocoa.
Old men lean on the fence line near the stage, hands wrapped around coffee cups.
And I’m standing at the edge of the town square with Tessa Long tucked against my side, where I guess she belongs.
Which is… a sentence my brain still refuses to process without short-circuiting.
She’s wearing a tailored dark coat, and her hair is in that tight braid she does when she’s planning to win. The Long heirloom ring flashes when she adjusts her scarf, catching the weak January sun.
People notice. Heads turn. Smiles spread. The quiet buzz of oh wow, it’s them ripples across the square, and I do my best not to react as a man walking into a firing squad with a ribbon on his chest.
Tessa, of course, was born for public scrutiny.
“Relax,” she murmurs, barely moving her mouth.
“I am relaxed,” I mutter back through a smile that’s made of duct tape.
She glances up at me, eyes sharp. “You’re blinking like crazy.”
“I’m blinking like a man who can feel Virgil Tucker staring into my soul.”
Virgil Tucker is, in fact, staring into my soul from the feed store booth he’s running with Penny. Penny waves wildly the second she sees us, then immediately starts whispering to the woman beside her, giving a live update to a sports commentator.
Tessa’s fingers slide into my coat pocket, warm against my knuckles.
It’s subtle. Private. Not for the town.
My whole body goes still anyway.
“You’re doing the smile again,” she says quietly.
“What smile?”
“The one that says I’m fine when you’re absolutely not fine.”
“I…” I inhale, then force my shoulders to drop. “Okay. Fine. I’m not fine.”
Tessa’s thumb strokes my knuckle inside the pocket once, calming me without letting anyone else see.
“Better,” she says.
“Do you have a manual for this?”
“Yes,” she replies. “It’s called stop panicking in public. You should read it.”
I huff a laugh, but it comes out strained.
Tessa looks out toward the gazebo, where Dottie Mae Carter sits on a chair with a giant smile plastered across her face. Dottie is bundled in layers of wool and attitude. Someone has given her a microphone. That’s a dangerous combination.
“Come on,” Tessa says. “We’re late.”
“For what?”
“For you getting over yourself,” she says, and then she starts walking, dragging me along as a reluctant sled.
We move into the crowd. People make space for us as if we’re royalty. I nod at faces I’ve known my whole life. I get slapped on the shoulder by men who look thrilled about my engagement. I hear congratulations whispered.
“Tessa!” Clara Jenkins calls from the bakery table she’s set up near the gazebo. She’s selling pies “for the historical preservation fund,” which is code for Clara wanted a reason to bake.
Clara’s eyes sparkle when she sees us together. “There’s my engaged girl!”
Tessa’s posture doesn’t change, but her smile softens in a way that surprises me every time. She actually likes people. When she chooses to.
“Hello, Clara,” she says warmly.
Clara leans forward conspiratorially. “I saved you a slice of pecan. It’s lucky.”
“We’re going to need all the luck we can get,” I mutter.
Clara laughs as if I’m charming and not actively dying inside. “Oh, Nash. You’ll be fine. You finally have someone who can keep you in line.”
Tessa lifts her brows. “Keep him in line?”
Clara pats Tessa’s hand. “Honey, everyone’s been waiting for the day someone could.”
“I’m right here,” I say.
“And you’re lucky,” Clara says brightly, then hands Tessa a paper plate, offering a blessing.
Tessa accepts it.
My life is a circus.
We weave toward the gazebo where people are gathering. Dottie clears her throat into the microphone, and the whole square quiets as if someone flipped a switch.
“Alright,” Dottie says, sharp even through the speaker. “If you’re here for the chili, you can wait. We’re doing history first.”
A collective groan rises.
Dottie ignores it as she’s been ignoring people for eighty-eight years.
She launches into a story about the first winter in Buckhorn, back when it was more camp than town, and I try to listen.
I do. I really do. But my attention keeps snagging on Tessa beside me, on the way she holds her pie plate carefully so it doesn’t drip, on the way her eyes actually brighten when Dottie mentions old cattle routes and creek lines because to her and the town, those words are music.
She’s enjoying this.
And that shouldn’t be surprising. She’s a Long. History is basically her bloodstream. Same as me, I suppose. The McCoys have always been here too.
Dottie continues, “Back then, folks didn’t have lawyers. They had weather. And pride. And the kind of hunger that makes you make choices you don’t talk about later.”
The crowd is quiet now. Even the kids.
Tessa’s fingers tighten briefly around her fork.
I swallow.
And it hits me, all at once: I don’t actually know why our families hate each other.
I know we do, and we always have done, but I don’t know what caused it in the first place. The story goes on, and I can feel my own thoughts splintering off, circling the edges.
If the town still bites down hard on this rivalry even with me “engaged” to Tessa… it’s because there’s more at stake than gossip.
More than pride.
More than a couple of teenagers who used to compete for top grades and who agreed to be ‘engaged’ and somehow ruined their lives in the process.
A cheer rises when Dottie finishes, and we join in.
“Now there’s a sight I never thought I’d see.”
Virgil Tucker.
I turn and find him approaching, hands in his pockets, moustache bristling with opinions. Penny trails behind him, carrying a stack of flyers and about to faint from excitement.
Virgil’s gaze flicks to our joined hands because, somewhere during Dottie’s story, Tessa’s fingers found mine again, and I let them.
His eyes narrow a fraction.
“Well,” Virgil says, “guess Buckhorn’s changing.”
Tessa’s chin lifts. “Good.”
Virgil chuckles. “You always had that bite, Tessa.”
She smiles. “And you always had opinions.”
“That’s my job,” Virgil says, then looks at me. “Nash.”
“Virgil.”
He studies me for a long beat, comparing me to a younger version of my father, measuring my weight against my last name.
“You got yourself into something,” he says.
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. “It’s… new.”
Virgil’s gaze flicks to the ring. “New, but old, huh?”
Tessa doesn’t react, but I feel her body tighten beside me, just a little.
“I’ll tell you one thing, son. Folks in this town don’t forget. Not the good, not the bad, and damn sure not the history between McCoy and Long.”
I swallow. “Yeah. I know.”
Virgil’s mouth twists, trying to decide how much to say. Then he tips his head toward the gazebo, toward Dottie still sitting as a queen on her chair.
“Dottie’s got a way of stirring ghosts,” he says. “But she ain’t wrong. The story ain’t as clean as people like to tell it.”
Tessa’s eyes flash toward him. “What do you mean?”
Virgil shrugs one shoulder. “Means there’s always been more land talk than either family wanted to admit. More agreements. More… handshakes.” His gaze lands on me again. “You boys don’t know everything your daddy knew.”
My breath catches.
I hear the words as a warning and a dare at the same time.
“You saying there’s something I should know?” I ask, trying to keep casual when my pulse is climbing in my throat.
Virgil’s eyes soften, just slightly. “I’m saying you oughta ask questions before you build things that wake old fights.”
Tessa’s hand tightens around mine.
Virgil pats my shoulder once, firm, almost fatherly, then turns and walks away as if he didn’t just drop a bomb in the middle of Founders’ Day.
I stand there, frozen.
Tessa turns her head. “You’re thinking too loudly.”
“I didn’t know there were… handshakes,” I say.
Her expression shutters. “Neither did I.”
That should reassure me.
Instead, it unsettles the hell out of me.
Because if she didn’t know, and Virgil is acting as everyone over fifty does… then that means the rivalry isn’t just family drama.
It’s adult decisions.
It’s secrets.
It’s land.
And land is not something Buckhorn treats as a story.
I pull my little notebook from my coat pocket before I can overthink it and flip it open with fingers that suddenly feel clumsy.
Tessa watches me, brow lifting. “What are you doing?”
“Writing,” I mutter.
“You’re always writing,” she says, but there’s a curiosity in her tone now instead of annoyance.
“I need to remember what he said.”
“Because you don’t trust your own brain?”
“Because my brain is currently full of chili smoke and impending doom.”
I scribble in my shorthand. It’s a mess of arrows and half words, the kind only I can read.
V. Tucker
HS ≠ paper
land ≠ simple
before building → dig
Tessa leans closer, trying to see.
Then she frowns. “That’s not English.”
“It is,” I say defensively. “It’s just… advanced.”
“It looks like a chicken had a panic attack.”
“It’s annotation,” I say as if that explains anything.
“That explains nothing.”
I close the notebook before she can decipher it through sheer spite, then immediately flip to the back where I keep the only neat thing about me: my sketch pages.
Tessa’s gaze drops, and her whole face changes.
It’s subtle, but I catch it. The way her mouth relaxes. The way her eyes focus.
Because the drawings are there. Rough outlines of the guest ranch buildings, the way I want the cabins to sit against the treeline, the idea of the restored barn turned into a common room.
Notes in the margins about water conservation, solar panels, horse trails that won’t cut through grazing areas.
The future I keep trying to build.
Tessa stares at it with wise, inquisitive eyes.
“You drew these,” she says, quieter.
“Yeah.”
Her finger hovers over the page without touching it. “This is… actually good.”
I blink. “That sounded like a compliment.”
“It was,” she admits, then narrows her eyes at me. She regrets the slip. “Don’t get smug.”
A laugh cracks out of me, startled and real.
It’s the first time all day I’ve felt my shoulders weren’t up around my ears.
“You’re not wrong about diversifying,” she says finally. “Buckhorn’s been bleeding kids for years. People leave. They don’t come back. If you give them a reason…”
I stare because I’ve heard skepticism and teasing and threats from her. I have not heard this.
“You think it could help?” I say.
“I think,” she corrects carefully, “it could, if it’s done right.”
My chest tightens. Not with panic this time.
With hope.
Hope is also dangerous.
Because it makes you forget what you’re risking.
A shout goes up nearby as the chili cook-off judging begins. Someone yells that Hank Lawson’s chili “tastes of spite.”
Tessa’s mouth twitches. “That’s accurate.”
I grin without meaning to. “You’re enjoying today.”
She glances around the square, lights, laughter, history, the whole town wrapped up in itself.
“I’m… surprised,” she admits, and the admission is a crack in armor. “It’s easier than I thought.”
“Pretending to like me?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Her eyes snap to mine. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
My stomach drops.
I open my mouth, then close it again because I don’t know what answer is safe.
Tessa watches me for a beat longer, then taps the edge of my notebook. “Show me the part about the cabins again.”
I swallow hard. “Yeah. Okay.”
I turn the page, and we huddle over my sketches.
It’s as if this isn’t fake, and for a few minutes, in the middle of Founders’ Day madness, with Dottie still holding court and Virgil’s warning echoing in my skull, I forget how awkward I’m supposed to be.
I just listen to Tessa’s quiet questions and the way her mind sharpens around the details, and I feel my insides settle.
Not because the problem is solved, or because the town stopped watching, but because for the first time since I blurted the word ‘engaged’ in front of the council, I’m not carrying the future alone.
Tessa Long leans into my shoulder, pointing at a drawing of a porch railing and asking what kind of wood I’d use.
And I think, with a sudden, terrifying clarity…
This is what it felt like that night.
Not the heat, the whiskey, the bed. But the ease, the click. The part where she looks at me seriously, not as a joke.
I swallow hard and turn the page carefully, as if moving too fast might shatter it.
“Okay,” I croak. “So, if we build the cabins here…”
Tessa nods, eyes focused, and for once, the town isn’t the loudest thing in my head.
The loudest thing is the warning Virgil left behind.
Ask questions before you build things that wake old fights.
And the quieter, scarier thought beneath it…
Ask questions before you fall for the woman standing beside you like she belongs there.