11. Hunt #2
Because Primrose had been waiting for this.
The whole town knew the story by now, or their version of it, and the second Nora Smith and the disgraced husband landed on the same stretch of sidewalk, every window on the block acquired an audience.
The grange ladies materialized out of nowhere.
June went very still behind the counter glass.
Somewhere a screen door stopped mid-swing.
Nora saw me.
I braced for it, the flat voice, the cold shoulder, the public dismissal I had coming. What I got was worse, because it wasn’t cruel. It was composed.
She looked at me the way you’d look at a delivery you hadn’t ordered. Unhurried, entirely in command of the six feet of sidewalk between us and, somehow, of the whole watching street.
“Anderson,” she said. Not Hunt. Anderson, like a name off a roster.
“Nora.”
“It’s Dr. Smith.” She said it lightly, almost kindly, and it landed like a door clicking shut. “You’re new here, so you wouldn’t know. In Primrose I’m Dr. Smith.”
“Dr. Smith,” I said.
“That crate’s cutting into your shoulder.
” She nodded at it, unbothered. “You should get it where it’s going.
Carl doesn’t pay his drivers to stand around.
” And then, to June, picking their conversation back up exactly where she’d left it, like I’d already finished existing: “You were saying. About the pie.”
That was all of it.
She turned back to her friend and gave me her shoulder, composed and completely untouchable, and the street let out a breath, and I understood that I’d just watched my wife hold half a town in the palm of her hand without raising her voice once.
The grange ladies looked at me with open satisfaction.
I hitched the crate higher and carried it where it was going.
It was, I decided, the single most attractive thing I’d ever seen a human being do.
It was also the loneliest I’d felt since she left, because the composure was the point.
She didn’t need to scream at me anymore.
She’d built a whole life, in a town that was hers now, where I no longer had the power to make her lose her footing.
I was going to have to earn my way back into a room she already owned.
And I learned that Nora’s order came in every Thursday.
The first time her address showed up on my route, I almost called in sick. The thought of showing up at her door, uninvited again, made my stomach turn. But this wasn’t uninvited. This was my job. I was her delivery driver, and she’d ordered groceries, and that was all.
Her truck was in the driveway when I pulled up. The goat was on the porch, watching me with murder in his eyes.
I got out slowly, the box of groceries balanced on my hip, and walked toward the house like a man approaching a bomb.
The front door opened before I reached the steps.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Nora stood in the doorway, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, wearing a t-shirt that had seen better days and jeans with dirt on the knees. She looked beautiful and furious and exactly like the woman I’d fallen in love with seven years ago, before I’d ruined everything.
“Working.” I held out the box. “Your groceries.”
She stared at me, then at the box, then back at me.
“You’re delivering groceries.”
“Carl hired me three weeks ago. The routes go all over the county.”
“The routes go all over the county.” She repeated it slowly, like she was testing the words for hidden traps. “And you just happened to end up on the route that includes my farm.”
“Someone has to deliver them.”
Her jaw worked. I could see her fighting a reaction she didn’t want to show me. For a second I thought she was going to slam the door in my face.
Then the corner of her mouth twitched.
“You’re delivering groceries.” Her voice caught on it, disbelief or maybe the start of a laugh she was trying to kill before it got out. “You. The heir to the Anderson empire. Delivering groceries in Primrose, Texas.”
“It’s honest work.”
“It’s ridiculous is what it is.” But she reached out and took the box from my hands. “I’m not inviting you in.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“And this doesn’t change anything.”
“It’s groceries, Nora. It doesn’t change anything.”
She studied my face, her eyes searching for an answer I couldn’t guess at. Then she nodded once, sharply, and went back inside.
The door closed.
I walked back to my truck with my heart pounding in my chest.
She’d almost smiled. Almost. I’d seen it, the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the light in her eyes before she’d smothered it. For one second, she’d found me funny instead of infuriating.
It was the most hope I’d felt in weeks.
Back at the store, I was stacking crates in the back when I heard the news.
“Did you hear about the clinic?” Carl’s voice carried from the front counter. “Doc Hale made it official this morning. The Smith girl’s taking over the whole practice. Going to be the new town vet.”
My chest went tight, and I had to stop stacking crates for a second.
Nora. Running her own practice. Building the life she’d always dreamed of, the one she’d put on hold to be my partner.
Pride. That was the word. I was so proud of her I could barely stand it. Proud that she’d found her way here, to this town that needed her, and was doing it on her own terms, becoming the person she was always meant to be, even if I’d been too blind to see it when we were together.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in my hotel bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about wildflowers.
Nora loved wildflowers. She’d told me that on one of our first dates, years ago, when we’d pulled over on the side of the highway to look at a field of bluebonnets. “They don’t need anyone’s permission to grow,” she’d said. “They just find a patch of dirt and make it beautiful.”
The thought wouldn’t leave me alone.
Around midnight, I gave up on sleeping and pulled out a notebook instead. The same notebook I’d been using for therapy, full of scrawled thoughts and half-formed apologies and memories I’d been too busy to notice when they were happening.
I started writing.
Mile marker 61. The sound you made when the calf stood up.
It was such a small memory. So small I’d almost forgotten it, buried under years of bigger moments.
But I remembered now: a roadside emergency three years ago, a cow in labor, me holding the flashlight while Nora worked.
The calf had been stuck, and she’d worked for twenty minutes to reposition it, her arms covered in fluid, her face set in concentration.
And when it finally slid free, when it opened its eyes and tried to stand for the first time, Nora had made a sound.
A sound I had no name for, the kind you make when a creature you love does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
I’d never told her how much that sound meant to me. Never told her that it was the moment I knew I wanted to marry her, watching her face light up as a baby animal took its first breath.
I finished the note. Then I drove to the clinic.
The building was dark, the parking lot empty, the whole town asleep around me. I parked across the street and walked to the front door, my heart pounding.
The wildflower was nothing special. Just a single stem I’d picked from the roadside on my way over, a yellow thing I didn’t know the name of. But it was bright and alive and exactly the kind of thing Nora would notice.
I left it on the step. Propped the note against the door. And walked away.
Back at the hotel, I finally managed to sleep. A few hours, maybe, restless and full of dreams I couldn’t remember. But when I woke up at four in the morning, the room felt wrong.
I sat up in bed, trying to figure out what had changed.
And then I saw it.
Through the window, across the flat Texas landscape, an orange glow was spreading against the dark sky. Fire. One of the farms, maybe a mile away, the flames bright enough to light up the horizon.
I didn’t think. I grabbed my boots, my keys, and ran.