1. Madison #2
This is my life in Iron Hollow. I’ve been the town’s designated nuisance long enough that eye-rolls are practically a form of punctuation when I speak.
My mother thinks it’s because I don’t know when to stop.
June thinks it’s because I’m usually right, which makes people uncomfortable.
I think it’s both, and I’ve stopped caring which one bothers people more.
What I haven’t stopped caring about is the story.
Because someone in this town has been running a quiet, patient campaign against the families who won’t sell, and everyone who might know something keeps their eyes down and their mouths shut.
The land is changing hands piece by piece, and nobody with a platform seems to think it’s worth the trouble of asking why.
I think it’s worth the trouble.
I turn back to Cole. He’s set the second glass down and is watching me again with that careful, unreadable attention, and I get the distinct impression he followed every thought that just crossed my face.
“You’ve got opinions about it,” I say. Not a question.
“I’ve got observations,” he says. “They’re not the same thing.”
“In my experience, that distinction is what people say when they know something and don’t want to say it.”
He tilts his head slightly. Studies me. “In my experience,” he says, voice quiet and even, “reporters who go looking for patterns on back roads at night tend to find more than they planned for.”
The words are mild. The weight behind them isn’t.
I hold his gaze for a beat longer than is comfortable. “Is that a warning, Mr. Blackwood?”
“It’s an observation,” he says. And this time, the almost-smile doesn’t come at all.
I should let it go. I know how to let things go — I just choose not to, which my mother would argue is the same problem dressed in different clothes.
But there’s something about the way Cole Blackwood stands there, calm and immovable behind his bar like he’s got all the time in the world and none of my problems, that pulls the pin on something in my chest.
“You know what I’ve noticed?” I set my bag on the barstool in front of me — not sitting, just anchoring — and meet his eyes directly.
“Men like you always frame it as concern. Be careful. Think it through. You don’t know what you’re getting into.
But what you actually mean is: stop asking questions that make powerful people uncomfortable. ”
Cole doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t shift. Doesn’t do anything except let the words land and then look at me with that same steady, unreadable patience that is starting to feel less like indifference and more like a deliberate choice.
“Men like me,” he repeats.
“Rich. Controlling.” I gesture vaguely at the bar — the renovated fixtures, the clean lines, the quiet evidence of money applied to a space that didn’t use to have it.
“Buying up property in a town you could flatten with your quarterly earnings. You’ve acquired what, four buildings on Main Street in the last eight months? Five?”
“Six,” he says. Evenly.
“Six.” I let that sit. “And you want me to believe you’re offering friendly advice.”
“I want you to believe,” he says, setting both palms flat on the bar and leaning forward just enough that the distance between us compresses in a way I feel more than see, “that reckless and brave are not the same thing. And that charging at a story without backup isn’t courage. It’s a liability.”
“For who?”
“For you.”
The words are quiet. Stripped of everything performative. And that’s what makes them land differently than I expect — not like a dismissal, but like something that costs him something to say. I push that observation away immediately because it isn’t useful.
“I’ve been covering this town for four years,” I say. “I know how to handle a story.”
“You’ve been covering fence disputes and drainage contracts,” he says, and it isn’t cruel, which somehow makes it worse. “This is different.”
“You don’t know what this is.”
“No.” His eyes hold mine. “Do you?”
The question drops into the space between us and sits there, and I hate that I don’t have a fast answer for it.
I hate that he’s looking at me like he already knows that, like he can see straight through the bravado to the part where I’m running on caffeine and gut instinct and the white-knuckled terror that if I don’t find this story, the orchard loses its last buffer and my family loses everything.
I don’t let any of that show.
What I let show instead is the thing I’ve weaponized since I was nineteen years old and someone first told me I was too loud for my own good.
“Call the tow truck yourself if it bothers you so much,” I say. “I’ll wait outside.”
I reach for my bag.
“They close in forty minutes,” he says. “And it’s getting dark.”
“I’m aware of how time works.”
“There’s no cell service on the east side of this block after six.” He says it without inflection. “Has been that way since the cell tower maintenance two weeks ago. Your phone won’t get a signal standing outside.”
I pause with my bag half off the stool.
He’s right. I know he’s right because I lost service on this exact stretch of road on Tuesday and spent twenty minutes driving in circles trying to find a bar of signal. I just don’t want him to be right, which is a separate issue entirely.
I look at him — really look, the way I look at sources when I’m trying to figure out if they’re lying or just incomplete. Strong jaw, set hard. Eyes that give nothing away but miss nothing either. A mouth that stays closed when lesser men would already be smirking.
He is, objectively and unhelpfully, the best-looking man I’ve seen in Iron Hollow in living memory.
I resent it immediately and completely.
“Fine,” I say, in the tone that means this conversation isn’t over, it’s just paused. “What’s the other option?”
The corner of his mouth moves. Almost. “I’ll give you a ride.”
“No.” The word is out before he finishes the sentence.
Cole straightens up from the bar, unhurried, like my refusal is a weather pattern he’s already accounted for. He reaches under the counter and produces a set of truck keys, sets them on the bar next to the cordless phone with a quiet click that somehow carries more weight than it should.
“It’s twenty miles to the nearest motel,” he says.
“Eighteen to your family’s orchard. The tow lot is forty-five minutes out and closed by the time they’d get here.
” He ticks each item off without looking at his hands, eyes steady on mine.
“Your phone has two bars right now. In twenty minutes it’ll have none. And the sun sets at seven fifty-three.”
I stare at him. “Do you just — memorize sunset times?”
“I pay attention to details.” A pause. “You should try it.”
“I pay attention to plenty of details,” I say, and I can hear the edge in my own voice, the particular pitch that Cal calls my you’re about to do something stubborn register. “I just don’t need a ride from someone I met eleven minutes ago.”
“You need a ride,” he says. “I’m the one offering.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Semantically, sure.”
I drag a hand through my hair and look away from him, which is a tactical error because looking away means looking at the front window, and through the front window I can see the street — the cooling smear of my Civic against the curb, the long afternoon shadows stretching across the asphalt, the way Main Street is emptying out in that particular small-town way that means by seven o’clock there won’t be a soul left to flag down.
And across the street, idling at the mouth of the hardware store’s side lot, there’s a truck.
Dark. Older model. Engine running.
No one gets out. No one rolls a window down. It just sits there, facing this direction, exhaust curling up into the early evening air in a slow, thin thread.
I watch it for two seconds. Three.
“Someone you know?” Cole’s voice comes from just behind my shoulder, closer than I expect. He’s moved without me registering it — I didn’t hear him come around the bar, didn’t clock the shift until he was already there.
“No.” I step back instinctively, creating distance, and tell myself it’s because he startled me and not because his proximity does something annoying to my pulse. “It’s nothing. Probably waiting for someone.”
“Probably,” he agrees. He doesn’t look away from the window.
The truck doesn’t move.
I get the sudden, irrational urge to write down the plate number, which I can’t make out from here, which means I’d have to go outside to get closer, which is — even by my standards — a bad idea at this particular moment. I file the impulse away for later and turn back to Cole.
He’s already looking at me. Not at the truck. At me.
Like the truck is secondary. Like I’m the thing he’s tracking.
“It’s going to rain,” he says, which is such a non-sequitur that I almost laugh. “An hour, maybe less. You feel that drop in the air?”
I do, actually. That thick, pre-storm heaviness that turns the whole county into a sauna before the sky cracks open and drowns everything.
“I’m not made of sugar,” I say.
“I know.” His voice is dry. “You’d have dissolved by now.”
I almost — almost — smile at that. I clamp down on it immediately.
The truck across the street still hasn’t moved.
“One ride,” I say, before I’ve fully decided to.
I hear myself say it and recognize it as the moment I’ve already lost this particular argument, which means I should at least lose it on my own terms. “You drive me to the orchard so I can get my mother’s car.
That’s it. We don’t make conversation. You don’t give me advice.
And we are completely clear that this changes nothing about what I’m writing. ”
Cole picks up his keys from the bar.
“Agreed,” he says.
Too easily. Like he expected exactly that outcome and has already moved past it.
I grab my bag. “I’m serious about the advice part.”