Chapter 4 #2
He went still. The crate stayed in his hands, and Adelaide became suddenly, acutely aware of every detail about herself that she could not fix from where she stood.
The dress, the bare feet, the smudge beneath her eyes, the fact that she was here at all, after everything, as if she'd simply stepped out for a walk and wandered back ten years late.
He set the crate down slowly on the edge of the sidewalk without taking his eyes from her face.
"Addie," he said, and her name in his voice was the thing that nearly undid her.
As though it had never stopped being a word he used, as though the years between now and the last time he'd said it had not changed its shape in his mouth at all.
The familiarity settled somewhere beneath her ribs, unsettling in its ease, and she swallowed against a throat that had gone suddenly dry.
"Hi, Jaxon." It was inadequate. A greeting that belonged to strangers, not to two people who had once known each other in ways that didn't fade cleanly with time.
But it was all she had, and she offered it with a voice steadier than she felt, aware that anything more would crack the surface of whatever composure she was still managing to hold together.
His gaze moved briefly over her, taking in the details — the dress, the lack of shoes, the exhaustion she could not hide — and when his eyes returned to hers, something in his expression had shifted from the initial surprise into something more guarded, more careful.
Protected, in the way of a man who had learned the hard way what happened when he left himself open to her.
Up close, the blue of his eyes was worse.
Worse because it was exactly the same. The exact shade that had looked at her across a hundred ordinary moments, over coffee cups and across truck cabs and through the steam rising off the lake at dawn, and she had walked away from that blue and married a man who had never once looked at her the way Jaxon's were looking at her now, with surprise, history, and a hurt so carefully contained it was almost invisible.
"You're back." It wasn't a question.
Adelaide nodded, a small movement that carried more weight than it should have. "For now," she said, and the words hung between them, uncertain and incomplete, belonging to nothing yet.
Jaxon's jaw tightened. A subtle shift she might have missed if she hadn't once known his face the way she knew the streets of this town, every line and angle committed to a memory she'd spent years pretending to archive.
He glanced past her briefly, toward the street she'd come from, as if expecting to see someone following.
"Does your husband know that?"
The question landed cleanly, without cruelty and without gentleness. Simply direct, cutting through everything she hadn't said. Just the question that mattered, delivered by a man who had never wasted words on anything that didn't.
"He will." It wasn't an answer, not really. But it was the only one she had, and Jaxon studied her for a moment longer with something unreadable moving behind his eyes before nodding once, slowly.
“Right."
Adelaide folded her arms, a gesture more instinct than intention. "I didn't expect to see you."
Jaxon's mouth shifted into something that was almost but not quite a smile. "It's a small town."
The words carried an entire history beneath them.
Of course she would see him. There was no avoiding it here, no slipping past each other in crowds, no distance that could be maintained indefinitely in a place this size.
She had known that when she turned the car toward Clarington, even if she hadn't admitted it to herself.
Coming back meant seeing him. It had always meant that.
"Yes," she said. "I remember."
Something flickered in his expression, brief and quickly contained. He glanced at the crate he'd set aside, then back at her, and she could feel him pulling himself back into the shape of his morning, the tasks that existed before she'd appeared and disrupted the order of them.
"I should get going," he said. "Deliveries."
"Of course." She stepped back slightly, creating space that hadn't existed before. The movement felt both polite and final.
Jaxon hesitated for half a second, his gaze holding hers with a directness that suggested there were things he could say, questions he could ask, and he chose instead to leave every one of them where it was.
"Take care, Addie," he said. She felt the words settle somewhere deeper than a casual goodbye had any right to reach.
"You too," she said, and he nodded once and turned away, lifting the crate and carrying it toward the café as if the last five minutes had been a brief interruption in a day that would continue with or without her standing at the edge of it.
Adelaide watched him go. The distance opened between them with each step, ordinary and irreversible, and she stood there longer than she meant to before turning back toward the street she'd come from, the quiet of Clarington unfolding around her once more, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, holding her loosely the way a place holds someone it isn't sure has earned the right to return.