Chapter 15
Fifteen
Piper
The sun is barely up when I slip out of the room.
I leave a note on the nightstand: Gone for coffee, back soon. It seems rude to vanish after the man has spent the last eighteen hours essentially reorganizing his entire life around my crisis. The least I can do is come back with caffeine.
The morning air outside the hotel is cool, so I stop on the pavement and just breathe.
Opal Creek. Not a bad place to have a breakdown.
The streets are busier than I expected—a delivery van idling outside a bakery and a man arranging a fruit stand. I pass a hardware store that apparently opens at 6 a.m. because country music is already bleeding out of the propped-open door.
I haven’t really looked at anything since running from the church. I’ve been moving from one crisis to another with my eyes on the middle distance, just trying to stay upright. But this morning, in yesterday’s new jeans and with no one needing anything from me, I can just… see.
I’m doing quite well. I’m just a normal woman having a normal morning walk.
Two women are sitting outside a café up ahead. They spot me from half a block away. One leans toward the other. The other nods. They both stare.
You’re being paranoid.
I’m having a difficult week, emotionally speaking, and I’ve manufactured a fantasy where random strangers in a town I’ve never visited are aware of my personal drama.
I smile at them as I pass.
One of them says, clear as a bell, just as I push open the door to the coffee shop: “That’s her.”
I’d ignore it, but when I step inside, every single head in the place turns toward me.
It isn’t a subtle glance-up-from-the-menu. It’s full stranger-just-walked-into-a-Wild-West-saloon attention. I freeze. One man lowers his newspaper. The barista stares at me, clutching a carton of milk.
“Morning?” I offer.
Nobody answers. The whispering picks back up like someone turned a dial.
“Can I get two coffees?” I ask the barista.
She leans forward. “You’re her, aren’t you? The bride?”
The acoustics in here are extraordinary. The whole room hears it.
Oh, no. I’m going to die. Right here, in Opal Creek, I’m finally going to succumb to the shame.
I reach for my wallet out of habit… my wallet, which sits in my bag. My bag, in the apartment in the city. With Ezra. Along with my phone, my cards, and everything else I own.
The realization hits me square in the chest. I’ve reached the no-resources stage of my collapse.
“Shit,” I say quietly. “I can’t—I don’t have anything with me. I can’t pay.”
“It’s fine.” I turn to see Griffin behind me, looking like a man who threw himself together in three minutes flat. His shirt is wrinkled, and his hair is doing that thing men’s hair does when it should look terrible but instead looks like it belongs in a high-end editorial.
He slides his card across the counter.
The barista takes it, her expression shifting as she reevaluates her morning.
“Thanks,” I mumble, feeling hoarse and defeated.
From somewhere behind me, a man with an impressive handlebar mustache clears his throat. “Congratulations, you two.”
“You picked the right man!” someone calls out.
“He’s handsome,” a woman adds. “Tired-looking, but they all are after the wedding night.”
Griffin makes a strangled sound.
“Come on, lovebirds,” a waitress named Joelle says, beaming as she waves us toward a corner booth. “Breakfast is on the house.”
We follow her because resistance is clearly futile. The booth offers partial cover, which I appreciate.
We order the works. My appetite has returned with a vengeance this morning.
“Excuse me,” I say just before Joelle turns away. “How does everyone here know who we are?”
Joelle’s smile widens. “Oh, honey. You’re famous.”
She walks three tables down, removes a newspaper from a man who surrenders it without complaint, and returns, slapping it onto the table with a thwack.
“Front page,” she says proudly. “The Opal Creek Chronicles. We don’t miss a thing.”
I look at the paper. I look at Griffin. I look back at the paper.
There’s a photograph of Griffin and me exiting the boutique yesterday. I’m mid-sentence, and Griffin is listening, his jaw tight.
The headline: RUNAWAY brIDE SPOTTED WITH MYSTERY MAN ON MAIN STREET.
Below that, in smaller text: Tart contest yields dramatic result. Local favorite edged into third.
“This is not happening,” I say. “I’m sandwiched between a mystery man scandal and a raspberry tart controversy.”
I glance across the table at Griffin, who hasn’t said a word. He picks up the paper and studies it.
After a minute, I see the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t you dare laugh,” I warn him, stabbing a finger in his direction.
He turns the page, pretending to be interested in the tart contest results.
“Lemon drizzle took second,” he says mildly.
“I’m going to die here. Right here. This booth is my final resting place.”
“Third place went to someone named Hazel. Controversial by the looks of it.”
He finally meets my eyes, and the twitch becomes an amused smile.
“You still want your coffee?” he asks.
“No. I want to go back in time and punch myself in the throat.”
He slides the cup toward me anyway.
“Drink it,” he says, flipping the paper over so my face is no longer staring back at me. “You’ll need it. You’re a local celebrity now.”
I groan, drop my forehead to the table, and whisper into the wood. “I wonder if Opal Creek prison has Wi-Fi.”
Griffin hums. “Maybe they’ll let you enter the tart contest next year.”
“Take this seriously.”
“I am. I’m the mystery man. It’s a good look for me.”
I sip my coffee. “I hate this town.”
“You love this town,” he says.
I look out the window at the fruit stand and the whale mural. “Yeah,” I admit. “I kind of do.”
After a long minute of silence, he blows out a breath. “I’m about to ask you something stupid.”
“I ran out of my own wedding yesterday. Nothing you say competes.”
“How are you feeling?”
I pick at my napkin. “Confused. Numb. Like the tank is dry.” I glance at him. “Every time I think I know what I feel, three other things show up, and I lose the thread.”
He nods. “Did he treat you well, Pipes?”
The question cuts through the noise. I’m out of the gate before I can think. “He’s not a bad person. Ezra is driven, and he has standards, and I’m not saying—” I take a deep breath to steady myself.
Griffin is looking at me with that patient, still expression that says he doesn’t believe a word of my defense.
“In the beginning, yes. He was exactly what I thought I wanted. He had a shape to his life, and I wanted to fit inside it. I wanted something that felt like ground under my feet after… everything.”
“And then you realized the ground was actually a cage?” Griffin asks.
I stare into my coffee like that might have the answers. “I assumed it was my fault. I couldn’t figure out what I’d stopped doing right. I kept trying to adjust the combination of myself to make him happy. The harder I tried, the less I recognized the woman in the mirror.”
Griffin’s jaw flexes. I see the muscle pulse under his skin.
“I don’t know what I did,” I whisper. “But something changed.”
His voice is tight when he finally speaks. “You didn’t do a goddamn thing.”
My eyes snap to his, but I can’t hold it, so I look away quickly, blinking fast.
Fingers wrap around my chin in a firm grip. He tilts my face back toward his, and I startle a little at the contact.
I stare at him, caught in the intensity of his gaze.
“You didn’t do a goddamn thing,” he repeats. “I knew you before. I watched what was left of you at that rehearsal dinner, and I’m telling you—a person doesn’t lose pieces of themselves on their own.”
My heart slams against my ribs.
I want to tell him he’s wrong.
I want to tell him I haven’t changed. That I’m still the same.
But the truth is… I don’t know if I am.
My eyes sting. He lets go and sits back, picking up his coffee like the whole thing was perfectly ordinary. My chin is warm where his fingers were.
The food comes, and we eat with the gratitude of people who forgot calories existed yesterday.
We’re halfway through breakfast when Griffin speaks again. “You never told me you finally went to the Sunvale Festival.”
My fork pauses midair. “Who said I went?”
He shrugs, the edge of his mouth twitching like he knows he’s caught me. “I saw the list.”
I blink. “What list?”
“The one you wrote. Hotel notebook. It was sitting on the nightstand this morning. ‘Sunvale Festival’—crossed out.”
My stomach clenches around the bite of pancake I just took. I swallow it down, suddenly dry-mouthed. “Right. That.”
He eyes me carefully. “Did I say the wrong thing?”
I shake my head and press the edge of my napkin to my mouth. “No. I just forgot I wrote that down.”
He nods and goes back to cutting into his eggs.
“They’re all things I’d planned to do,” I say after a beat. “Over the last year or two. Just… stuff I never got around to.”
He leans in, the weight of his gaze heavier now. “Because Ezra was busy?”
I don’t answer right away. My shoulders inch up like they’re trying to shield me. I pick up my coffee instead, take a sip that tastes more bitter than it did a minute ago.
“Yeah,” I admit. “He always had something. A work trip. A client dinner. Golf with his dad. There was always a reason.”
Griffin doesn’t move, but something shifts in his jaw. That muscle ticks again.
I glance at his arm resting on the table.
The tattoos I remember from college—his parents’ initials, the wave line for his hometown, that small lightning bolt near his elbow—are all still there, but there’s a new one near his inner forearm.
Faded black lines form a tree, tucked just beneath the crook of his arm.
Without thinking, I reach out and trace it with the tip of my finger. “That’s new.”
His head tilts, eyes dropping to where my fingers linger on his skin. “A couple of years ago,” he says quietly.
I want to ask why, or what it means, but I’m not sure I have the right.
So instead, I let my hand fall away and murmur, “I like it.”
He watches me for a beat until he says, “You should do the rest of the list.”
I blink. “What?”
“Finish it. Every one of them.” He sets his fork down and rests his elbows on the table. “If they were important enough to write down, they’re important enough to do.”
Damn it, that’s a hard thing to hear when you’re sitting across from a man who looks at you like he remembers who you were before you forgot.
“Can I ask you something? Those five years you were gone, what did you actually do?”
He exhales through his nose. “Contract jobs. Infrastructure. New York. Seattle, Portland. Montana for eight months.”
“Montana? That seems like a lot of flannel, even for you.”
His mouth curves. “I grew a beard for a winter. Nearly married a woman named Cassidy who made elk stew.”
I put my fork down. “You nearly got married?”
“It wasn’t serious, but for a while, it felt easier to stay than leave.”
That phrasing catches me.
“What changed?”
“I stopped pretending I liked who I was around her.”
“Was it a bad relationship?” I ask.
“No. She just wanted someone quieter. Said I was too intense.”
I look at him—the broad shoulders, the steady gaze, the sheer presence of him. “You? Intense?”
His eyes find mine. Something unreadable moves through them. “You’d be surprised.”
I hold his gaze a second too long. “What made you come back? Really.”
“The ocean,” he says. “It started to feel like I was running from something instead of toward it. I was old enough to know the difference.”
I think about that. I think about Betty, his grandmother. “I still miss her,” I say. “I think about her every Christmas. The cornbread, specifically.”
He laughs, the good kind. “She’d have been outraged that the cornbread is what stuck.”
We sit in the comfort of the memory. I think about how different our childhoods were. My family was messy and struggling, but we were there. Griffin only had Betty.
“Your mom looked well yesterday,” Griffin says, following my thoughts.
“She did. We finally got the medication balanced again. It takes so long to get it right, and every time something shifts, it’s like starting over. But she’s been steady lately.”
He nods, but he doesn’t push. He never has.
“She’s stronger than people give her credit for,” I say.
He looks at me over his coffee. “Takes one to know one.”
Joelle reappears with the coffee pot, refilling our cups. The newspaper is still face-down between us.
Outside, Opal Creek is fully awake. I ran away yesterday, and now I’m sitting in a booth in a town I’d never heard of, front page of the paper, eating eggs with Griffin Hayes while my whole life waits for me to come back and clean it up.
Just not quite yet.
“Griffin?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you for yesterday. For all of it.”
He holds my gaze. “Don’t mention it.”
He means it, and that, more than anything else, is what makes my throat tight.
I pick up my coffee. Outside, the morning keeps going.
For the first time in three years, I think I might be going with it.