3. Jessica
Jessica
Dottie clocked us the second we came through the door and had two mugs on the counter before we'd picked a booth — coffee for me, hot water and a tea bag for Callie, which I filed away without comment because everyone was entitled to their wrong opinions about hot beverages.
We slid into a booth by the window. Callie wrapped both hands around her cup and leaned back. "So. New York. Ten years. Give me the version you don't put on LinkedIn."
I looked at her for a moment. The reading glasses pushed into her hair. The calm, unhurried eyes of a woman who had survived something and come out the other side of it with her bullshit detector finely calibrated.
So I gave her the real version. Not the highlight reel.
"Year one through five, I was on fire," I said.
"Couldn't lose. Couldn't miss. Every event bigger than the last, every client more impressive, the whole thing humming.
" I turned my cup on the table. "Year six, something shifted.
I couldn't name it. The wins still landed, but they landed softer.
Not as significant. By year eight, I was executing flawless events and going home and sitting on my kitchen floor because the chair felt too far away from the ground. "
Callie didn't flinch. She didn't offer advice or platitudes or the sympathetic head-tilt that people do when they want you to know they're listening but aren't actually absorbing a word. She just held the space. Let me put things down in it.
"I burned out," I said. "That's the unsexy version. I burned out, and I couldn't admit it because the burning was supposed to be the point. I left here to burn, but now I’m just—” I shrugged a shoulder. “—burnt.”
"I know what it's like to build a life that looks right from the outside and feels like someone else's coat," Callie said. Quiet, steady, the voice of a woman who had rebuilt herself from scratch. "The taking-it-off part is the hardest bit."
I looked at her across the table, and something gave way behind my sternum that I hadn't realized was braced. Callie Monroe was someone I wanted to know properly. That was becoming clear very fast.
The bell above the diner door chimed, and the air in the room shifted.
Louisa Blackwood walked in like she owned the building.
She slid into our booth as though the bench had been reserved for her arrival, set her handbag down beside her, and beamed at me with the serene satisfaction of a woman who had absolutely known I was here and had timed her entrance to the minute.
"Jessica. What a lovely surprise."
"Hi, Louisa." I grinned. I couldn't help it. "You just happened to be in the neighborhood."
"I needed coffee." She lifted one finger, and Dottie was already on her way over with a fresh mug. Then she turned to Callie, her whole face going soft. "And how is my beautiful granddaughter this morning?"
Callie's mouth pulled into a grin, and she proceeded to tell us a story of how Maisie convinced Clay to chase after a baby duck to bring him home. They both came home covered in mud, and the duck’s name was Gerald.
Louisa shook her head, her eyes bright with the particular joy of a grandmother collecting evidence for stories she was going to tell at every family dinner for the rest of her life. "That girl has him so wrapped he doesn't even know which way is up."
"None of us know which way is up, Louisa. Gerald is now a Blackwood."
Louisa laughed — the warm, full laugh of a woman whose family was exactly as ridiculous as she'd raised them to be. Then she turned back to me, her eyes bright and calculating.
"Now." She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. Her fingers were warm, and the gesture was so naturally maternal that something in my chest shifted. "Jessica Lee. Tell me — is it how you remembered? Being home?"
"It's better." The word surprised me. I hadn't planned to say it, but I meant it completely.
"I went to Mom and Dad's this morning. Mom had her cinnamon rolls ready and waiting, Lou.
Fresh from the oven. The big ones. And I took one bite, and I nearly fell off the chair because nothing in ten years of living in New York has ever tasted that good. Not once. Not even close."
Louisa hummed in satisfaction. "Your mom's rolls. They’re the best.” Then, her eyes went soft.
"She called me the morning she found out you were coming, you know.
I could hear it in her voice — that woman has been lit from the inside ever since.
My Jessica's coming home, Lou. My Jessica.
She must have said it four times in one phone call. "
My throat tightened. I picked up my coffee to cover it.
"And I know your parents are so proud of the work you’ll be doing here.
" Louisa shook her head. “It's a mountain of a job, and they've put it on the shoulders of one woman in heels.
" Her hand squeezed mine. "You listen to me.
If you need anything — and I mean anything, Jessica Lee — a kitchen to work in, a phone tree to mobilize, a casserole at midnight, a place to put your feet up when the world is too loud — you come to me.
You don't even have to ask. You just turn up.
My door is always open for you, just like it always has been. "
My eyes stung. I pressed my lips together, and nodded.
"I mean it." Her eyes held mine. "You're not doing this alone. Not in this town. Not while I'm still breathing."
"Thank you, Louisa." My voice came out rougher than I'd intended.
She squeezed my hand once more, and then her expression shifted — the warmth holding but the mischief sliding back in underneath it.
"I was just thinking the other day about the time you were fifteen, and you talked Hunter into riding Bobby McAllister's half-broke mare through the Founders Day parade. "
Callie's eyebrows shot up. Louisa squeezed my hand and raised the other — wait for it.
"She had a flag," Louisa continued, and here she paused, because Louisa Blackwood had impeccable comedic timing.
"A flag she had stolen from the VFW post. She was on the back of this mare, holding the flag like she was leading a cavalry charge, and Hunter was in front holding on for dear life because that boy would have followed this crazy girl into a burning building if she told him there was something interesting on the other side. "
"To be fair," I said, "I also fell off."
"You fell off laughing. Hunter fell off silently, got up, caught the mare, returned the flag, and didn't speak to you for three days."
"I had to bribe him with pecan pie."
"My pecan pie. Which you stole from my kitchen!” Louisa shook her head, but her eyes were shining.
"This girl," she said to Callie, "is the only person on Earth who could convince Hunter to walk down the garden path and into absolute chaos.
Nobody else could do it. Nobody else ever tried.
She'd say jump, and that boy would already be in the air before he thought to ask how high. The messes they would get into…”
Callie was laughing so hard her glasses had fogged, and she had to take them off and wipe them on her shirt. I was laughing too — deep and real, the warmth in my face and the looseness in my shoulders and the feeling of being in a room where the currency was history instead of achievement.
Louisa watched both of us with quiet satisfaction.
She didn't mention Hunter again. But she didn't need to.
He was in the room now — in the story, in the laughter, in the way my skin had flushed warm at the memory of how good he looked Sunday night.
The way his voice had deepened even further, and the way it wrapped around my name like velvet.
Louisa saw it. Whatever my face was doing, I just knew she cataloged it. Her expression didn't change by a single degree.
That woman missed nothing. She never had.
The events calendar was spread across my kitchen table by nine o'clock that night and it was a monster.
Twelve months, no breaks, every county event from the New Year's Gala through to the Christmas Market.
It was insane. It was the most ambitious calendar I'd ever seen.
My brain was already sorting — timelines forming, vendor shortlists populating, three ideas crystallising before I'd finished the brief. This was what I was built for.
I called Bobbie at ten. He answered on the first ring.
"Tell me everything. Start with the apartment. Is there a bathtub? I need to know if there's a bathtub."
I laughed. ”There is a bathtub."
"Is it tragic?"
"It's fine, Bobbie. I knew what I was coming back to.”
"Fine is tragic. Fine is a bathtub that has given up on itself. Does it have feet?"
"It does not have feet."
He let out a dramatic sigh. "Devastating. Continue."
I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and talked for forty minutes straight while my coffee went cold.
I told him everything — the first few days in all their unfiltered, overwhelming, weirdly tender detail.
The people I'd run into, the conversations that had landed sideways, the moments that had snuck up on me.
And underneath all of it, the thing I couldn't quite explain — the strange, unsettling peace that kept arriving when I wasn't looking.
The way my body kept exhaling. The way the quiet kept settling over me like a hand on my shoulder.
The way the silence in the mornings was hitting my nervous system like medicine I hadn't known I needed.
Bobbie listened. Let me circle and orbit and touch down on every topic like a plane that couldn't find its runway. Then, with the surgical precision of a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment:
"You haven't said his name once."
My mouth opened. Closed. The silence on the line stretched and I could feel him on the other end, patient as a cat at a mouse hole.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Mmhm."
"I don't."
"Jessica. You just talked for forty minutes about a town with one diner.
You described a handshake. You gave me a census of a woman named Dorothy's facial expressions.
And in forty minutes of narrating every square inch of your new life in Copper Creek, Texas, you didn't once mention a certain quiet boy with the name you used to get a particular look on your face about. "
"I do not get a look."
"Sweetheart. I have known you for eight years.
Every single time the name Hunter Blackwood has come up in eight years — every single time, Jessica, I am not exaggerating — your whole face does this thing.
Your eyes go somewhere else. Your shoulders drop a quarter inch.
Your voice changes register. You think you're being subtle.
You are not being subtle. You are about as subtle as a fire alarm. "
"I don't —"
"The Christmas you told me the workbench story? Your whole face lit up. The night you got drunk on rosé and told me about the creek? You smiled in a way I’d never seen before.
The time you mentioned him in passing at brunch, and Marcus asked who he was, and you said just a friend from home, and then stared into your mimosa for forty-five seconds as it owed you money?
I clocked it. I clock everything. It's my job. "
My stomach twisted in that way it did when you got caught doing something you shouldn’t. ”Goodnight, Bobbie."
"Mmhm."
"I hate you."
"You love me. Call me tomorrow." His voice softened — the rare register underneath the performance. "And Jessica? It's okay to be happy. You know that, right? You're allowed."
I hung up. Stared at the phone in my hand. Put it down. Brushed my teeth. Got into bed.
The apartment was dark. The sheets were cool. The silence of Copper Creek settled around me, and I closed my eyes. My body settled into the mattress.
And then he was there. Behind my eyelids.
Uninvited. The man I'd walked in on in the Blackwood kitchen and barely recognized.
The jaw. The forearms. The hardened, brown eyes that hadn't looked away.
My fingers on his collar, straightening the fabric, the warmth of his neck under my knuckles.
The low way he'd said my name on the swing.
God, he turned out so hot.
With a mind of its own, my hand slid down under the sheet. Slow. Across my stomach. Lower. The heat between my thighs was already there waiting, like it had been waiting all night, like it had been waiting since the kitchen doorway when we locked eyes.
My breath caught in the dark.
Oh, fuck.
“Hunt.”