Sneak Peak #2
"It's smart," I said. My voice was steady. My hands were under the table, gripping the edge of my chair so hard my knuckles ached. "I grew up in Copper Creek. I know the community, the landowners, the political landscape. Nobody else in this room can say that. It's a strategic advantage."
Three reasons. Each one perfectly sound.
Each one a lie I was constructing in real time.
Nobody questioned it. Why would they? I was Jessica Williams. I didn't make impulsive decisions.
Except I just had, and the speed of it should have terrified me — should have made me pump the brakes, take a day, run the numbers like a professional instead of a woman who'd just volunteered to move back to the town she'd outgrown at eighteen because the universe dropped its name on a Monday morning like a coin in a collection plate and my mouth said yes before my brain had a vote.
Instead, what I felt was the first full breath I'd taken in months. Deep. Clean. All the way down to the bottom of my lungs, filling spaces I hadn't known were empty. I didn't examine it. I just breathed.
Bobbie was draped across my kitchen counter like a Calvin Klein ad that had given up on life.
One leg dangling, silk shirt unbuttoned one button past professional, a glass of wine in his hand that was technically his third but he'd poured the second and third as one continuous pour, so technically it was still his second, and I wasn't in a position to argue because I was on my fourth.
"You're not running away," he said, pointing at me with the hand holding the wine, which sloshed onto his wrist. He didn't wipe it. He licked it. Because Bobbie Chen did not waste Sancerre. "You're strategically relocating."
"Exactly."
"To rural Texas ." He said rural Texas the way most people say root canal. "Where the men wear boots without irony, and the closest thing to a cocktail bar is a gas station with ice."
"It's a twelve-month contract, Bobbie. It's a career move."
"Honey." He swung himself upright on the counter and fixed me with a look that could cut glass.
Five foot eight in the platforms he wore to the bodega, sharper than a scalpel, the man who'd watched me sprint through New York for a decade and had never once failed to call bullshit when he smelled it.
He was taking over my lease and the spider plant I'd been failing to kill for three years, which he'd already named Francesca and was planning to rehabilitate.
"You haven't voluntarily left Manhattan since 2019, and that was for a funeral. You don't even like trees."
I frowned. “I like trees."
"You told me last month that Central Park gave you anxiety because it was 'too aggressively green.'"
"It's a great opportunity," I said, because I'd said it four times already and the repetition was starting to sand the edges off the panic underneath.
"Mmhm." He took a long, theatrical sip. His eyes didn't leave mine. Bobbie's Mmhm was a weapon of mass destruction — it meant I see exactly what you're doing and I'm going to let you do it and then I'm going to bring it up at the worst possible moment for the rest of your natural life.
I ignored the Mmhm. Picked up my phone and FaceTimed my parents instead, because talking to Bobbie required a level of honesty I was not currently equipped for.
My mother answered on the second ring. Her face filled the screen — Evelyn Williams, sixty-two years old, kitchen behind her, something already in the oven at eight o'clock at night because my mother had never once in her life not been baking something.
"Jessica Lee." She peered at me through the phone the way she peered at everything — like she could see through the screen and into the apartment and directly into the parts of me I was trying to keep shut. "You look thin. Are you eating?"
"Mom, I —"
"Ed!" she called over her shoulder. "Ed, get in here, it's Jessie.” I winced at the childhood nickname.
My father's face appeared behind hers. Quieter than he used to be, or maybe I was just listening differently now.
He didn't say much. He squeezed Mom's shoulder and looked at me through the phone, and his eyes were soft and full, and he said, "Hey, sweetheart.” Something in me unlocked so fast I had to look away.
We talked. About the contract, about the town, about whether the old Henderson place still had that rooster that attacked the mail carrier.
Mom told me to bring warm layers. Dad asked if I needed anything for the apartment.
Normal things. Parent things. Things that settled over me like a blanket I'd kicked off years ago and was only now realizing I was cold without.
And somewhere in the middle of it — somewhere between Mom's casserole instructions and Dad's quiet nod when I told him I'd be there by the end of the month — my accent came back.
I didn't notice. The vowels rounded out.
The pace slowed. The sharp, clipped Manhattan diction I'd been filing into place for a decade softened, and the girl from Copper Creek bled through like ink through paper.
I was laughing — really laughing, the deep kind, the kind that came from somewhere below my ribs instead of somewhere behind my teeth — at something Mom said about Dorothy Sullivan's fourteen-point opinion on the new parking meters.
From the kitchen doorway, Bobbie watched me. Arms folded, shoulder against the frame, his face doing something I'd never seen on it before — soft, almost tender, stripped of every bit of performance he usually wore like armor. I caught his reflection in the dark window behind my phone.
He mouthed two words.
There she is.
Bobbie was asleep in my bed by midnight. He'd fallen sideways onto my pillow mid-sentence the way he'd been falling asleep on my furniture for ten years. Platforms still on. One arm hung off the edge of the mattress.
I sat on the floor. Cross-legged, back against the wall, surrounded by half-packed boxes and the stripped-bare bones of an apartment that had never really felt like mine.
Not once. Not in the five years I'd lived here, not when I'd hung the prints or bought the throw pillows or arranged the bookshelf in that studied, casual way that magazines tell you means you have your life together.
The kitchen was dark. The city hummed outside the window — the New York quiet, which wasn’t quiet at all, just noise I'd trained myself to stop hearing.
Sirens and traffic and someone three floors up rearranging furniture because this city never shut the hell up, and I used to love that and now it sounded like static between stations.
I was going home. Back to a town with one diner and one bar and a population that could fit inside the venue I'd run on Saturday night with room to spare.
I was supposed to feel conflicted about that.
I was supposed to be weighing pros and cons and building a spreadsheet and approaching this the way I approached everything — strategically, with contingencies, with a plan B that had its own plan B.
I didn't feel conflicted.
What I felt was a loosening in my chest that had started the second I said I’d go and hadn't stopped. Like a fist that had been clenched so long I'd forgotten it was a fist, slowly opening. Finger by finger. Knuckle by knuckle. The tendons releasing. The blood coming back.
Relief. Enormous, bone-deep, shameful relief.
Shameful because it wasn't supposed to be there. Because I'd spent ten years building a life that was supposed to feel like an arrival, not a sentence. Because if going home felt like relief, then what the hell had I been doing here? What was all of it for?
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window.
Closed my eyes. The glass fogged with my breath.
I would not think about the creek. I would not think about the stars.
I would not think about why Copper Creek specifically made my body exhale like it had been holding its breath for a decade.
My eyes were closed. The glass was cool against my skin.
The apartment was dark, the boxes were packed, and I was leaving.
The last thing before I shut it down and locked the door and fell asleep on the floor beside the couch — the very last thing, uninvited and unstoppable, sliding in under every barricade I'd built —
It wasn't the creek. It wasn't the stars. It wasn't the gala or the skyline or the man at the bar whose hand on my elbow registered as nothing.
It was knowing I’d see Hunter again.