Chapter 1: The For Sale Sign That Wasn't

The U-Haul died four miles outside of Cedar Hollow, which Nora Bellweather decided was either a sign or a coincidence, depending on how much she wanted to cry about it. She chose coincidence. Crying could wait until she was alone, ideally with a glass of wine and a door she could lock, neither of which currently existed in her life. What existed was a rented truck ticking as it cooled on the shoulder of Route 9, a duffel bag of knives that represented most of her remaining professional dignity, and eleven hundred dollars in a checking account that used to have considerably more zeros attached to it. She called the number on the door — Hargrove Auto, Full Service, Est. 1974 — before she registered whose name that was. By the time the tow truck rounded the bend, gravel spitting under its tires, she'd already remembered, and it was too late to unremember, and there was nothing to do but stand there in the ditch grass in her second-best boots and watch Eli Hargrove climb down out of the cab like a decade hadn't happened at all. He'd gotten broader. That was the first thing she noticed, unfairly. Broader through the shoulders, a little more weather in his face, a scar through one eyebrow that hadn't been there before. He was wiping his hands on a rag out of habit before he'd even looked at her properly, and when he did look — really look — he went very still, the way a man goes still when he's deciding whether to trust what he's seeing. "Nora Bellweather," he said. Not a question. Just her name, set down carefully, like he wasn't sure it wouldn't break something. "Hi, Eli." "You called my shop." "I called *a* shop. I didn't know it was yours anymore. I thought—" She stopped, because what she'd thought was that his father would still be running it, cranky and kind and calling her *chef* even back when she was nineful only ever burned toast. "I'm sorry about your dad. I should have written. I meant to." Something crossed his face and was gone. "Five years now." "I'm sorry," she said again, because she didn't have a better sentence, and the silence that followed was long enough that a hawk had time to cross the whole sky above them before he cleared his throat and nodded at the truck. "Let's see what she's doing." He worked while she stood a careful distance away, arms crossed against a September wind that smelled like cut hay and asphalt, and she let herself watch him the way she hadn't let herself do anything in months — without an agenda, without calculating what it cost. He still hummed while he worked. He still had that trick of tilting his head like the engine was telling him something in a language only he spoke. "Belt," he said finally, straightening up. "I can get the part, but not till tomorrow morning. You're stuck here tonight." "Of course I am." "Where you headed, anyway? Just passing through?" She almost lied. The old instinct — protect the wound, keep the soft parts covered — nearly won. But he was going to find out inside of a day; Cedar Hollow's whole information economy ran on approximately four gossiping women at the Cut & Curl, and one of them was her grandmother. "I'm moving into Gran's old building. The one on Main, next to—" She stopped. "Next to my shop," Eli said, and there it was, the ghost of a smile, rueful and real. "Small towns." "Small towns," she agreed. "What are you putting in there?" "A restaurant." She said it fast, like ripping off a bandage, because the last time she'd said those words out loud they'd been attached to a place in the city that no longer existed, a partnership that had gone up in flames that were still, legally speaking, being litigated. "If I can get the permits. If I can get the roof fixed. If about six other things go right, which, given my recent track record, is not a great bet." Eli didn't ask about the city. He didn't ask why a woman with a culinary degree and — she assumed he still half-knew, small towns — a name that used to show up in magazines was standing in a ditch with a broken-down U-Haul instead of wherever she was supposed to be. He just looked at her for a second too long, and said, "I always figured you'd open a restaurant." "You did not." "I did. You used to make me eat things nobody in Cedar Hollow had ever heard of. I ate a beet once. For you. Under protest." Despite everything — the ditch, the eleven hundred dollars, the ten years — she laughed, and it startled them both. "Come on," he said, tossing the rag back in his toolbox. "I'll drive you into town. Your grandmother's expecting you, and if I let you sit out here in the cold she'll have my head, engagement or no engagement." The word landed between them like a dropped plate. He heard it too. She watched him hear it, watched the color come up his neck, watched him decide, visibly, not to take it back. "I mean," he said, "the one that didn't happen." "Eli—" "Truck's this way," he said, and picked up her duffel bag before she could stop him, and walked toward Cedar Hollow like he hadn't just cracked the door open on the one conversation she'd driven four hundred miles specifically to avoid.

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