Page 12 of The Hometown Legend

He walked inside and looked around. It was clean. Freshly so, and it beat the hell out of the mildew in the apartment and old motel rooms he’d been staying in.

Cassidy hadn’t wanted spousal support from him. But there had been some gaps in pay while he’d been moving around, and while he’d waited to get his disability from the military. And after he put all that money down on the ranch.

He’d been living lean. That was over now. He had the money.

Still, he hadn’t stayed anywhere this nice in some time.

It was the cleanliness that got him.

He moved deeper into the room, and there was a table. And on that table was a giant basket. Inside the basket was a bottle of wine, which he immediately took out and moved off to the side.

It wasn’t difficult for him to be around alcohol, but he wouldn’t be opening the bottle.

There was food in there, which he did appreciate. Candies and nuts, some bread and muffins. The basket overflowed, really.

It was amazing, and his stomach was growling. He went over to the fridge and opened it. There was a glass bottle with milk, some butter, a pie. He opened up the freezer and saw a tub of vanilla ice cream, and he gave thanks to a God he rarely acknowledged anymore.

He took the pie out of the fridge and cut himself a generous slice. That was one of the perks of living by himself—there was no one here to judge him. He heated the pie up in the microwave, then put a generous scoop of ice cream right on top. He didn’t care much about exploring the rest of the place, not when there was a blackberry pie for him to dig into.

It felt like home.

This place.

Homemade pie, a big scoop of vanilla ice cream and a clean kitchen.

He sat there in the silence, eating.

It wasn’t a parade. But he didn’t want a parade.

He thought of that woman again. Surrounded by sunlight. It made something warm bloom inside him that he hadn’t felt in a long time.

As welcome homes went, this was just about perfect. He hadn’t even turned the lights on. He looked around the dim room, the only sound his fork on the plate and the steady ticking of the clock on the wall.

“Welcome back, Gideon. Welcome back.”

CHAPTER THREE

THETHINGABOUTRory was that she’d always been a quitter. Something she was thinking about as she sat in the farm store, working a shift while Fia harvested more from the garden.

The farm store she’d be leaving next month.

Quitter behavior. Some might argue.

She’d first realized she was a quitter when clinging to the bottom of a rope in PE, looking up and doing mental calculations on how difficult it would be to get to the top. She was never going to make it. She’d realized that she could struggle and strain and get halfway, and then fail, in spite of getting mostly there...or she could just stop before she started.

She opted for that.

She’d failed PE, which she hated. She’d had straight A’s otherwise.

The grades were very important. Because she wasn’t athletic, she wasn’t popular. Her braces, glasses and knobby knees had precluded her from being part of the elite set. And her grades were all she had.

For all the good they’d done her.

Unlike most of the Four Corners kids, she’d gone to high school an hour from the ranch. Another aspect of her...quitter-ness. She just hadn’t been able to deal with her family during that period of time and the opportunity to put a little distance between herself and the turmoil at home had been a blessing.

She’d met her best friend, Lydia Payne, at a parade in town that her mom had taken her to when she’d been eight years old. Lydia had decided to collect Rory and make her into a pet of sorts, and Rory had soaked up the attention. In her own household, she was often lost.

Less confrontational than Fia. Not a rancher like Quinn. A little less—alotless—brave than Alaina.

---