Page 51 of Ever With Me

She smiled and then left quickly, not giving him a chance to protest.

Just let her go.

She wants to go.

Besides, look what happened when he’d asked her to stay before. She’d just made him reveal more, while she remained a mystery.

Yet that empty chair made the whole backyard feel instantly lonely.Isn’t that how I like it? The solitude?Perhaps, but something Maddie said came back to him...before his emotional diarrhea.

“How about you just play a song on the guitar? It used to be your best friend, right? Or has Brooks Kent lost his spark?”

She wasn’t wrong. His guitar used to be his place of solace.

Brooks hesitated, then pulled out his guitar again. Maybe he just needed time with his old friend.

15

MADDIE

Stop thinking about him.

All day long, Maddie had caught herself listening to Brooks’smusic. And now that four o’clock was rapidly approaching, it was all she could do to keep herself from racing out the door.

Brooks Kent was becoming a problem.

She hadn’t intended to have fun playing house with him and his niece.

But it was.

And he’d been so normal. Practically domestic as he grilled hot dogs for Audrey and made mac and cheese on the stove. Put her to bed.

And then he’d opened a window into his dark past, one that made so much sense. Tragically so.

Uncomfortable as she’d been with blackmailing him, it was easier when she’d thought he was just an asshole who jerked people around. Yet the Brooks she’d gotten to know the past couple of days seemed to have an actual heartbeat under that arrogant exterior.

So she’d fled his house, feeling guilty about the fact that he was apersonand she’d been a jerk to him. A person who’d wanted to know more about her.

Now, here she was, thinking about him nonstop, doing what she did every time she had acrush.

God, I’m pathetic.Lindsay and Naomi were right. She did catch feelings too easily.

Actually, Maddie had avoided Naomi all day since Naomi had a way of zeroing in on whatever Maddie was feeling.

Maddie pulled her ear pods out and tucked them away, then left her back office to make a round in the Depot before she left.

Mid-afternoon in the Depot was always one of the slowest times, especially on a weekday. Now that school had started again, they didn’t have the throng of customers from the summer, which made the place feel dead. Things picked up on the weekends, and they’d have a few more heavy trafficked days in the fall, especially near the fair and during the holidays.

Yet every September, the pressure of living in a town that depended on tourism for a bulk of its commerce weighed heavily on Maddie. Pops had done a lot with his businesses to bring fresh faces in during the year, but he couldn’t even stop the slowdown.

And now they had an ugly, gaping hole where one of their main storefront windows used to be.

She stared at it, her guilt clawing its way through her. She didn’t have to close her eyes to imagine Brooks’s car sitting there, surrounded by the wreckage.

The man she’d been casually flirting with.

Naomi had done her best to fix the surrounding space, but it was still killing the aesthetic appeal in that section of the store—and, worse still, looked awful from the street.

“I don’t know why Pops won’t let me call someone else to see if they can repair it sooner,” Naomi said from behind her. She stood beside Maddie. “It looks so hideous. Have the police made any progress on figuring out who was behind it? It’s so hard to believe that the security footage didn’t get a license plate.”

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