Page 32 of Things Left Unsaid

When he studies me, brow arched, I ask, “Why are we stopping here?”

“I’m going to supply my future bride with butter tarts.”

I put him off with: “Don’t you remember I’m a type 1 diabetic.”

“Yes, but I also knowyou can eat Harry’s pastries so long as you watch your carbs and blood sugar level.”

“How do you know that?”

“Attended a class years ago,” he says as he leans over to unfasten my seatbelt for me.

The chivalrous gesture takes me aback, but it shouldn’t—I’m in Pigeon Creek and have rewound my life to the 1950s.

He barely touched me, yet wherever there was a point of contact, I can feel a tingle.

A tingle.

Though that tingle might just be the fact he took a class for diabetes management…

He had to have done that for me.

My jaw works but I mutter, “Fine.”

“Though Old Harry does have a sugar-free range if you want to try some of those products instead. He went and got type 2 diabetes. He has a gluten-free range too. That might have started with Callan’s diagnosis,” he says dryly. “Callan probably props up the bakery more than anyone in Pigeon Creek.”

Man, I forgot that’s how it works here.

Everyone knows everyone’s business.

Secrets are currency and information is king.

And if you can provide a service to the Korhonens, you do because they’ll reward you.

As there’s no reason for me not to, I jump onto the asphalt too, suddenly aware of the height difference between us.

He’s over six feet five and I’m not exactly short at five-ten, but I feel like it while I’m in his shadow.

He smells better this close.

Not that I should notice.

Yet I’m reminded of what it’s like to stand next to him. To feel his heat. It pipes off him as if he’s his own geyser.

When I was younger, I’d hug him for warmth and he’d think nothing of hugging me in return.

All these years later, I know he treated me like a sibling whereas I looked at him with hero worship.Adoration.I’d loved him with all the fervor my teenage heart was capable of.

I never realized how he let me in until he locked me out in the cold.

That hurt.

It was, in fact, the worst part of my exile. If he’d believed in me, I’d have endured the town’s hatred.

But he didn’t.

He blamed me.

So he broke my heart.

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