Page 107 of Brewbies
Until she’d said it out loud, Darby hadn’t realized just how true this statement was.
McGarvey nodded slowly, his expression unreadable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m afraid that’s not going to be a possibility.”
Darby felt her heart drop into her guts with a sickening splat. “Why is that?”
“Because I have to give you this.” McGarvey handed a white envelope through the window.
If she never saw an official-looking document as long as she lived…
With trembling fingers, she pried open the flap and pulled out the tri-folded sheaf.
She flattened them out against her steering wheel, reading the text at the top several times before her brain unpacked their meaning.
Petition to Declare Darby Dunwell a True Townsendite
On the very first line, in a signature so obsessively neat that she could actually read all the letters, was Ethan Townsend’s name.
Many more followed.
Caryn. Cady. Gemma. Myrtle. Vee.
She got as far as Roy Dobson’s when her eyes began to blur and hot tracks slipped down her cheeks.
Ethan had his land. He’d build his brewery. The small space she’d occupied in Townsend Harbor would close over as quickly as grass on a grave.
As it should be.
“I’m sorry,” Darby said, handing the papers and envelope back to McGarvey as the broad smile slid from his face. “But I can’t.”
“Are you sure?” McGarvey asked, meeting her streaming eyes.
She nodded, fiercely dashing the moisture from her cheeks. “Please. Just let me go.”
Before I lose my nerve.
McGarvey shook his head sadly. “Okay. But I’d cool it on the gas if I were you. The 101 is crawling with cops from here to Poulsbo.”
Darby waved as he walked back to his cruiser and waited until he was inside to ease back onto the road at a more moderate speed.
So long as he didn’t follow her into the tree tunnel, she should be able to resume her steady clip within a minute or two.
3:32 p.m.
She could still make it.
Provided another Townsendite didn’t show up to slow her down in some inexplicable way.
But as luck—or the lack thereof would have it—someone did.
There, at the mouth of a canopy studded with spring green buds, was Ethan Townsend.
He stood tall and broad-shouldered, staring down the length of the highway, a quiet determination in his gaze as he watched her approach. Though it had only been two weeks since she saw him, Darby drank him in like a woman starved. The familiar contours of his jaw line, his sharp cheekbones, eyes the blue of the summer sky after a storm.
Darby’s foot slid off the gas pedal, and the camper’s sudden deceleration made her stomach flip.
That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
At the precise moment that it occurred to her to wonder what the fuck Ethan was doing standing on the side of the road with no car in sight, his arm lifted from his side and a small cardboard sign appeared from behind his back.
