Page 123 of Once Upon A Small Town Secret
“Paige.” Just my name, but it feels like a hand on my shoulder.
“What.”
“Just trust me, okay?” he says quietly. “Please.”
His tone stops me in my tracks. I squeeze my eyes shut because this isn’t the moment to untangle that chord. “Fine, but let me know the second you find him.”
“Copy that.”
The call ends, the screen goes black, and I’m left standing in the Pint, feeling lost.
Chapter Thirty Eight
Ben
I don’t point the truck anywhere in particular. I just keep driving.
The radio’s on low—some late-night DJ telling a story about a song that came out before I was born. I take turns without deciding to, roll through neighborhoods I know by muscle memory, pass the river twice, then a third time.
The lights on the bridge throw long, dragging smears on the black surface, and I catch myself thinking, stupidly, that if I drove long enough, I could outrun the way my chest keeps cinching down and then letting go like a bad stitch.
When the truck stops, it’s not because I aimed for it. But something in me must have.
The old condo is cleaner than it is in my memory. The city resurfaced the parking lot since the last time I was here; the pothole that used to swallow hubcaps is gone, replaced with tidy white lines.
New porch lights. New landscaping—small trees that will throw real shade in ten years. The same rectangle of building, but softened. Family-friendly. The kind of place that looks like it would be on a brochure.
Still, when I look at the second-floor unit with the little rusted balcony—now painted, not rusted—I feel something shift inside me. It’s not the paint or the lights or the trees. It’s the way my body recognizes the room beyond it.
This is where my dad and I perfected the art of silence. The long, low kind that stretches through a dinner eaten in separate rooms and an evening and a weekend until you wonder if your voice is a muscle that can atrophy.
This is where he packed a life into boxes while I wrote a midterm on a school computer two states away. Where a woman I didn’t know opened the door on a chain and said, “Oh, honey,” and it cut me sharper than if she’d just slammed the door in my face.
A different family lives there now. It’s their porch light. Their welcome mat. Their bikes chained to the stair rail. I sit in the truck in the dark and watch the light spilling from a windowthat used to be ours. A kid moves through it in profile and then vanishes, and for a second, I’m ten again at a table for two, waiting for conversation to happen to me.
I could have tracked him down. Greg Hoffman. I know men who know men who would find a mailing address for me for the price of a favor. A phone number. I could have knocked on a different door and asked the questions I didn’t know how to ask.
Why wasn’t I enough? Why didn’t you say goodbye? What kind of person leaves a kid with a key that doesn’t work and calls it moving on?
But I didn’t try to find him. Why bother?
I keep telling myself he wasn’t worth it. Maybe that was true. Maybe it was cowardice wrapped in logic. Either way, I didn’t. I built a bar and a life and became a person who made something of himself.
The words in the Pint today should have slid right off. Three old men, pissed about… what? A beer they didn’t like. A kid with my last name standing behind a bar.
Thief.
Good-for-nothing.
Sham.
I don’t know them. But I know the way those words found parts of me I’d rather keep boarded up.
The Hoffmans are from here. My family. My grandfather ran a place once. My father moved us away before I ever knew my grandfather, then moved back here long after the chance to get to know him had passed.
Maybe those men sat on stools my grandfather wiped down, and they think I’m stealing a name to make a buck. Maybe they knew my father and think his rot passed down in the blood like hair color.
The passenger door opens and the dome light snaps on. I don’t jump. I’m too far inside my skin for that.
