Page 61 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

Emma and I shook our heads, smiling.

“She climbed down the ivy.” Suzie waved her hands in big circles. “Never mind that it’s a two-story house, plus an attic, so we were at least thirty feet off the ground. She just shimmies right on down.”

“She sounds…fun,” Emma said.

“Yeah, you both are going to love her,” Suzie promised.

Carly cooed and gurgled, waving her tiny fist in the air, and Suzie rested her cheek against her soft, fuzzy head, cuddling her daughter closer. My heart turned over in my chest. I had never had baby fever. Jessica had been a complete accident and the years following, I had been focused entirely on surviving the total upheaval of my life, first as a teen mom, and then as a widow. Having a second child had literally never occurred to me.

Now…it occurred to me.

Having another kid would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Jessica was fourteen, for heaven’s sake. It would be like starting that part of my life all over again. Why would I do that now, when things were finally getting easier?

Still, I couldn’t resist stroking a finger along Carly’s satiny cheek. Longing surged through me.

“We should get going,” Emma said. “I have a town to run.”

I waved them off with promises that I would bring Jessica and Max to the bonfire and got back to work.

But no matter how hard I scrubbed at the glass, no matter how much I reminded myself that between my job and Jessica, I had my hands full, I couldn’t shake the hollowed-out feeling in my gut.

A restless craving for more.

Chapter 20

Max

The sun was barely visible behind Hart Mountain when we arrived at Barnett Farm. Ribbons of red, purple, and gold filled the sky. I pulled in a lungful of crisp air, taking in the mingled scent of animal smells and pine, along with hamburgers and brats on the grill. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful scene than this, pastoral fields stretching toward craggy mountains, the sounds of friends and children chatting and laughing punctuated by bird calls.

And Kate at my side, her honey-brown hair turning to fire under the rays of the setting sun. That might be the most beautiful thing of all.

Hart’s Ridge was both a mountain town and a farming town, and both were a foreign experience to me. I had moved here with a lot of questions about what Piedmont would be like, what the students would be like, what the Harts would be like. But I hadn’t given the town itself a whole lot of thought.

Maybe because I had never truly believed I would stay.

Since I graduated college, I hadn’t stayed put in any place longer than three years. I had been focused on building my career, not building a life. And now that I wanted to build a life, now that I was actively trying, it had somehow escaped me that a very important part of life was where you lived it.

Did I want to live in Hart’s Ridge?

Did I want to give up midnight takeout orders of phô? Did I want to live in a town where the only bar housed a goat bound and determined to knock me on my ass? Did I want to live in a town where elderly busybodies side-eyed me suspiciously because I was dating the town widow?

I wouldn’t have thought so, if I had thought about it at all.

But I would have been wrong.

Nowhere had ever been home for me. Houses were shelter and, if I was lucky, safety. I had grown up in Los Angeles, but if anyone asked where he was from, I always told them the last place I had lived. First that was LA. Then it was Washington, DC. Now it was Atlanta. But none of those places had ever been home, the way people meant it as a feeling. I didn’t even know what home would feel like.

But I was beginning to suspect it might feel like Hart’s Ridge. Like plantain frites at Dreamer’s. Like looking both ways for Goat before entering the tavern. Like everyone having an opinion on my love life.

Like being introduced to Kate’s friends as her boyfriend.

For the first time, it all felt very real. Like maybe I could really do this. All my hopes for the future, about roots and a family, I hadn’t really believed in it. I couldn’t visualize it. But now, I could actually see it, the future I wanted so badly, and it looked a lot like this. The thought hit me squarely in the chest, leaving me almost dizzy. I couldn’t breathe around it.

It looked like Kate. Like Hart’s Ridge.

If we didn’t burn the place down first.

And since that thought was at least slightly less scary—and a whole lot more manageable—than how I felt about Kate, I focused on that.

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