Jake stood beside Stevie next to the open barn doors as kids and parents streamed past them. Lily was running around, chattering with her friends and basically spreading excitement everywhere.
The moon was bright and high above them. Light spilled from the open barn doors and from the floodlight in the center of the yard.
He was intensely aware of Stevie at his elbow. Several folks greeted him, and her soft hellos echoed his. Some of them even recognized and hugged her. Some darted looks at her. He hoped they were simply curious.
His heart pounded hard in his chest whenever he thought of the kiss he and Stevie had shared. He thought of it almost constantly.
They'd kissed.
He wasn't kidding himself about what it meant. She'd been seeking comfort. And he'd met her kiss, offering it.
But...
But.
Her words from the afternoon swirled in his head. You have nothing to be intimidated about.
He kept reminding himself that she'd come here to run away from her life—a life that expected her back. She'd been desperate for someone to understand her grief.
That was all.
And again, there was that but...
Two families were getting out of their vehicles, and he figured just about everyone was here when one last pair of headlights turned up the drive. He squinted into the lights, trying to identify the vehicle. It was compact. Out of place, like Stevie's little hybrid had been yesterday morning.
Three little terrors—triplets that belonged to his friend Callum, raced past, and Jake was shaking Callum's hand when the newest arrival got out of the car.
Stevie's sharp intake of breath had Jake turning toward her. Her gaze was fixed on whomever had just gotten out of the car.
Light from the barn spilled behind them, and he couldn't get a good look at the approaching man until he was just a few feet away.
"Zack," she said, and it wasn't a greeting. Her voice was flat. "What are you doing here?"
"You disappeared." It wasn't a real answer.
There was a pregnant pause, as if Stevie didn't know what to say.
"Jake, this is my business manager, Zack. Zack, my friend Jake."
Zack's face swiveled to Jake and, even in the low light, he could read the calculation in the other man's assessing gaze.
Jake shook his hand firmly but didn't say a word. He might not have been an expert on body language, but he could read tension in the set of Stevie's shoulders.
And Jake was also too aware of what he looked like. He'd added gel and mussed his hair until it stood on end in a pseudo-Einstein look. He'd donned a white lab coat from his closet and pulled out the bulky black glasses he'd worn back in college—still held together by duct-tape across the bridge.
"Can you give us a few minutes, bud?" the business manager asked. It wasn't really a question.
Jake looked at Stevie.
"It's fine," she murmured. Her eyes seemed to beg him not to leave her alone, but the words didn't cross her lips, so he walked away reluctantly.
Not far, though. He slipped into the shadows close to the barn door. She'd called him her friend—no matter what he wanted after this afternoon—and her friend he would be. And right now, as her friend, he wasn't leaving her alone with that guy.
Her arms had crossed over her middle, her hands clutching her elbows as if she were holding herself together by sheer will alone.
Her face. That expression. It was the same one she'd worn when she'd looked at him that day—a mixture of panic and uncertainty.
Back then, he'd figured she'd wanted to run away, and seeing her expression again reinforced that impression.
The business manager blasted her. "What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere? You've already blown off four tour dates. Are you trying to get sued?"
She didn't move, but her stillness spoke volumes.
"How'd you find me?" Her voice was small, not like the boisterous giggles she'd shared with Lily earlier.
His lips twisted in a sneer. "There's an app on your phone. I can track your location."
He'd been tracking her? That was beyond creepy.
She shivered, and Jake had to fight his urge to rescue her. He wasn't part of her music industry life. It wasn't his place.
"Look, I've done what I can for you," Zack said, "but you're about to implode your career."
"Maybe I don't want to come back," she whispered.
Zack made a disparaging noise. "For what? For this cowpoke?"
"He's my friend." Her voice came slightly stronger now, but her words were like a blow to Jake's gut. He'd always been in the friend zone.
More silence between them. A loaded silence.
"I can't believe you've let this setback derail you like this."
"Sienna wasn't a setback. She was going to be my daughter." Maybe the business manager couldn't hear it, but Stevie's voice was gaining even more strength.
"You should be over her by now."
That was the wrong thing to say to a grieving mother.
"Please go."
There was Jake's invitation to join them, but before he could move in their direction, Lily rushed past him without noticing him.
"Stevie, Stevie! We're about to start, c'mon."
"I'm not leaving unless you're in the car with me," Zack said, his voice low and threatening.
"You can't leave, Stevie!" Lily's voice ranged toward whining. "We gotta make s'more goop."
But Stevie took it in stride, accepting Lily when his niece grabbed her hand and started pulling her toward the barn. "I'll call tomorrow, and we can talk through some options." The way she'd said it, it wasn't a question.
The girls slipped past him into the barn. He couldn't tell whether Stevie noticed him in the shadows. He stayed and watched until Stevie's manager got in his car and drove away.
He ducked into the barn, loud with voices and humming with expectation. And then he was too busy being the mad scientist to talk to Stevie.
But it didn't stop him from having flashbacks to that terrible day in his sophomore year even as he hammed it up in front of the kids and took them through the steps of their experiment.
It was a good thing he'd gone through it with Stevie and Lily earlier, because now he could put himself on autopilot as those memories cut jagged holes in his world.
The weekend before the event, they'd had a marathon study session at the library. He could still smell the scent of thousands of books. Feel the hush that had surrounded them. They sat at a study table in the back corner of the library, and since it was a Saturday morning, they were the only students there.
Their knees bumped under the table. Again. This was the twelfth time it had happened.
He'd counted.
Even after weeks of tutoring, he constantly wiped sweaty palms against his jeans. And prayed she didn't notice.
They'd been working on Coulumb's Law, and her head was bent over the textbook splayed on the table before her. Her nose almost touched the page, as if the closer she got, the more it might make sense.
"So the force between the particles is dependent on the distance between them?" She asked the question tentatively, as if afraid he was going to correct her.
"You've got it."
She looked up, using one hand to hold her bangs out of her face. Her eyes were shining at him.
"I...got it?" she whispered. Her other hand squeezed his, sending a jolt to his toes.
He'd known she could understand, and smiled goofily back at her, sharing the joy that bubbled right out of her.
The memory flitted away as the kids shouted their joy, goo everywhere. Jake needed to focus, but as he blinked, more memories overtook him.
That moment in the library, that touch, had been the impetus that had given him the courage for what happened a few days later. That, and the grief he'd still been processing over Adam's death. Adam had been a proponent of go big or go home.
And Jake was a test-the-hypothesis kind of guy.
But he'd wanted to feel close to his brother and he'd thought... He'd hoped.
He could still remember the jitters that had had him practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as he'd waited for her in the hallway by her locker.
The final bell had rung forty-five seconds before. Lockers slammed, and kids talked all around him, but he was stationary. He'd asked his final period teacher if he could leave early, and since he hadn't missed a day of class since eighth grade, Mr. Hampton hadn't even blinked at the request.
Now he was hoping she wouldn't be able to see his hands shaking where he clutched the bright green poster board. His shaking was dislodging some of the glitter that he'd painstakingly used to spell "Go to prom with me, Stevie?" It covered the toes of his shoes.
But he didn't have time to do anything about it.
There she was. She'd just turned the corner from her last period class and was approaching. She hadn't seen him yet. Her head was turned toward her friend Cara as they chatted.
His heart pounded. She had to say yes.
Didn't she?
Cara caught sight of him first. He couldn't decipher the widening of her eyes or the twitch of her lips.
He ran out of time to worry about it, because then, Stevie saw him too, and came to a halt a few feet away. "Oh. Jake."
And the look on her face was one he'd never seen before. That blend of panic and the dart of her eyes like she wanted to run, and the discomfort...
The words he meant to say stuck behind his Adams' apple. "Hey, Stevie. How'd the test go?"
His face burned.
How'd the test go? That wasn't what he'd wanted to ask, even if it was what they'd worked toward for all these weeks.
Now people were gathering behind her, whispering. Some were pointing at him.
"Um, I think it went okay. I don't think I'll need more tutoring." She looked away. For the second time, he thought she wanted to escape.
The probability of a favorable outcome was rapidly shrinking.
There was a roaring in his ears. This hadn't gone anything like he'd planned. He'd thought she would catch sight of him, and her face would light up, like that moment when she'd gotten Coulumb's Law.
He turned on his heel. And he was the one who ran away.
The memory burned a hole in his gut. The kids were done with their goop—Callum's triplets were peeling chunks off theirs and throwing it at each other—and he hopped off the makeshift stage.
"You are the coolest uncle ever!" Lily crowed. She threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his middle.
But after Stevie's visit from her business manager and the memories that had rushed back in, he found he couldn't quite meet Stevie's eyes.
Stevie stood on the back porch, head cranked back to take in the night sky.
She couldn't believe Zack had come. At least he hadn't been able to bully her into rushing back to Nashville.
After the chaos of the evening—personal and physical—Lily had asked Stevie to tuck her in. She hadn't been able to refuse the girl, and now she wiped away the errant tear that she'd been able to hold off until now. She'd never had a bedtime with Sienna.
The brisk evening breeze cooled the tears on her cheeks.
The barn light was still on.
She crossed the yard. Even in the dark, she knew her way. Knew how to avoid the huge hole close to where Jake parked the farm truck. She was comfortable here. It felt like home.
She found Jake inside, still working. She paused in the doorway, lingering there, and he didn't seem to see her.
He was taking time at each table to wrap up the used tablecloth covered in goop and goo-making liquids and stuffing them in a trash barrel. He must've already gathered up all the bowls and measuring spoons, because they were stacked in neat little bundles along the front edge of the platform.
Music was playing. Music she recognized. Her own voice wafted quietly through the air, and she followed the sound it to an old-school boom box, complete with cassette player, at the back of the stage.
"I can't believe you're listening to this. Where did you get it?"
He was playing one of the first songs she'd recorded. She'd scraped together enough money to pay for studio space and to have several boxes full of cassettes produced. She'd sold them out of the trunk of her car for months, mailed copies to music producers, and eventually she'd connected with her first manager.
She'd thought she'd tracked down and destroyed all the existing copies.
"I bought it off eBay a few years ago." He didn't look up.
His admission floored her.
"You aren't exactly my target audience." She walked to the table at the end of the line and began helping. The sooner the barn was cleaned up, the sooner they could get to bed. Tonight, she actually she might sleep again. Between working with Jake for two days and the emotional roadblocks she'd busted through—not to mention facing off with Zack—she was physically and mentally spent.
He shrugged. "Doesn't stop me from enjoying your stuff."
But this was so different from her sound now. This was nothing more than an acoustic guitar and her voice. The naive lyrics had been written when she was nineteen. She could hear every crack of the guitar strings, every note that she missed by a half-step. She hadn't done any retakes—couldn't afford them with what the studio had charged.
She shuddered in half-joking horror as she passed by Jake. "I can't believe you willingly listen to this. It's awful."
"It's you." He didn't look at her when he said it.
In fact, he hadn't really looked her in the eye since she'd joined him.
Was he angry that Zack had showed up earlier? Make that two of them. She'd been irate, felt violated to learn that Zack had used her phone to track her down. It was a controlling move and just reinforced that she'd been right to end her romantic relationship with him.
She needed to fire him. The fact that he hadn't understood her loss just emphasized how big the disconnect was between them. The tracking thing was beyond the pale. She would fire him, once she left here.
The problem was, she was running out of time.
Zack was partly right. She couldn't leave her career in limbo forever. She had tour dates scheduled the following week. She couldn't cancel them without disappointing her fans and causing the venues to lose a lot of money.
But she had a major problem.
"I haven't been able to sing since I got the phone call that Sienna had died," she admitted.
She kept her focus on the next table, on the next visit to the trashcan. There was something freeing about the admission, but she also didn't want him to think less of her either.
And then the last table was cleared, and she had no choice but to face him. He met her near the corner of the stage. His eyes were soft, the way they'd been just before they'd shared that amazing kiss in the orchard. Her stomach pitched.
"Have you tried writing a song for her?" he asked.
She shook her head slightly. "I...can't. That part of me is blocked off somehow. I can't hear the music inside anymore."
He reached for her. She expected him to draw her in close again, but he only held her elbows loosely. There were still inches between them.
The cassette clicked off, leaving only silence.
Jake's heart pounded so loudly that she could probably hear it. His ears were burning.
He wanted to pull her closer.
But the image of her face when her business manager had appeared was etched into the front of his brain, superimposed over the memory of her at eighteen, wearing that look when he'd tried to ask her to prom.
These past thirty-six hours had brought her back into his life and shown him the kind of woman she really was. The kind of woman who mourned for the daughter she never got to have. The woman who was patient enough to listen to Lily's convoluted stories over breakfast. The artist. Her voice from the cassette had faded, but was forever held in his memory. She was amazingly talented. Also amazingly beautiful and kind.
But she wasn't staying in Redbud Trails. When she went back to her life in Nashville, she'd forget all about him.
And if he wanted to keep from getting eviscerated, he couldn't kiss her again.
So he settled for pressing his chin against her temple and holding her loosely.
"You'll find your voice again," he whispered into her hair.
And then he squeezed her elbows and let her go.