“You and your idiotic ideas!” Emily said, pushing her way past her best friend’s husband.
“Good evening,” Troy said calmly, edging his bottle of beer out of the way as he closed the door behind her. “I assume it’s Rachel who’s the idiot, and not me.”
Emily flashed him a crooked grin. “I’d never call you an idiot,” she said, giving him a rough hug. “Especially if you have another one of those Rolling Rocks in the fridge.”
“Better yet,” he said. “I have cider for you. Want some water, sweetheart?” he called back to his wife as he headed toward the kitchen.
“I want a shot of bourbon,” Rachel said in a voice barely loud enough for Emily to hear as she settled a hand over her belly. Then she raised her voice. “Water would be great! With lots of ice.” Rachel turned back to Emily. “What bee flew up your skirts?”
“First unmarried guy who walks up to the bar, you said.” Emily threw herself onto the overstuffed couch in the familiar living room. “Three dates, you said. Truth or Dare, you said.”
Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Hey, it’s not my fault the first guy was a millionaire athlete who was once rated People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.”
Troy came in, his hands filled with a bottle of cider and the largest glass of ice water Emily had ever seen. “Rachel said you were having dinner with Mad Dog tonight. How’d it go?”
Emily took a long pull on the cider, savoring the tang at the back of her throat. “Well, I didn’t kill him.”
Troy started to laugh, but apparently he had the good sense to realize she was serious. Rachel was the one who spoke first. “Let me guess. He ordered Pepsi instead of Coke. No! Wait! He wanted cream gravy on his mashed potatoes, instead of brown. Oh, God. Don’t tell me substituted broccoli for green beans.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Emily said.
“Food isn’t a joke,” Rachel agreed. “Especially not now.” She turned a winning smile on her husband. “Speaking of which, do we have any more of that apple crumble?”
Troy clearly understood when he was being dismissed. “With vanilla ice cream?”
“Just a bit,” Rachel said contentedly. “I’ve got to get my calcium, right? Do you want some, Em?”
Em. Rachel had called her Em for years, since they’d met in first grade. That’s probably where Jon had picked it up. He’d shortened her name because he was always in a hurry and Em was a lot quicker to type in a text. A lot less chance of making a mistake.
Matt hadn’t shortened her name to keep from making a mistake earlier that evening. He’d called her Em because he was trying to calm her down. Trying to keep her from going off the deep end once she discovered that his true purpose in coming back to Harmony Springs was to ruin her life. Her life, and the life of every other person who depended on a thriving downtown business district.
“Earth to Emily,” Rachel said. But then she conceded the seriousness of the moment, because she said to Troy, “Forget about the crumble. Maybe I’ll have some later.”
“Just holler if you change your mind,” Troy said. “I’ll be sitting in the den. With my feet up. Watching the Rockets on TV. Watching Matt Dawson’s former team—”
“Thanks, love,” Rachel said, obviously reading that Emily’s blood was nearing the boiling point. She waited for Troy to exit before she said, “Okay. What happened?”
“It was a complete disaster.”
“He stood you up.”
“No!” Emily said. “He got there right on time.”
“Then he went for a little tongue when he kissed you hello.”
“There wasn’t any kiss!”
“He insulted your parentage and cursed your family for seven generations.”
“Rachel—” Emily warned.
“Well, I don’t know what else he could have done in forty-five minutes to make you act like this. Less, if you didn’t speed-walk on your way over here.”
“He owns the American Discount.”
There. That shut Rachel up. For about thirty-seven seconds. Then she said, “That’ll give you lots to talk about on your second date.”
“There isn’t going to be any second date!”
“You’re wimping out already?” Rachel leaned back in her chair, her hands folded over her baby bump as if she’d known Emily would take a dive all along. “And I had such high hopes…”
“What is it with you? Just because you’re blissed out on pregnancy hormones doesn’t mean you have to marry off every unattached woman in town!”
“I’m not worried about every unattached woman. I’m worried about you. You’re the one who accepted the dare, Em. And I intend to see that you keep your word. It’s for your own good. You need to prove to yourself that you won’t back down the second something gets difficult.”
Emily smothered the urge to scream—and if that wasn’t difficult, she didn’t know what was. When she was certain she could keep her words from screeching into dog-whistle territory, she said, “Look. I’m not backing out on the dare. I’ll get to a third date this month. But not with Matt. Let’s just pretend some other guy walked up to the bar. Let’s say I asked out…”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care!”
“Simon McCall,” Rachel said, obviously throwing down a gauntlet.
Emily immediately heard Matt’s earnest sneer about Simon’s store windows. “Fine. I’ll go out on three dates with Simon McCall. Can we get back to what’s really important here?”
“Matt Dawson’s plan to single-handedly destroy all of Harmony Springs?”
“Rachel—”
“Em.” Rachel’s voice was firm. “We’d all like Harmony Springs to stay the same forever. But the world marches on. No one wants to drive to Winchester once a week. They don’t even want to wait for two-day delivery for online orders.”
“You’re wrong.”
Rachel just looked at her.
Emily pulled the sleeve of her sweater over her fingertips as she repeated, “You’re wrong. People don’t mind waiting if they’re getting something worth waiting for. Nobody at the big box store in Winchester is going to take the time to show someone how to rip out ten rows of knitting to fix a mistake. The delivery guy from Mega-Mart won’t look at pictures of the grandkids all dressed up for their first day of school.”
“You’re living in the past, Em.”
Emily shook her head. “Sure, we had those things in the past. But we can keep them in the present.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I want you to succeed.”
“Then save about twenty column inches on the front page of next Wednesday’s Herald.”
“Save it for what?”
“The article you’re going to write. About how Harmony Springs is mobilizing to drive the American Discount out of town. And what I’m doing to lead the fight.”
Emily didn’t say the last part, the part that echoed loud and clear inside her head. When the American Discount was gone, Matt would be gone too. And that suited Emily just fine.
~~~
One week later, Emily pushed her way past the library’s heavy glass doors. Glancing at the clock on the wall, she saw she was fifteen minutes late. But it wasn’t like the meeting would start without her. Not when she was the one who’d sent out the emergency call to all the Main Street merchants.
It had helped that she’d worked in so many places in town. And everyone knew Theresa trusted Emily with everything at Harmony Skeins, with a lot more than just running the cash register. Emily regularly planned store displays. She scheduled sales and managed inventory, taking on more and more responsibility, especially after Theresa moved closer to her kids in DC.
Emily might not own a store on Main Street, but she knew everything there was to know about running one. And she hadn’t wasted the seven days since she’d had dinner with Matt Big-Bucks Dawson.
First off, she’d needed a name. Something snappy. An acronym that let people know, immediately, what was at stake. Her first thought was Preserve Main Street, but PMS wasn’t exactly the message she wanted to broadcast. Similarly, Shop Here In Town was right out. Committee to Retain And Preserve too.
When she hit on the perfect name, it rang like the bells at St. Ann’s: Save Our Stores.
Now one week later, Emily was ready to put her plan into action.
Heather March looked up from the rostrum at the front of the room. “And here she is now,” the librarian said. “Ladies and gentlemen, our own Emily Barton.”
There was a polite scatter of applause, and Emily walked down the aisle without further delay. “Hey, guys,” she said, leaning toward the microphone. Her voice jumped back at her, echoing off the glass walls of the children’s reading room. She didn’t need a mike. Not here in the library where she’d first read Pat the Bunny and other literary classics. She stepped around the lectern and stared out at her fellow Harmony Springs merchants.
“Thank you for taking the time to join us. I’d especially like to thank Jackson Printing for copying the SOS flyers. And Caden, I appreciate your dropping them off at all the stores.”
Caden Harper was sitting in the front row, a spiral notebook balanced on his knee. He was reporting on the meeting for The Herald; Rachel had actually called him a stringer. If the kid played his cards right, he could probably get extra credit in Mrs. Martin’s social studies class. He was in ninth grade, right? Didn’t they study union organizing freshman year?
But Emily didn’t have time for fond memories of high school. She had a war to fight.
“Folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But life as we know it is going to change forever next Monday. Because October 19 is opening day for Matt Dawson’s American Discount store.” She took advantage of the crowd’s murmured concern to look out at the assembled merchants. Her flyers had been even more successful than she’d thought they would be. There were nearly fifty people in the room. That was over half the shops on Main Street. Not bad, when Emily factored in the reality that a handful of places were still open for business this time of day, their owners unable to hang a “Closed” sign in the window just to come to a meeting.
Emily scanned the crowd for familiar allies—Anne, of course, standing by the refreshments table where she’d set out bite-size offerings of her famous apple custard tarts. Lexi Taylor, fresh from The Christmas Cat, dressed like a Victorian schoolteacher. Kitty Moran, with a scattering of rose petals stuck to her denim apron. Simon McCall.
And in the back row, a disturbingly familiar face, rugged with the scruff of a few day’s beard and a shock of black hair that looked as if it had just been tangled by the stiff autumn breeze outside. She found herself staring into those almost-black eyes. Her belly tightened even as her lips began to curl in reflex, automatically matching the casual grin that flashed across the room.
“Matthew Dawson,” she said, barely hearing her voice crack on his last name. “You aren’t welcome here.”
He held up the flyer Caden had distributed. In his hand, the orange call to action looked garish. Cheap. “Is your store on Main Street?” he read, quoting the top line of the paper. “Why yes,” he said, looking directly at Emily. “Yes, my store is.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Effective communication,” Matt said. “It’s one of the most important tools in a successful businessman’s arsenal.”
“You can take your effective—” She cut herself off, painfully aware that they weren’t sitting in a booth in the Orchard Diner, that they weren’t sparring over the last pizza slice while Jon sat laughing in the center of the couch in the Dawson’s family room. She cleared her throat. “Fine,” she said.
Matt nodded, as if she’d just accepted his offer to greet shoppers in the doorway at American Discount. He leaned back in his chair and gestured for her to continue.
The bastard. Who was he to tell her how to conduct her meeting? The Purr roared to life at the back of her head. This was a contest, dammit. And she was going to win.
She had to. Because when she moved on from Harmony Skeins, she had to have another store to go to.
Emily did some of her best thinking on her feet. After all, she’d had a lifetime of practice. As a middle child, she was used to observing shifting family alliances, to measuring who was strongest in any given conflict. Her older sister, Charlie, usually started out with the lead, but her brother, Bran, was the only boy and he could steal the thunder at any given moment. Anne exerted her own magnetic pull as the baby in the family. So Emily had learned early to roll with the changing tides, never valuing her own anchor too much, never so tied to her own path that she got thrown off course.
Who cared if Matt Dawson had a freaking store on Main Street? He wasn’t going to win that easily. Emily smiled at the crowd. This would be easy. Like the time she’d played Antigone in the school play. She’d have them eating out of her hand in no time.
“I’m actually glad Matt raised the point. His store is on Main Street, of course. But just having a mailing address on Main Street isn’t what’s really important. Right, Chris?”
She cast a generous smile toward Chris Taylor, whose bookstore was three blocks off Main. He tilted his head with an easy smile. “Just as long as you don’t base things on monthly income.” Plenty of other merchants joined in with Chris’s rueful laugh.
Emily let herself laugh too. “Not income, no. Too many of us would have to join you in the fight to the bottom.” More uneasy amusement. “What I’m talking about is something different. I’m talking about a Central Business District.”
Silence.
That was fine; the quiet gave Emily a moment or two to shape her argument. She concentrated on the map of Harmony Springs inside her mind, on the streets that were as familiar as the shelves in Harmony Skeins. It was easy to draw the lines she needed. They had their own cool logic, completely apart from any emotions that might affect her thoughts.
Not that Matt Dawson raised any emotions for her.
With fifty pairs of eyes trained on her, Emily took a deep breath. She had one chance to sell this idea. One chance to Save Our Stores.
“Other towns have done it. They have historic districts, with uniform plaques describing why buildings are special. A visitor’s center. Brochures about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War. Some even have pedestrian malls—whole streets where no cars are allowed.”
“Parking is tight enough around here,” Kitty Moran said, and there was a murmur of agreement with the florist. “Block off half of downtown, and people will just go to the big box stores in Winchester.”
Emily nodded. She’d been in the trenches of the parking wars for a few years now. Every spring, Chief Carter held a town hall meeting, where locals discussed whether it was time to put in parking meters along Main Street. The town was almost evenly divided. Those in favor noted that the income would go a long way to balancing the town’s sagging accounting books. Those opposed said it would make Harmony Springs look cold and uncaring.
Thanks to her constantly squabbling siblings, Emily knew the wisdom of choosing the middle path, of building coalitions. She said, “We don’t need to decide on parking now. In fact, we shouldn’t decide on parking now. Instead, we should start small. Build from there.”
“What did you have in mind, Emily?” That was Bill Thornburg, owner of the feed store on the edge of town. He’d been best friends with Emily’s grandfather. She still had fond memories of watching new-hatched chicks at the Feed and Grain, the little yellow balls of fluff scrambling around in a galvanized laundry tub every spring. Emily flashed Bill a grateful smile.
“First off, we need to define our Central Business District.” This hadn’t been in Emily’s plan; she hadn’t rehearsed this part. But Matt had forced her hand, and she was willing to go with the flow. She smiled fondly at Bill. “You aren’t going to like this,” she said. “But we need to define a tight community. A part of town where all the stores have the same interests. I’ve given it careful consideration”—sure she had—“and I think sixty square blocks makes sense. From Sycamore in the south to Jefferson in the north. From First Street to Tenth.”
She watched her neighbors nodding. Those parameters would include Harmony Park and all the administrative buildings—City Hall, the post office, this library where they were meeting. It would snag almost all the stores. Restaurants, too. Each of the employers who had paid Emily’s paycheck over the past dozen years.
But not the American Discount. The American Discount was one block west of Emily’s boundary.
At the back of the room, Matt raised his eyebrows. Emily shrugged, as if she had no control over the matter. It wasn’t her fault the city fathers had started numbering the streets where they had. She wasn’t responsible for Matt snatching up a parcel of land outside the town’s core, land that he’d gotten relatively cheap, she was pretty sure. A lot cheaper than if he’d been in the heart of Harmony Springs.
Bill Thornburg chewed over her boundaries, his lips twisting as he counted out the streets in his mind. “That’ll leave out the Feed and Grain,” he said. “Baked Rite, too.”
Emily nodded. “It will. Which isn’t to say that your store and the cookie factory aren’t important to Harmony Springs. But SOS has a specific set of concerns. Tourists don’t visit the feed store on a regular basis. There aren’t public tours at Baked Rite.”
“Fair enough,” Bill said. Emily flashed him a grateful smile. She’d have to knit him a scarf for Christmas. A soft one—maybe use some of the Sweet Georgia Superwash she’d been coveting, the worsted weight that would knit up fast and look sturdy. She pushed ahead, determined to press her advantage while she had it.
“If Save Our Stores is going to accomplish anything, we’ll need money.” She shook her head, acknowledging the groan that went up from the crowd. “Now wait a second. I’m not talking big bucks here.” She purposely looked at Matt then, making it clear who had the bottomless pockets around here.
He shrugged, displaying his empty palms.
Emily surged ahead before he’d think he had an invitation to interrupt. “When I say we need money, I’m talking about a small dues payment. Twenty bucks from each store. Paid into a central fund.”
“What’ll you do with twenty bucks?” Jake Presley sat up straight as he called out his question, planting all four legs of his chair on the floor.
Emily had known guys like Jake her entire life. They didn’t like other people’s ideas, but they didn’t have anything better to contribute on their own. They asked questions to hear their own voices. And they put up roadblocks, just because they could.
“Not twenty bucks,” Emily said sweetly. Corrections were always easier to take if they came with a smile. “A thousand. If each of you digs deep for one of those Andrew Jacksons.”
“Okay,” Jake said mulishly. “What do we get for a thousand bucks, then?”
Perfect. That was just the invitation she needed to share the things she’d been planning for the past week. “First, we’ll get decals for our store windows. A symbol to let customers know they’re shopping at an SOS store.”
She watched a few heads nod. People liked to belong to a group.
But Jake pressed: “What good is a scrap of plastic pasted to a window? What cidiot is going to care about some fancy design?”
“It’s up to us to explain it to them. We should set up a Communications Committee. They can draft a policy statement, an explanation of what a thriving Central Business District means to Harmony Springs. We can print up the statement on flyers, on trifold brochures that each member can distribute to customers. See the decal, get the information.”
Down the line, there would be cross-marketing potential. Frequent Shopper programs, where customers could build up discounts by visiting multiple stores in town. An expanded presence for all merchants at the Christmas Fête. Some sort of spring activity, mirroring the Fête’s small-town cachet. A summer program too, and a fall one—the key would be getting people into town three, four, more times a year.
But all of that could wait for a future meeting. All of that was more than folks could absorb in one session.
“So?” Emily asked. “What about it? Do we have any volunteers for the Communications Committee?”
Rachel, God bless her, recognized a cue when she heard one. “Well, The Herald will be involved with getting the word out going forward, so I might as well be on the Committee.” It took a few minutes for other folks to raise their hands, but in short order, Emily had half a dozen volunteers.
“Great,” she said. “Now if you’ll just pay your dues… Caden? Can you take care of that for me? Write down who’s paid how much, and we’ll set up a spreadsheet later.”
The boy looked like she’d just crowned him king for a day.
“Wonderful,” Emily said. “Thank you all for coming. Let’s meet again in a month—second Tuesday in November. Until then—”
“Excuse me.”
Damn. She should have known Matt wouldn’t sit still for this. For a split second, Emily considered telling him he couldn’t talk, that only people who owned or worked at stores in the Central Business District could take the floor. That would be overplaying her hand, though. She needed to lead these folks from the middle. Just like convincing Charlie, Bran, and Anne that they all needed to pool their money for an Xbox, when Mom and Dad had refused to buy one.
“Matt?” she said, sweetening the single syllable with a brittle smile.
~~~
Matt had seen his share of leadership meetings. He couldn’t count the times he’d sat in a locker room, listening to a manager fire up a team on a losing streak. He’d stood on the mound hundreds of times, on the receiving end of a lecture from a pitching coach, wagging finger and all. He’d led his own projects in business school, rounding up teams of students whose goals differed from his, whose levels of enthusiasm were distinctly lower than Matt’s own drive.
But he’d rarely seen the type of guidance Emily was using. She spoke to the group as if she had no fear, as if she was absolutely, one hundred percent certain they’d follow her. She was easy, comfortable, like she’d known these people all her life.
Which, of course, she had.
Emily Barton was the insider, the home team. And if Matt didn’t watch out, he’d be booed out of the room.
“Thanks, Emily,” he said, climbing to his feet. Half the audience turned around in their chairs, craning their necks to see what he had to say. That wasn’t good. He needed them relaxed, easy, not twisted into knots in their seats.
He strode down the aisle between the folding chairs. This was just like a press conferences after a tough game. He could handle the hard questions. He could make them eat out of the palm of his hand.
“Folks,” he said, when he got to the front of the room. Like Emily, he decided not to step behind the rostrum. His voice could carry, and he didn’t want anything standing between him and the people he needed to win over, the people he needed to convince. “I appreciate your letting me speak. I won’t take much more of your time. I know you’re all ready to head home, to call it a day.”
He was rewarded with a smattering of tired smiles. Nodding heads. Shifting asses on hard seats. They were grateful that he understood. That he was one of them.
“I’m just one man. Not a Communications Committee or anything like that.” He nodded toward Rachel and flashed her a friendly smile. “But I do have my own message that I want to get out there.”
This was it. It wasn’t time to hide things, to try to get a slider past them. Instead, he needed to reach back for his best pitch, throw his fastball right over the plate, a hundred miles an hour before they even knew it was there.
“Like all of you, like Emily Barton, I want Harmony Springs to survive. No, not survive. I want our town to thrive. It’s no secret that I’ve called Raleigh home for the past ten years. But every night I slept in my downtown apartment there, every night I spent in another hotel room on the road, I thought about what you all have right here.”
He had them. They were leaning forward, eager to hear what they had, what he’d missed for all those years.
“I missed the smell of fresh baked bread from old Mrs. LeMieux’s bakery. I missed the taste of that first cup of coffee of the day, the cold brew from Shenandoah Roasters. I missed the look of the apple blossoms in the valley, like pink snow when the air is finally warm, finally spring.”
Where the fuck had that come from? He hadn’t planned on talking about apple blossoms. Not with Emily standing off to the side, her arms crossed over her chest, the sleeves of her sweater pulled down past her fingertips.
He bulled on. “I missed Harmony Springs,” he said, purposely keeping the sentence short. Simple. “But the Harmony Springs I missed doesn’t exist anymore. LeMieux Bakery shut down what? Eight years ago? Nine? When Mrs. LeMieux broke her hip and went to live with her grandkids down in Fredericksburg. And Shenandoah Roaster’s been gone for five years at least. It only made sense for Sarah to move closer to her main customers, to the big restaurants in DC.”
He didn’t dare look at Emily’s face now. Not when it was time to land this speech. Do or die.
“Harmony Springs has changed. And if we don’t act soon, it could be gone forever. Now, Emily has some great ideas here. Save Our Stores. Show folks that we have something special. Let them see exactly what we know, what we miss, about Harmony Springs.”
They were nodding. He was agreeing with Emily. People liked agreement. It made them feel comfortable. Safe.
So much for that.
“But SOS isn’t enough. SOS is an emergency plea. You use SOS when you’re drowning.” There it was. Resistance. Uncertainty. Now he wasn’t the only one avoiding looking at Emily. Other people looked away too. They didn’t want her to see that they were unsure, that they doubted.
Time to hit them with the curveball, the one they’d never see coming.
“That’s why you need American Discount. A place where tourists can find a bit of everything. A place where you can get what you need.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. He was embarrassed to admit how much the store meant to him. But it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for folks to see that. They should know how much he cared.
So he clasped his hands in front of him and said, “Look. I’ve got a whole stack of paperwork I could show you. The average American Discount store brings in X dollars a day. The average American Discount store has Y customer visits every week. The average American Discount store pays Z dollars in taxes every single year.”
He watched them fill in X and Y and Z, imagining numbers that were probably even greater than the ones Matt had in his files. He saw admiration on several faces, the sort of fan worship that kept folks pressed against fences after games, shoving pens in his hand, pushing forward with balls and caps and jerseys so everyone could take home a piece of him.
But there was anger, too, at least on Emily’s face. The hard lines sparked against the jagged cut of her hair. Her jaw was set and he remembered the main lesson he’d learned years ago, when she and Jon had hung out in the Dawson family room night after night.
She didn’t like to lose. She was the most competitive girl he’d ever met, hell, one of the most competitive people. A board game of Monopoly, a debate over what cartoon character said what, a fight about some obscure fact or figure. She needed to fight. She needed to win.
But he couldn’t think about Emily. Not now. Not with his store on the line.
With the discipline of ten years of pitching in the majors, he brought his focus back to the one thing that really mattered, to this room full of people, to the allies he needed to win over. “I’m not going to tell you the specific numbers for X and Y and Z,” he said. “Some of you wouldn’t believe me. Others would think I’m a jackass for bragging.” A ripple of laughter. Good. “But I’ll tell you that my American Discount store is going to beat those average numbers. And when I do, Harmony Springs will come out ahead too. Because more dollars spent at one store means looser wallets at others. More customers visiting one store means more people in town, more people stopping in for something they forgot, for something they didn’t realize they needed. More tax dollars means better times for Harmony Springs. For all of us!”
A few people actually shouted out support. More of them clapped. Most of the people in the room smiled.
But not Emily Barton. She narrowed her eyes as she stepped forward. She tugged on her sleeves without mercy. And this time, when she started speaking to the room, she didn’t try to reach out to them, one equal among many. She didn’t try to remind them they were all in this together.
Instead, she stepped behind the lectern. She bent close to the microphone. She licked her lips and pressed them together for just a split second before she said, “Thank you, Matt.” She flinched a little as her voice bounced off the far wall. “We’ll all keep in mind your plans for Harmony Springs. Maybe you could do a bit of research for us, before the next SOS meeting? Maybe you could tell us how many surrounding stores went out of business within the first year of the average American Discount store. We’ll do our best to extrapolate of course. Because we know everything about your operation will be far above average.”
~~~
They laughed, all the people who’d come because she’d invited them, all the people who’d believed in her flyer. They laughed because they couldn’t hear her heart pounding. Because they couldn’t see her fingers trembling inside her sleeves. They laughed because they wanted to have things both ways. They wanted Matt to be right, with his talk of money raining down from heaven, and they wanted to believe Emily’s rallying cry that Harmony Springs could become a gem in the crown of Shenandoah Valley tourism.
The Purr was screaming in her ears.
Because this fight had just become entirely too personal. And personal was the last word she wanted to apply to Matt Dawson. She’d spent the past twelve years knowing that she and Matt would never be personal again.
And that meant she had to fight him. She had to fight him and win. Or she’d have to give up on the hometown she’d loved every single day of her life.