CHAPTER 1: Coming Home
The bakery smelled the same.
Evie Monroe stood in the doorway of her grandmother’s shop on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, and breathed in flour and cinnamon and the particular sweetness of a place that had been making the same things for thirty years, and felt the tightness in her chest that had been her companion for the past three months ease, incrementally, by some small but measurable amount.
She’d driven down from New York with two suitcases, a borrowed car, and the specific shame of a life that had come apart faster than she’d expected. The job had ended first, then the apartment, and then — in the way that things fall in sequence when the sequence has been inevitable for a while — the relationship.
She was twenty-eight years old and she had come home.
Her grandmother, Nan Monroe, was seventy-four and sharp as a tack and had said exactly two things when Evie called: “When are you coming?” and “The guest room needs fresh sheets.” There had been no told-you-so, no questions about what had gone wrong, no suggestion that Evie had been foolish to go to New York in the first place.
There would be those conversations, eventually. Nan didn’t miss things. But she also knew when to let the thing land first.
Evie set her suitcase down on the bakery floor.
“You’re thinner,” Nan said, from behind the display case.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re thinner and you have circles under your eyes and you’ve been driving since three in the morning.” Nan lifted the pass-through. “Come in. Sit down. I have palmiers and I’m going to heat milk.”
Evie came in.
She sat on the familiar stool behind the counter and let Nan put a plate in front of her and heat milk in the small saucepan with the cinnamon stick, and she ate and drank and felt, incrementally and with some effort, like a person who had a home to be in.
“How long?” Nan said.
“I don’t know.” She looked at the display case. “As long as I need, if that’s—”
“Evie.” Nan looked at her directly. “This is your home. How long isn’t a question.”
She held that for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Tell me tomorrow,” Nan said. “Tonight you sleep.”
She slept for fourteen hours.
In the morning the town was doing its spring thing — the particular Charleston spring, the azaleas on the side streets and the smell of salt from the harbor and the quality of light that she’d missed in the grey New York winter and hadn’t admitted she’d missed.
She walked.
The old neighborhood, the old streets. The bakery was on Church Street but she’d grown up three blocks north, in the house that was now her aunt’s, and the blocks between were familiar in the way of childhood geography — not just known but felt, in the body, the specific length of a particular block, the sound of the gate at the corner.
She was turning onto Tradd Street when she saw him.
He was at the end of the block, outside the hardware store, loading something into the back of a truck. Tall, dark hair cut close, the build of someone who had been somewhere difficult and had come back carrying it in their shoulders.
She recognized Caden Hale from a hundred feet away and felt her stomach drop with the efficiency of a well-calibrated reflex.
She turned and went back the way she’d come.
She was absolutely not ready for that.
She was not ready for any of that.
She went back to the bakery and helped Nan with the morning rush and did not think about the person at the end of Tradd Street, and largely succeeded, which was a better start than she’d expected.
