Chapter 1
The first thing Wrenley Hayes learned about Cedar Hollow, Colorado, was that the welcome sign lied. It promised a population of two thousand four hundred and twelve. By her count, on a Tuesday morning in late September, half of them were currently inside the hardware store staring at her like she had grown a second head.
She lowered the paint chip in her hand and offered the room her brightest smile, the one she used on cranky toddlers and tax auditors. “Morning, everyone.”
A woman in a fleece vest blinked at her. A man with sawdust in his beard cleared his throat. A small boy hiding behind his mother’s leg pointed and whispered something that sounded suspiciously like that’s the bakery lady.
So word traveled fast in Cedar Hollow. Good to know.
Wren tucked a curl behind her ear and turned back to the wall of paint samples, which was, to be fair, the actual reason she had come in. Aunt Marigold’s bakery, which was now technically her bakery, needed help. The display case was older than Wren. The floor tiles were the color of week-old oatmeal. And the front room had been painted a shade of mustard yellow that suggested someone in 1987 had been very angry at the sun.
She wanted soft pink. Cream. Something that said come in, sit down, eat a scone, tell me about your day. She did not want mustard. She did not want oatmeal. She wanted joy, on a wall.
“You planning on buying any of those, or just rearranging them?”
The voice came from behind her, low and rough, and somehow managed to sound both bored and annoyed at the same time. Wren turned with her smile already in place.
It dimmed, a little, when she got a look at him.
He was tall. That was the first thing. Tall enough that she had to tip her chin back, and she was not what anyone would call short. Dark hair cut close on the sides, longer on top, like he had given up partway through a haircut. A jaw that looked like it had been designed by someone with strong opinions about jaws. Flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms that were doing entirely too much for nine in the morning.
His eyes were gray. Not warm gray. Storm gray. And they were aimed at her with the patience of a man who had been waiting for her to leave since she walked in.
“I am, in fact, planning on buying,” Wren said. “I just have a lot of opinions.”
“I noticed.”
She laughed. He did not. She let the laugh die a small, dignified death and held up two chips. “Okay. Help me. Bashful Blossom, or Sugared Almond.”
“They’re paint.”
“They’re decisions.”
“They’re paint, lady.”
“My name is Wren.”
He looked at her for a long second. Whatever he was thinking, his face did not give it up. Then he reached out, plucked the chip on the left from her fingers, and tapped it once against the shelf. “Sugared Almond. It won’t show grease.”
“Why would my walls have grease?”
“You’re the new owner at Marigold’s.”
It was not a question. She felt her smile sharpen at the edges. “And you know that because?”
“Town of two thousand.”
“Right.” She tilted her head. “And you are?”
He hesitated. Just a beat, but she caught it. Then he tapped the name patch sewn above his shirt pocket. The stitching read COLE in block letters, faded from a thousand washes.
“Beckett Cole,” he said. “I own this place. So unless you need anything else, the paint mixer’s in the back.”
He walked off before she could answer, boots loud on the wood floor, and the fleece-vest woman by the door let out a soft, sympathetic oof, like Wren had just been stepped on by something large.
Wren looked down at the paint chip in her hand. Sugared Almond. A nice, warm cream, the color of a perfect croissant.
She would not give him the satisfaction of being right.
She picked up Bashful Blossom too.
By the time she carried two gallons of mixed paint back to the bakery, the sky had gone the soft, thin blue that mountain skies did in fall, and the maples down Main Street were starting to turn at the tips. Cedar Hollow sat in a bowl of pines, ringed by peaks that already had snow on the high faces. Wren had spent every summer of her childhood here with Aunt Marigold, kneading dough on a flour-dusted counter and stealing chocolate chips when nobody was looking. The town had not changed. The bakery had not changed.
She had.
She set the cans down on the front step, pushed her hair off her forehead with the back of a sticky wrist, and looked up at the storefront. MARIGOLD’S, the sign said, in faded gold paint on a green board. The window display still had the same chipped ceramic rooster Marigold had bought at a yard sale in 1994. The bell above the door, when Wren pushed it open, gave the same two-note jingle that had soundtracked every summer of her life.
Her aunt had been dead for four months. The bakery had been closed for three. Wren still expected, every time she walked in, to hear her aunt’s voice from the back, calling out that you, Birdie?
Nobody called her Birdie anymore.
She left the paint by the door and crossed to the counter, where her phone was buzzing itself off the edge. She caught it before it dropped and saw the name on the screen and felt her stomach do its now-familiar twist.
DCFS - MS. ALVAREZ.
She took a breath. Two breaths. Picked up.
“Hi, Linda. Sorry, I was in the hardware store.”
“Wrenley. Thanks for picking up. I wanted to confirm a few things before our home visit next Wednesday.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“You’ve moved into the residence above the bakery?”
“As of last weekend.”
“And the bakery itself, the business, that’s open?”
“Reopening,” Wren said carefully. “Next month. I’m doing repairs.”
“Mm.” There was the soft sound of a pen against paper. “And the second bedroom for Sawyer is set up?”
“It will be.”
“And you said in your last email that you’d be establishing a, I’m looking for the word here, a stable community presence. Friends, partners, a support network. Something the court can see at the hearing in December.”
Wren closed her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m working on that.”
“Good. Because, Wrenley, I have to be honest with you. Your brother is fifteen. He has been in three placements in two years. The judge is going to want to see roots. Real ones. Not a woman who just moved to a town alone and rents an apartment over an unopened business.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do.”
The pen scratched again. Wren stared at the chipped rooster in the window and breathed through her nose and did not cry, because she had already done that for three nights straight and it had not made her aunt less dead or her brother less lost or the social worker less right.
“Okay,” Linda said, gentler. “Wednesday. Ten o’clock. I’ll see you then.”
“Wednesday at ten.”
Wren set the phone down on the counter and stared at it. Then she looked at the paint cans by the door, and the mustard walls, and the empty display case, and the door to the apartment upstairs where the second bedroom currently held a stack of broken display trays and one rolled-up rug.
A support network. Roots. A partner.
In a town where she had been home for six days, knew the names of approximately four people, and had already managed to annoy the only hardware store owner within forty miles.
“Cool,” she said, to nobody. “Cool, cool, cool.”
She picked up a paint can. The mustard wall, at least, she could fix today.
She was halfway through cutting in the trim along the front window when the bell jingled. Wren did not turn around. She had a brush in one hand and a rag draped over her shoulder and a smear of Sugared Almond on her left cheekbone she did not yet know about.
“We’re closed,” she called. “Reopening in October. Sorry.”
“You left this.”
She knew that voice. She turned.
Beckett Cole stood in her doorway holding a roller tray. Her roller tray. The one she had absolutely, definitely left on the counter at the hardware store, because she had been distracted by the way the boy with sawdust in his beard had been very politely trying to ask her if she was single without actually asking her if she was single.
“Oh.” She set the brush down on the edge of the can. “Thank you. That was sweet of you.”
“It wasn’t sweet. I was driving past.”
“Sure.”
“I was.”
“I believe you.”
He looked at her like she was something he could not figure out the price tag on. Then his eyes shifted, past her, to the wall.
His expression did something. Not a smile. Smiles, she suspected, were not in his standard inventory. But something around his mouth eased a fraction, like a muscle deciding it did not need to be tight.
“You picked it,” he said.
“Sugared Almond.” She lifted her chin. “It is a slander against the color pink that I picked it because of you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of taking credit.”
“You absolutely would.”
He set the roller tray on the counter. His hand was big, scarred across the knuckles, and she watched it for one beat too long before she dragged her eyes back up.
He had noticed her noticing. The corner of his mouth moved a quarter inch. It was the closest thing she had seen, so far, to him being amused.
“There’s a divot in your floor over by the case,” he said, nodding at it. “Tile lifted. You’ll trip on it.”
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“It’s a long list?”
She laughed, a real one this time, sharp and helpless. “You have no idea.”
He looked at her for another second. Then, like he had decided something against his better judgment, he crouched down by the floor tile, ran a thumb along its edge, and stood back up.
“I’ll bring by some adhesive tomorrow,” he said. “It’s a five-minute fix. Don’t pay anybody for it.”
“Oh. I, that’s, you don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Why are you?”
He looked at her, this large grumpy man in her doorway with paint on his boots from somebody else’s job, and for a second she thought he might actually answer.
Then the bell jingled again and a small voice said, “Daddy, you said five minutes and it has been thirteen.”
A little girl marched in. She had two dark braids that did not match, a purple jacket buttoned wrong, and the wronged expression of a person who had been waiting in a truck since she was approximately four years old and was now six and had clearly aged a lifetime in the interim. She stopped three steps inside the bakery, took in Wren, took in the paint, took in the rooster in the window, and her entire face changed.
“Oh,” she breathed. “It smells like cookies in here.”
“It does, doesn’t it.” Wren crouched down to her level. The grumpy giant in the doorway had gone very still. “I haven’t even baked anything yet. I think it’s the walls remembering.”
“Walls don’t remember.”
“This bakery’s been here forty years. These walls remember everything.”
The little girl considered this with the solemnity of a Supreme Court justice. Then she looked up at the man Wren now strongly suspected was her father and said, “Daddy. I like her.”
“Posy.”
“What.”
“Truck. Now.”
“But she said the walls remember.”
“Truck.”
Posy heaved the sigh of the eternally misunderstood, gave Wren a small, conspiratorial wave, and trudged back out the door. Beckett did not follow. He stood there a second longer, looking at Wren with an expression she could not read, and then he tipped his chin at her, a small, gruff goodbye, and left.
Wren stayed crouched on the floor for a full minute after the bell stopped jingling.
A grumpy single dad with a six-year-old who liked her on sight.
A support network. Roots. A partner.
“No,” she said, out loud, to the empty bakery. “Absolutely not. Don’t you dare, Wrenley Joan Hayes. Do not even think it.”
She picked up her paintbrush.
She thought it.
