Alison had been part of her tight-knit crew. They’d caused a bit of trouble together—the barn incident being one of them—and mainly spent time in the woods near the Garrett ranch or on the beach, because for them it had been better than being at home.

They were the misfits of Copper Ridge, and even if no one else had fully realized it, they had. They knew they were different. They knew they were wrong. Broken families, poverty. Abuse.

There was only one elementary school, one junior high and a high school that sat squarely between Copper Ridge and Tolowa, making the most out of the shared student population. That meant they’d spent a lot of years circling each other like wary strays, slowly forming a group. A bond that had been, at the time, thicker and stronger than the bond with their families.

Alison, Damian, Matthew, Kelly, Sarah, Josh and Brooke. A few other people rotated in and out, but that was the core.

And she’d left them behind. She’d never contacted them.

In that moment, she felt ashamed.

“Not married,” Sadie said, holding up her bare left hand for emphasis. “I’ve been...moving a lot. Being a crisis counselor. And now a proprietress at a bed-and-breakfast. So...I still don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“Sounds nice to me. You escaped,” Alison said.

That was how she’d felt at the time. Now she wasn’t so sure.

“I’m back. This place has that way about it. It even called me back eventually, and I like moving on a lot more than looking back. Historically speaking.”

There was a disconnect happening. Something so fundamentally defeated in Alison’s eyes, something so familiar, that it hurt Sadie to look at it. And she couldn’t nail down what it was or why. Maybe just fatigue from a long shift.

“Do you ever... Do you talk to anyone else from school?” Sadie asked.

Alison looked down. “Not really. Matt’s still here. He fishes. Brooke owns a shop up the road, but we don’t... I don’t have a lot of time. Everyone else moved like you. Josh went on and made all kinds of money... I’m just still here.”

“Oh.” She made a mental note to track Brooke down later.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Sadie said, filling in the silence, which she was professionally good at. “I heard that you had the best baked goods in town. And the thing is I’m organizing a community Independence Day barbecue on the Garrett ranch, which is, not incidentally, where my B and B is. And I wanted to have a dessert booth. Possibly a pie eating contest. So I wanted to talk to you about what you have, what is possible production-wise and if the owner of the diner might be interested in donating a certain number of pies for the contest in exchange for advertising space.”

“These are the best pies!” one of the men shouted from the corner. “Alison makes the best everything.” There was a round of agreement from the other men at the table and that pulled another smile out of Alison.

Getting a smile out of her, Sadie was coming to realize, was as difficult as pulling Toby out from the back of the lazy Susan cupboard when he was annoyed about the vacuum cleaner.

“There, that’s all the validation I need,” Sadie said. “So if you’re up to it, I’d really like to involve you. And if the diner owner isn’t super into it, I’m happy to purchase pies directly from you. Or maybe you’d be interested in manning the dessert booth? You could sell pie by the slice. It’ll be a great bit of advertising for you. And hey, since I think you’re probably a million times better than me at baking, pies might be a great thing for me to have in the B and B anyway.”

Sadie wished she could stop the tumble of words now, because Alison looked wary, and it hit a warning button deep inside Sadie. But the ideas were rolling off her tongue now without her permission. Possibly because of that internal warning signal.

For a therapist she was awfully useless in out-of-office people situations.

“I’ll have to check with Jared. If he can spare me for that much time,” Alison said.

“The diner owner?”

“My husband,” she said, blinking rapidly. “He may not want me getting so involved in something like that. It’s already hard with how much I do here.”

“Right. Well, I mean, only if you want to. Don’t feel an obligation to me or anything.”

“I do want to,” she said.

“Then I’m sure your husband will be happy for you. It’ll be good for you and all.”

Alison didn’t look so sure and that right there sent Sadie’s instincts from warning bells to the desire to maim the guy in the testicular region.

“Right. Yeah. Just the cupcake?” she asked.

“A marionberry pie, too, actually. I’ll have it after dinner.”

Alison bent and pulled a pie out and put it in a white box before ringing both items up.

“Great,” Sadie said. “And now I know where to get my goody fix, and where to see an old friend. So all in all, this was a productive day.” Sadie reached into her purse and pulled out a crumpled receipt from the coffee stand she’d gone to earlier, and wrote her cell phone number across the back. “Call me. If you ever need anything, or want to hang out, or have questions about the barbecue.”

“Sure,” Alison said, taking the receipt. “I will.”

Sadie had the feeling the other woman was lying. And again, she couldn’t quite place why. But everything seemed wrong. Well, the statement about the husband not wanting her to be gone too much seemed off to Sadie, but then, Sadie knew there might be other factors. Even though her gut response was that it sounded awfully controlling.

“Thanks for the goodies. If I slip into a sugar coma, don’t be too surprised.” Sadie waved and walked out the door, back down the sidewalk toward where she’d parked her car.

She was happy about the pie, but uneasy about everything else.

And this was the problem with coming home. There were so many emotions tied up in things. She didn’t like it. Before leaving Copper Ridge she’d had a whole lifetime of heavy. Of bad feelings and worry and outright terrifying crap, and she just didn’t like to feel things that were even close to that anymore. It wasn’t healthy to dwell, after all.

But Copper Ridge made her dwell, dammit.

And just like that, the magic of returning home was gone.

* * *

It was deck day. And Sadie had a bevy of shirtless construction workers off the back of her house, putting down posts and cement blocks in preparation for the building of the massive deck she’d designed for the B and B.

She had big plans for it. Tables. A barbecue. No, a barbecue wouldn’t strictly be breakfast, but she could fix other meals.

Her one serious question, though, was whether or not a group of construction workers was a bevy.

Perhaps they were more an assemblage. Or a herd. A pack. That sounded nice and manly. Very sexy. She sipped on her lemonade and watched them from her living room window, privately pleased that she was perving on them rather than the other way around.

“Yeah, baby,” she said, tilting her glass back and catching an ice cube between her teeth. “Show me what your mama gave you.”

She was determined to get some visual enjoyment out of these guys. It was a way better idea than thinking about Eli and how much she would rather see him shirtless and sweaty.

There was a knock at the front door and she jumped, splashing lemonade onto her hand. She shook her head, walking to the door. She supposed it served her right. Getting caught being a dirty peeping Tom. She still didn’t feel guilty, though.

She tugged the door open and saw Kate standing there, schooling her expression into something almost comically casual. “There are a lot of work trucks out here.”

“There are indeed,” Sadie said. “Because I’m having a deck built. And the guys are doing it without shirts on if you want to come in and watch.”

“That was what I was hoping,” Kate said, her cheeks flushing pink.