CHAPTER ONE: GRAY
There is no Starbucks within the Little Haven, Georgia town borders.
If you want the good stuff, you have to drive yourself or take the rickety old bus from Town Square out to Mountain Hope and get your fix at the miniature Starbucks located in Target. It’s only open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and you have to drink your latte in full view of folks buying pre-noon alcohol or sanitary pads or hemorrhoid cream.
The Little Haven alternative? You can risk an interaction at The Daily Buzz, a standing-room- only cafe decorated in wall-to-wall paintings created by the owner herself. All of them depict some kind of cat dressed to look like a flower or vegetable. None of them are any good.
If you get your coffee at The Daily Buzz, you’ll be taking your drink in a dubiouslyclean mug given to you by whichever little old woman the café currently has in their employ. They seem to exclusively hire little old women for the front counter, and the shop is well known in town for requiring at least two screamed repeats of your order before you can pay. Even then, the likelihood of them getting your order right is low. In Little Haven, coffee is viewed town-wide as something that should be taken hot and black despite any personal preferences.
I sigh and shift my bag on my shoulder as I take in the café veranda. It looks exactly the same as when I last saw it nearly two decades ago. I would bet a grand that the paintings are still up, the little old lady at the counter is blue-haired, and my iced mocha will be served dark and steaming.
I stand outside the shop for a minute too long. I might make my jokes about the coffee or the employees, but I do miss The Daily Buzz. I miss everything in Little Haven.
I just don’t miss who I was here.
When you leave your hometown at a young age, there’s an illogical expectation that, when you return, it will be as though you’ve clicked a button on a remote and un-paused all the occupants at once. That the whole world was just holding its breath until your arrival.
Even though it makes no sense, even though I’m old enough to know better, it still feels like a decade and a half’s worth of work will dissolve at the seams as soon as this place is set back in motion. I’ll be eighteen again. Young, clueless, helpless. I’ll be starting over.
And, I guess, in a way I am starting over. My throat goes dry at the memory of my suspension, at the humiliation of it all. It was rash, what I did. I know that now. It’s just that when I heard Myers talking about that girl—the one with the downhome accent and the off-brand make-up, looking like a younger version of my little sister—some part of Little Haven had un-paused in me.
And it had cost me a notch in my career. It had set me back, maybe all the way back to that point in time when I was young and clueless and helpless and leaving home for the first time.
I swallow past my thick, dry tongue and take my first step forward.
My Oxfords crunch on the loosely packed snow of the shop’s stairs. I glance down and grimace as the sleek, pointed leather toe dips into a small snowbank; I had forgotten Little Haven even gets snow at this time of year. It’s in Georgia, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t this supposed to be the land of mosquitos and swamps?
When I left New York, it was in the middle of a blizzard. The only perk of being forced to take a paid suspension from the team was getting out of that winter hell hole. I’d worn my nice Oxfords into town because I hadn’t gotten the chance to wear them all season, and even though they might be wasted on the blue-haired ladies of The Daily Buzz, at least I’d feel a little like myself.
There’s a pop in the distance. Every muscle in my body tenses, and my shoulders instantly ride up to shield my face the small amount they can. I wait a moment with my hand on the doorknob of the coffee shop before I brave a glance over my shoulder.
The relief that floods through me is almost embarrassing. Not paparazzi, not someone trying to get the inside scoop on Gray Smith’s struggles as he keeps his head down before a return to the team. The sound was a woman and her son at a shop down the street, picking up a glass ornament they’d dropped out of their bag and into the snow.
I grit my teeth as I push open the door to the café.
“Gray!”
My sister squeals so loud, all the other patrons look up from their mugs and conversations to watch her dart over to me. Lindsey has one of those wrap thingies tied around her upper body, and when she pulls me into a hug, her newborn is squished up against my chin. It gurgles out a stream of spitty bubbles and I pull back, shoulders stiffening.
“You made it!” My sister tucks her red hair behind her ears, positively beaming at me. “Tell me everythin’. Did your flight get into Atlanta okay? Did the Uber have a hard time getting here? I told Jakey we should have driven in to pick you up, but the weather has been forecasting one a them damn blizzards and he got freaked out that some of the high school kids’ll use the storm as an excuse to throw one a them ragers. You remember them ragers?”
She laughs then, a loud, bubbly sound I’ve heard over the phone a million times, but had forgotten what it sounded like in person. It’s warm and easy, and even though I still feel like I might catch some disease standing in The Daily Buzz, the sound helps put me at ease.
Lindsey points down at her baby and winks. “Surprisin’ I didn’t end up with another Baby Kate after one a them high school ragers, right Gray? Thank the Lord for birth control.”
I peer down at the little bundle tucked up to Lindsey’s chest. She finagles with the mass of black fabric, until she’s pulling out the baby, rearranging my arms, and dropping the thing against my chest.
“Speakin’ of which, meet your new niece.”
“Oh my God, it is so weird you have a kid.”
I blink down at the little baby I’ve only seen via FaceTime, surprised by how cute I find her. I’ve never been one to be into babies, but this little spitting, gurgling thing is already tugging at my heart strings. She’s got a puff of Lindsey’s red hair, and when she cracks open her lashes to give me that distasteful look reserved for anyone that isn’t the breastfeeding mother, I see she’s got Jake’s bright green eyes.
“You look good with a baby,” Lindsey announces. “You should get right on that. If Mama’s health still had her out and about, you know she’d wanna hook you up with one a the girls from church. Nessie Nichols is a single mama now, remember her? And Bailey Joyner—”
A slow, surprising smile has spread across my face. I run my thumb down the baby’s earlobe, surprised by the velvety softness and the bare spread of reddish hair there. Something did un-pause here in Little Haven while I was gone, then. Kate is a miniature version of her mother, and I find now that I’ve not been thrown back in time to age eighteen, but rather, to my childhood, when I held my newborn sister for the first time.
A warmth spreads across my sternum. It’s not the same as getting my spot back on the coaching staff, but it certainly helps.