No use musing over brooding eyes the colour of scorched earth, when they were on the other side of the planet. Same went for wild dark curls. Fingernails permanently stained from the hours spent under the bonnet of some broken-down car or another. Body tough, lean and wiry. Yellowed leaves shifting beneath heavy boots as he chopped wood. Sweat glistening on his strong arms. Brow furrowed in endearing concentration...
Sable blinked herself back to the present to find her heart not only twinging, but now skittering, and performing some pretty spectacular thumpity thumps.
For the wood chopping was the last true memory she had of Rafe—nineteen years old and smouldering—the day before she’d skipped town without saying goodbye.
She let out a hard, fast breath, and gave herself an all over body shake.
Her heart had been through the wringer of late and was not in any shape to twinge. Or skitter. And especially thump. Besides, that was not why she’d come back to Radiance.
When a person’s life unravelled, as swiftly, relentlessly, and mortifyingly publicly as Sable’s had just done, once the dust settled it brought with it a sense of clarity.
Her epiphany? Her meteoric success as a photographer, the notoriety that came from dating someone even more well known than she, and the creature comforts that had come with all that had clouded things for a good while.
When it had all been stripped away, she’d been left to figure out who she was without those safety nets. What she wanted.
And what she wanted most hadn’t changed. Not since she was a teenager, traipsing barefoot through the forest surrounding this small town, ancient camera in hand, mooning after the local bad boy, imagining a softly filtered version of what her life might one day look like.
Deep down, she wanted nothing more than to be someone’s mother.
So here she was. Back in Radiance. The place she now saw as the crossroads of her life. Where, if she’d taken a left, instead of a right, things might have turned out very differently.
Too jet-lagged to face her mother, Sable turned away from the Gingerbread House, and gripped the handle of her suitcase, dragging it over the bumpy cracks in the footpath, and made her way next door.
Only once the overgrown forest came to an abrupt end at her mother’s fence line, she stopped so suddenly her suitcase bumped against the back of her boots.
“What on earth—?” The mist in the air all but swallowed her words.
For instead of overgrown grass, sad patches of dirt, tangles of blackberry bushes, husks of old cars and farm machinery, there lay acres of lush green grass, a few goats, a cow or two, and a plethora of happy chickens. For a second she wondered if her terrible sense of direction had failed her yet again, and the Thorne place had been over the other fence.
But no. There was the tree that had once shaded a darkly foreboding pile of wood in the shape of a house. Only now it draped over a gleaming Airstream caravan, shining like a silver dollar against the distant backdrop of the fiery poplar, maple, and liquid-amber-covered foothills leading up to the peak of Mount Splendour—more of a big hill, really—that overlooked the whole of Radiance.
She’d not expected life to have been put on hold when she’d left, but how had this not come up during one of Mercy’s rare, uncomfortable phone calls? Something along the lines of, Oh, and by the way, the Thorne house burned down/fell down/was taken up by aliens.
Then Sable spotted a window slowly closing at the side of the van. Meaning someone was home.
Twinge.
Was it Rafe’s father, the fearsome Mr Thorne? Or could it be Rafe himself?
Skitter. Thump.
Was Rafe even in Radiance any more? Her mother’s news reports were clearly lacking.
Only one way to find out.
Luggage bumping along behind her, Sable strode down the compacted dirt driveway, around the dam—its golden-brown water a reflection of the cloudy autumn sky—and up to the front door of the shiny Airstream.
She lifted a hand and knocked. Her heart thumping so hard she could now feel it in her throat.
After a few long moments, the door swung open, nearly hitting Sable in the nose. And a lanky dark-haired young woman blinked back at her.
For a snapshot in time Sable imagined it might be Rafe’s girlfriend. Or wife. Even while her stomach rolled at the thought, like a ball of wool tumbling over the edge of a cliff, she reminded herself she’d been prepared for the possibility.
And that it didn’t change anything. Not for her.
For it wasn’t Rafe’s heart she was after. Not that he’d ever look at her that way again after the way she’d left. As for her heart? Bruised, shaken, and shamed by recent events, it was in recovery and would be for some time.
The young woman’s eyes rounded comically. “Sable Sutton? Oh, my gosh! It’s you! It’s really you!”
A heartbeat later, Sable’s synapses came back online and she realised it was—
“Janie?”
Rafe’s younger sister had been a little kid when Sable had left. Not even ten. Now a grown woman, she threw herself at Sable, wiry arms wrapping her up tight. Tighter than she’d been hugged in years. Which made her bruised and shaken heart cough and splutter, like an old engine trying—and failing—to catch.
Sable gently extricated herself from the hug.
“Look at you,” said Janie, eyes skipping over Sable as if she thought she might disappear in a puff of smoke at any second. “Still the wild-haired wood elf I always thought you were, but with an edge. Yep, it’s official. You’re even more ridiculously cool in person than you are in your feeds!”
Sable somehow kept her next breaths even.
She’d prepared herself for the possibility that some locals might have found her online. It
