Page 9 of True Ruin

Gabi froze.

Her pulse stuttered, then kicked hard in her throat. He remembered. Not just her, but the nickname he’d given her the night they kissed behind the bleachers, when she’d been stupidly certain the world had shifted beneath her feet.

“Dallas—” she began, with no idea what came next.

Thank heavens, she didn’t have to find out.

“True!” a booming voice cut in from the diner’s entrance, and the spell between them shattered. Gabi stepped back as a gray-haired man in a rumpled sport coat made his way down the aisle, waving a folded newspaper like a baton.

Dallas groaned, dropping his head into his hands.

Out of breath, Lloyd Halpern, the owner-editor of thePromise Dispatch, halted at the booth. He tapped Dallas’s notebook with a nail bitten to the quick. “You’re an old soul, Hotshot. Still using those little black notebooks. Woulda thought with all those swank bylines you’ve been racking up, you’d be more high-tech.”

Gabi held back a laugh.Hotshot?

Dallas’s gaze drifted away, his hesitant shrug a thousand kinds of endearing. “They work.”

“Sure, when you were sixteen and trying to write obits that wouldn’t get you fired,” Halpern scoffed, then turned to Gabi.“Apologies, Ms. Wilder, but I’ve been trying to convince my famed former student to pen a story close to his heart. Figured if I caught him off-guard in a location with few exits, he’d say yes.”

With a resigned exhale, Dallas thumbed through the cards on the tabletop jukebox, surprising her when he stopped at Duran Duran. “Thanks, but like I told you, I’m not looking for an assignment.”

“Didn’t imagine you were, but for old friends,mentorseven, I figured you’d make an exception.” Halpern rolled his newspaper into a loose cylinder and rapped it once on his thigh. “Bonus: no malaria pills required, and I can guarantee you won’t end up in traction. Just a straightforward human-interest piece on the mill’s restoration, your family connections giving you the inside track. Now, don’t look at me like that. You’re wasting my time pretending you’re not itching to report during your vacation.”

Hiding amusement that likely wouldn’t be appreciated, Gabi watched Dallas’s expression close off, his boot tapping out a jazz sequence on the faded linoleum. Whatever he was feeling, an itch to write about his family’s business wasn’t it.

But Halpern kept rolling, energized by the scent of a maybe-yes. “Still carrying a field microphone? What about a recorder? Tell me you brought home some of that pricey Reuters equipment.”

Dallas sent the jukebox cards snapping past. “Some of it.”

Halpern’s watery gaze dropped to the open notebook on the table. “If you’re scribbling, you’re halfway in.”

“Chief—”

“Lloyd,” he corrected, rocking back on his heels as he hooked a thumb beneath his jacket and snapped his navy suspender. “A man with aWall Street Journalbyline doesn’t need to call me ‘Chief.’”

With a weary breath, Dallas adjusted his glasses, the closest Gabi had ever seen a man come to crying.

Unrepentant, Halpern went in for the kill. “You remember your first job at theDispatch, right?”

“I remember,” Dallas said, sounding defeated.

“Running leads, typesetting the classifieds alone because nobody else showed up. Paste-up and layout, all glue and willpower. Boy, those were the days, not a computer in sight. I watched out for you, didn’t I?” He tapped the newspaper against Dallas’s shoulder, more punctuation than reprimand. “Do this story, and I might see fit to let Campbell’s kid brother, Kit, come on as a runner. He’s been nosing around since I showed him some of your old editorials at career day. Good kid. Reminds me of you.”

Dallas mumbled something under his breath and gave the jukebox cards another spin.

“I was thinking of ordering that dial-up internet whatsit, after the last intern said journalism was doomed without it. I’ll make the call if you decide to help out.”

“Quit courting me. I’ll do it,” Dallas said, his tone suggesting he’d been cornered.

Halpern snapped his suspender in triumph. “That’s the spirit! Make it a thousand words, due Thursday at noon. Focus on the restoration, how it fits into Promise’s overall revitalization—the usual bunkum. Get a couple of quotes from the businesses going in. Customers lining up to shop at a hundred-year-old mill ’cause it seems trendy—that wouldn’t be a bad premise. If this goes well, it could turn into a short series about the town’s growth. There’s a lot of renovation going on among the cottages in Harrow Creek, for instance. Your brother’s neighborhood, isn’t it? His girl Lainey inherited the house from her father, I think. Anyway, we’ll talk.” He turned to Gabi, sweeping her back into his trajectory. “One of those quotescould be from you, Ms. Wilder. That fancy new coffee shop of yours.”

“Uh, well—” Gabi started, but Dallas stepped in to rescue her.

“I can handle the specs, Chief.”

The editor grinned, his shrewd gaze darting between the two of them. “Sure, Hotshot, of that I have zero doubt.”

Then he was gone, whistling a jaunty tune as he waltzed out of the diner, leaving Gabi feeling like she’d survived a tender hurricane.