Page 33 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

“I know you didn’t.” His voice softened, just for a second. “That’s why I have to.”

“So that’s it? You decided for me? You didn’t even ask me.”

“Somebody has to think about it.”

“You don’t get to think about it for me!” My voice cracked, and I hated it. “I’m not a kid, Shepherd. I’m not three. I know what I want.”

“You think you do.”

That did it.

Everybody in my whole life had looked at me that way. My parents. Most of my teachers. Every relative at every holiday who’d smiled and asked about the backup plan. You think you want this, sweetheart. You’ll understand when you’re older.

He was the one person who’d never looked at me like that. He’d taken my work seriously from the very first day. He’d sat with me on a mountain at sunrise and told me I wasn’t the backup plan kind.

I’d believed him.

“Okay,” I said. My eyes were burning, but I didn’t let them spill. I wasn’t going to cry in front of him. Not about this. “Then I guess it doesn’t matter what I wanted.”

Something changed in his expression. For one second I thought he was going to say something else. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

I turned around and walked back to the barn. I picked up the last crate of gourds and carried it out to the truck and set it in the bed beside him without a word. Then I went upstairs and shut the door behind me.

My duffel bag was sitting open on the floor at the foot of the bed. I’d started packing it two days ago, a little at a time, because the internship ended after the festival and I’d be driving back to Asheville on Sunday. I’d told myself it was being practical. I hadn’t let myself think about what it meant.

Now I sat on the bed and looked at it, half full of sweaters, and I let myself cry.

When I was done, the window had gone dark, and my eyes were sore, and I felt hollowed out and very tired. Below me, in the barn, the work lights came on.

I could see the glow through the floorboards, a thin gold line around the edge of the stair door. Then I heard the drill. A pause. The drill again. Then the staple gun, a whole row of it.

He was working.

I lay down on the bed and pulled the quilt over me, trying to drown out the soft noises. Nine o’clock went by. Then ten. Then midnight. The drill, the staple gun, the scrape of something heavy across the concrete floor. Once I heard him say something under his breath, short and frustrated, and then there was the drill again.

He was finishing the festival pieces. Alone.

I turned on my side and pressed my face into the pillow.

Around two in the morning, I got up and went to the window. The one that looked down into the shop.

I could only see part of the barn floor from there. The big pumpkin was gone, already loaded and covered in the truck. The shop looked empty without it. All I could see was the edge of the light and his shadow moving across the floor, back and forth, back and forth.

I thought about the first day, when he stood at the top of the ladder and told me I wouldn’t last the season. I thought about the creamer, and the car door, and the sticky note on his refrigerator. Chili on the bench in the sun. Walt’s barn. The overlook, and his arms around me while the valley filled with light.

I’d come here to prove I was good enough. I had. Dr. Mills had seen it.

But somewhere along the way, it had stopped being about proving anything. I’d met Harper, who saved me cinnamon rolls. Walt, who said “Still here, miss?” every Tuesday like it was a compliment. Lily and her books and postcards. A whole town that had taken me in like I already belonged here.

And a man on a mountain who’d made me feel, for the first time in my whole life, like my dream was becoming a reality.

I went back to the bed and picked up my laptop from the floor beside the duffel bag. I sat down cross-legged on the quilt and opened it. The email from the Kessler Studio was right there at the top of my inbox, where it had been sitting for a week.

Below me, the drill started again.

I clicked reply and started to type.

Chapter Twelve