Elizabeth told herself she wasn’t in love.

In the winter gloom of the next morning, the glittering, earth-shattering certainty of her future with Jack felt much less certain.

That wasn’t to say she didn’t want a great love with Jack. In fact, she wanted it so much it hurt. The previous evening when she returned April’s car and while April gave her a ride to work, she’d been unable to stop herself from smiling. April had noticed and asked her what was up, but Elizabeth had just said, “Nothing, just feeling happy.” She didn’t think she’d quite fooled her friend.

Her customers at the Sled Dog had noticed, too. She’d felt extra friendly, floating on a cloud of happiness, and her tips had been exceptional. What nobody else knew was that even as she’d poured pints and mixed cocktails, her mind had been back in the foyer of Jack’s house. She’d been in his arms, feeling the electricity zip through her veins. Remembering his lips, his hands, the hard strength of his tall body against hers.

After work, when she crawled into bed, she’d been unable to fall asleep for hours. Instead, she stared up at the stained white popcorn ceiling, watching the shadows, and had an overwhelming sense that everything was different now. That kiss with Jack, that moment she’d fallen in the snow … something inside her softened. Uncoiled. Felt right for the first time ever. It was as if her entire life had just been marking time until Jack.

In the morning, though, Elizabeth felt something else. In addition to the still-reverberating frisson of desire for Jack and the deep intuition that he might be her one great love was a much stronger and more familiar presence: fear. Just as this chance was dangled in front of her, with Elizabeth’s luck something would happen to snatch it all away again.

She wasn’t a romantic. Not an idealist. Not someone given to flighty impulses like falling in love just because a handsome man glanced her way.

She gave an eager Rugby his food and then started a pot of coffee brewing for herself and Emmett, hoping the smell would rouse him. She shivered in her flannel pajamas and fuzzy slippers, and while she waited for the coffee—and for the house’s sluggish furnace to kick on—she grabbed an old coat as an additional layer.

“Morning,” Emmett said from the kitchen doorway.

Elizabeth looked over. Her brother had two full garbage bags in his hands.

Rugby looked up from his food bowl and barked once.

“Good morning,” Elizabeth said. “What’s all that?”

“It’s time for me to get rid of my baggage. Literally and figuratively.”

She smiled at him. It was unexpected, and unusual lately, to see Emmett take the initiative. And he’s not hungover, she realized, seeing his eyes without their typical red cast or dark shadows.

“That’s a great idea,” she said. “It’s time for me, too.”

“Thanks for making coffee. I’m going to take this stuff out and keep at it.”

“I’ll make you breakfast, too, if you want.”

As Elizabeth sipped her hot coffee, hands wrapped around the mug for warmth, she felt a little more invigorated.

I’m not in love, she told herself again. Men like Jack don’t fall for women like me. But that doesn’t mean I can’t start acting like a woman with a future.

She’d been stagnant before—it was so obvious now—and secretly dreading the coming reunion with her father, not because she didn’t love him and want him to be released from prison, but because she barely had a grip on her precarious life as it was. There was Emmett. The house. Her lack of momentum. Lack of a career.

She’d always thought bartending would be a stop-gap job, a placeholder, a way to pay the bills while building toward a future with more meaningful work, and yet she’d been bartending for four years. There were no excuses, really, she saw that now. She should have been taking classes at the community college all along instead of allowing herself to lurch from one personal crisis to another, willingly turning over any extra money she had to pay for her dad’s lawyer and to take annual trips to visit him down at the federal prison in Oregon, and, in recent months, bailing Emmett out of one scrape or another.

Today that would all change. The possibility of love had infected her, and life would be better.

She would be better.

* * *

She and Emmett had an appointment with Theresa Harmon later that morning to get an update on any repercussions from the accident. Theresa had requested the meeting, which made Elizabeth nervous, but once they got there, seated in the old armchairs that faced Theresa’s desk, the lawyer had only good news.

Since Jack Barnes had made it his professional opinion that Elizabeth wasn’t the driver, and since Elizabeth had done the right thing and not given any statements to the police at the scene, and since they weren’t going to report the vehicle’s damage to the insurance company, and since there was no record anywhere of what alcohol or drugs were or weren’t in Emmett and Elizabeth’s systems, it appeared as if they’d gotten exceptionally lucky.

“This could have ended much differently,” Theresa said in her usual no-nonsense voice. “It could have ended with Emmett in jail at the very same time your dad’s being released from prison. I can’t help but think how disappointed he would have been.”

“Sorry, but he’s given up the right to be disappointed in me,” Emmett said.

Theresa had known them a long time, through the years of Nate’s arrest and trial and parole hearings, through Emmett’s legal claim to become Elizabeth’s guardian when their mom up and left, and she’d sometimes served as the only reasonable adult in their lives. Theresa always played it straight with them, and as such, she wasn’t afraid to challenge them when she felt it was warranted.  

“Well, then, I’m disappointed in you,” she said to Emmett. “You’re supposed to rise above your circumstances in life, not succumb to them. That’s what separates the weak from the strong.”

“He is,” Elizabeth said, defending her brother. “We both are. Onward and upward from this point forward.”

Upon leaving Theresa’s downtown office, they walked to the North Star Café for hot chocolate. It was a small treat that Emmett had used to do for Elizabeth when she was a kid and thought there were no problems that cocoa couldn’t solve.

“It’s going to be hard,” Elizabeth said, referring to Nate’s upcoming release, deciding to address the situation head-on. “I’m worried he’s going to mess things up for us here when he gets released, aren’t you?”

Emmett took a deep drink of cocoa as he looked out the window onto snowy Main Street.

“It’s going to be brutal, him coming back,” he said. “You don’t remember what a pariah he was, but things were nasty for a really long time when he first was arrested.”

“I remember enough,” she said.

She’d long worried about how Nate’s release would affect her life, but now she had a new worry—namely, would his sudden appearance mess up her fledgling relationship with Jack? Jack was so upstanding. Would he even be willing to be associated with a convicted felon like Nate? Would the name Armstrong scare him off when it was splashed all over the news again in a negative light, reminding the entire town what Nate had done?

“Onward and upward, right?” Emmett said. “If we need to move from Golden Falls to start fresh—to get rid of our baggage—then that’s what we’ll do.”

“I think that’s a great idea for you and Dad,” Elizabeth said. “But I’m not moving.”

Emmett looked surprised.“Why not?”

“Because I just might have a reason to stay.” She took a sip of her hot chocolate and refused to tell Emmett anything more.