I was on edge.

Something was off. And it wasn’t just that I wasn’t feeling great. I’d been feeling dizzy on and off all day, but it wasn’t that. It was Finn. He’d been acting different lately and when I asked him about it he told me not to read too much into his broodiness. He’d laughed, but it hadn’t reached his eyes.

I knew he was hiding something.

That and he went to run an errand early this morning and I hadn’t heard from him yet and it was approaching midnight.

My mood must have been written all over my face because as I was sweeping up, Critter reached under the bar and pulled out a shotgun. He cocked it and the sound echoed off the walls of the bar. “Where is that son of a bitch?” he asked, heading to the door. “I warned him…”

“Critter!” I called out. “Stop. Wait!”

“Did he hurt you?” Critter asked, turning back around and looking me up and down with murder in his dark eyes. “I warned that son of a bitch.”

“Not in the kind of way that needs resolving with a shotgun,” I explained, pushing the barrel of his gun down.

He raised a bushy brow. “Is there a kind of way that don’t?”

“Yeah, and I think this is one of them.” I crossed the room and continued sweeping while Critter walked back behind the bar.

The shotgun stayed on the counter.

“You ain’t gonna cry are you?” Critter asked, watching me from the bar.

“I don’t cry,” I replied, straightening my shoulders. “Not for a long time, anyway.”

But I do feel like something heavy was dropped on my chest.

“Yeah, but in my experience, being pissed off at a man and tears go hand-in-hand.” Critter pulled down a tumbler from the rack, pouring three fingers worth of whiskey from the top shelf.

“I thought you only drank beer,” I pointed out.

Critter lifted up his glass. “Tonight feels like a whiskey kind of night,” he said, not sounding like his usual happy self.

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured him, hoping that his change in mood wasn’t because of me.

“I know you will be. You’re a tough one, kid. I’m glad you came around. Things wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“Thanks. I feel the same.”

Critter had become family to me. More family than I’d ever had before.

“I hope you always do,” he muttered and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right.

“You say that a lot,” I said, spinning around to face him the butt of my broom handle knocked a picture off the wall, sending it crashing to the floor, picture side down. “Shit,” I cursed.

“Be careful. You need help over there?” Critter asked.

“I got it.” I knelt, picked up the frame and set it on the closest table. I swept the shards of glass into a dustpan and dumped it in the rolling trash bin that I wheeled over to the table. I shook the frame over the bin to make sure no broken glass remained. The picture separated from the frame and fell into the bin. “Critter, you never said. Who is it that I remind you of?” I went to reach for the photo on the top of the pile, gasping at the image staring up at me.

Critter’s heavy footsteps sounded behind me. He looked over my shoulder and picked up the photo off the trash pile. He smiled and ran his hands lovingly over the older image of a woman sitting at the bar, smiling at the camera like the person behind the lens meant everything in the world to her.

Critter held up the photo and pointed to the woman. “Her,” he sighed heavily. When he spoke again his voice was scratchy. “You remind me of her.”

And it made sense why.

The woman…was my mother.

* * *

Unable to take my eyes off the photo I sat at the bar. Critter stood on the other side and poured me my own drink. He slid three fingers of whiskey in front of me. “Here,” he said.

“I don’t drink whiskey,” I said.

“You do tonight,” he argued, downing the contents of his glass and slamming it down on the bar, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Critter plucked the photo from my hands. “I was wondering when you’d get here,” he said, but he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to the picture.

To my mother.

“Those are the exact same words you said to me when I first met you,” I pointed out.

Critter flashed me a sad smile that made my throat dry. “Those are also the exact same words I said to her when she first walked into my bar.”

“That’s my mom,” I said. “But something tells me you already knew that. You lied to me.”

“I omitted the truth,” Critter argued.

I glared at him. “Yeah, I lied. I didn’t want to. Lord knows I hated every second of it. But I thought it was for the best.”

“Tell me more,” I said, not wanting to get caught up in anything other than finding out more about my mother and her time in Outskirts.

Critter chuckled and nodded his head. “Yeah. I know. I’ve always known. You’re just like her. She too went out of her way to point out the obvious.”

I’m nothing like her. I wanted to argue, but I was too taken aback by the way he was talking about knowing my mom. A woman I didn’t even get to know on that kind of level.

“Do you know why we call them tings?” Critter asked, pointing to the ceiling.

“No,” I said, shaking my head and spinning my tumbler on the bar.

“Your mom. She made up that name. She said a ting is the sound you hear when something happens in your life that will change it forever. Good or bad, big or small,” he smiled sadly. “Life is composed of thousands of tings and she wanted people to memorialize the ones they experienced here. Which is why we now hang tings from the ceiling.”

“Wow,” I said, feeling confused and warmed by the knowledge that my mother had something to do with the twirling pieces of paper that have been blowing in the AC breeze above my head for weeks.

Critter cleared his throat. “I know every single person in every picture up on those walls.” He looked at me and smiled. “You may not have her blonde hair and she didn’t have your freckles, but that face you’ve got there? That’s your mama through and through. Thought I was seeing a damned ghost when you first walked through my door.”

“I wanted to tell you a million times about her. Caught myself about to tell you how much you reminded me of her about a thousand times. Like when you talk too fast when you’re nervous or bite your lip when you’re thinking of something to say. The truth is that I didn’t want to scare you off by dumping all this on you the second you got here. I wanted you to find your way. Thought you could get to know the town, get to know the people here.” He looked me in the eye. “Get to know me.”

He pointed to the frame. “Maybe even HER, before I ran you off with tales of the past.” Critter looked to the door like he was remembering watching her walk through it for the first time all over again.

Critter took the photo from my hands and slid it back into the frame which he leaned against the pillar on the bar like he wanted mom to be a part of the conversation.

“So, tell me,” I started, “who exactly was my mom to you?”

Critter leaned forward, resting his forearms on the bar. He laced his fingers together and stared at mom’s picture when he spoke. “Everything.” His eyes then found mine.

“Your mother was everything to me.”

* * *

“You might not think that your mother wasn’t strong enough because she never left that bastard who called himself your father, but you’re wrong. She did leave him. Once,” Critter explained. “Which was why she came here.”

Critter knows about my father?

I couldn’t even process that my mother would tell anyone about Father or the way he treated us. She never told anyone.

Ever.

“When?” Was all I could think to ask from the barrage of questions hitting me all at once.

“A long time ago. Before you were born.” He looked around the bar like he was seeing it again for the first time. “When she came here.”

“I…I didn’t know,” I whispered, mulling the revelation over in my head. “Mom never told me much about her past. All I know is what I got from a box she left for me, but besides the keys to the truck and camper and the deed, it was mostly trinkets.”

“Makes sense. She was a very private woman. But when she came around I couldn’t help myself. I knew she was married, but while she was falling in love with the town…I was falling in love with her.”

“Then the land she left me wasn’t just some late-night auction purchase on TV or a stopover. It was part of her life.” I looked up to Critter whose eyes were glistening.

He smiled and looked up at the tings. “This place WAS her life.”

“Why would she leave then if she loved it so much?”

Critter looked to the ceiling at the hanging notes. “There’s one above the door dated May 6^th, 1996. Go take a look.”

I slowly slid off my stool and made my way over to the door. I glanced up and sorted through a bunch of them which were mostly drunken notes about the best night ever when I found the one dated May 6th 1996. It was in my mother’s distinctive cursive handwriting.

I turned and walked back to Critter who had his back to me, leaning over the bar. I walked around and slid back onto my stool so that we were face to face again.

“When she first left, I thought she decided to go back to him. To the church. I was devastated. But years later I found that behind the register when I was installing a new bar top. Must have fallen down. She was never great at attaching those damn things.” Critter sniffled. “I’ll tell you more.” He shook his head and rapped on the bar with his open palm. “Just give me a few minutes to…clear my head.”

There was still so much I wanted to ask and Critter must have sensed it. “Just a few,” he repeated.

“Okay.” I finally took a sip of the whiskey and coughed when the liquid burned my throat.

“Thought you didn’t drink whiskey?” he asked. His eyes glimmered with unshed tears.

“Tonight feels like a whiskey night,” I said, using his earlier words.

“I’ll be right back.” Critter pointed to the back window and suddenly the time of reminiscing was over and my boss was back. “In the meantime, there are a bunch of new notes over by the window. Some rookie hanger didn’t have a clue how to use a stapler. Tack them back up for me would ya?”

“Sure.” I took another sip of my drink and coughed again.

Critter untied his apron, set it on the counter, and grabbed a full bottle of whiskey from the bar. He didn’t say another word before disappearing through the swinging doors. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

I wanted to follow him and beg him to tell me more but the look on Critter’s face was heartbreaking and I knew he’d tell me more when he was ready although it had to have been over twenty years since my mother had been there, considering how old I was, and he wasn’t ready yet.

I took my tumbler with me and shuffled over to a fallen note. I bent down to pick it up and pulled out a stool to attach it back to the ceiling and when I did I spotted three different tings all tangled together.

Even though my stomach was a pit reading Miller’s ting about Finn, I couldn’t help but chuckle at Josh’s and Miller’s tings about each other. They did love each other. It was a unique kind of love.

Just like mine and Finn’s.

His name in my thoughts was enough to make the pit in my stomach grow.

It was easy to spot the other recently hung tings Critter mentioned. The string colors were still bright and hadn’t yet faded like a lot of the others. Plus, the ink on the paper was still dark and bold. Critter was right, there were a bunch of new ones. At least ten, all hung one after the other in a row and instead of tacked with a staple like all the others, these were flimsily held to the ceiling with small strips of clear tape.

I grabbed the stapler from the bar and hopped up onto a chair which I slid across the floor. I tacked the first note to the ceiling when the air conditioning kicked on and the note fluttered around toward me. The message was at eye level.

I gasped. The date was the day I came into town. But this wasn’t here then. I moved to the next one as my heart began to pound in my chest.

My eyes stung with forming tears as I continued.

I felt the tears pouring down my cheeks by the time I read the last one which I plucked from the ceiling and dropped down on the chair to read over and over again as the tears continued to fall.

The swinging doors from the kitchen creaked open and that feeling of awareness I used to think was dread but now associated with Finn flitted down my spine. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever come back,” I said, turning with happy tears still spilling down my face, fully prepared to jump from the chair and into Finn’s arms, only to come face to face with Critter who had an apologetic smile on his face.

Critter ducked under the bar and I jumped down from the chair I’d been standing on. “What’s going on?” I asked when Critter poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey and downed it all in two gulps.

“Are you going to tell me the rest of the story?”

“It’s not my story to tell,” Critter said.

I was growing frustrated. “If it’s not your story to tell, then whose is it?”

“It’s mine,” said a familiar voice from the kitchen. I looked to Critter whose face was unreadable. I slowly turned, wondering if the voice was imaginary but when my eyes landed on the person standing between the swinging doors, I suddenly forgot how to breathe.

No. It can’t be.

The woman folded her hands in front of her and took a reluctant step into the bar. She smiled sweetly.

“Hello, Sawyer.”

My. Heart. Stopped.

“Mother?”

is the second and final book in The Outskirts duet, and the conclusion to Sawyer and Finn’s love story.