It wasn’t lost on me that if it weren’t for Mags drawing me back to Sweet Bay, I wouldn’t have had any of this. I’d still be churning away in New Orleans, thinking I’d found all I was to do with my life. I’d thought I was done with The Hideaway forever, but family was the magnetic pull that drew me back. I may have given up on Mags a long time ago, but in her own unorthodox way, she was the one who saved me in the end.
The phone in the hall rang, and I jumped up to get it. “The Hideaway, this is Sara.” I loved the words as they left my mouth.
“Hey, babe,” Crawford said.
“Hey, yourself. Why didn’t you call my cell?”
“I know you love answering the house phone.”
I smiled even though he couldn’t see me.
“You’re out early this morning,” I said. The background noise told me he was in his truck with the windows down.
“I’m on my way to the McCaffertys’ house in Lillian to meet the floor guy. You’d love this place. It’s a rambling old Creole full of antiques. I mean antique antiques.”
“What are they doing to the house?”
“Adding on. Again. They need room for the grandkids. Although I don’t know how kids and all these antiques will mix. How did the night go? Was Major on his best behavior?”
“I didn’t hear a peep out of him until he got feisty this morning about his toothbrush. But he’s fine. It’s all perfect, actually.” It had been a few weeks since the last construction worker left, but the newness had yet to wear off for me.
“I can’t wait to see you,” he said. “I have a few more stops to make, then I’ll head your way. Need anything?”
“Just you.”
At ten, after giving the Melmans a map of the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay and suggesting a few places they could grab lunch, I went next door. It was a beautiful thing, my business being forty feet from my home. Sometimes I missed the clattering streetcars and morning “rush” of traffic in the Quarter, but you couldn’t beat walking next door with your coffee mug to flip the Open sign around and begin the day.
In the three months I’d been back in Sweet Bay—for the second time—renovations on The Hideaway had wrapped up, and Crawford and his team built a small cottage on the empty lot next door. We were fortunate to have a long stretch of good weather in early fall, and the builders made quick work of the cottage. It now housed my new shop, Lost and Found. Allyn was the one who’d convinced me I could do it.
“You started the first shop from scratch. Why can’t you do it again? Alabama surely has just as many estate sales and old barns to salvage as Louisiana does. They’ll eat your stuff up, just like they do here.”
Crawford was on Allyn’s side, of course. They met when Crawford and I drove to New Orleans to pack up my loft and bring a few things back home from the shop. Allyn insisted on taking us out to dinner. I picked a sidewalk café near Jackson Square, a place I thought would be just noisy enough to distract us from the fact that Crawford and Allyn would have nothing to talk about. But I was wrong—I could hardly get a word in between them bantering back and forth, first about farming and motorcycles, then about me.
“You’re the lucky one who gets all of Sara’s pent-up romantic yearnings,” Allyn said to Crawford, nudging me with his shoulder.
“That makes me sound like I’ve been locked up in a tower somewhere.”
“You basically have,” he said, then turned to Crawford. “No one has been able to break down that wall she built around herself.”
“You did the hard work,” Crawford said. “All your advice at least convinced her to give me a shot.”
“Do I even need to be here? I can scoot out if you two want to keep talking about me and my wall.”
Crawford smiled at me. A candle flickered on the table between us, right next to a red glass vase holding a plastic rose. His knee touched mine under the table.
The truth was, I’d had to convince him to give me a shot when I got back to Sweet Bay. I drove to his house after I told Dot and the others they didn’t have to move out. He didn’t believe I was there to stay.
“I can’t do this twice,” he said. “How do I know you’re not going to skip town again?”
“I’m not going anywhere. This is where I need to be—where I want to be. Everything has changed.”
Crawford leaned against his kitchen counter, hands in his pockets, and smiled, but it wasn’t his usual smile. “Of course it has. You have the house back.”
“Yes, I have the house, but it’s more than that. I’m sorry for not calling, for not explaining myself to you. Once I got back to New Orleans, it didn’t take long to realize I’d made a huge mistake.” I stepped closer to him and put my hand to his face. “There’s nowhere else I want to be, and no one else I want to be with.”