Page 69 of The Last Call Home (The Timberbridge Brothers #5)
The new Honey Drop smells like fresh pine, varnish, and hope—clean lines, new paint, floors that haven’t been scuffed by a hundred rowdy boots or barstools that remember your name. But give it time. Lilah says places earn their ghosts, and this one’s already humming with the memory of the last.
We rebuilt it from the ground up.
New foundation. New frame. New roof. Nothing salvaged but the heart of it—and the sign. Burned at the corners, the gold lettering faded, but she insisted it hang right above the bar. She says it’s a reminder. Not of what burned. Of what survived.
Cassian calls it poetic.
We never argued about staying.
Not once.
After everything burned—literally and not—we were just . . . here. In Birchwood Springs. CQS knows where we are, and they will contact us when we’re needed.
Cass and I tend the bar sometimes, help Delilah run the coffee shop and give Hopper a hand with their farm. We’re family, helping each other and settling into our sleepy town.
Cass and I take turns behind the rebuilt Honey Drop’s espresso machine, even though he still doesn’t understand how the milk wand works and I still think foam art is a conspiracy against me.
Delilah runs the show—or at least tries to.
She’s seven months pregnant and pretending that doesn’t mean anything.
She says she’s fine.
She’s always fine.
Except she’s also crying at puppy commercials and bossing us around like we’re her personal army. Yesterday, she told Cass he was folding croissant boxes with “resentful energy.”
Today, she waddles—glowing, gorgeous, furious—behind the bakery counter while we take care of the register and make lattes for college girls who keep asking if Cass is single.
(Spoiler: he is not.)
“Babe,” I call across the room. “You were supposed to sit down fifteen minutes ago.”
Lilah narrows her eyes. “I was sitting. Then your husband tried to make a heart in a cappuccino and scorched the milk into submission.”
Cass doesn't even glance up from the order he’s boxing. “It looked like a heart. A heart on fire.”
“It looked like abstract trauma,” she mutters, but her mouth twitches as though she’s trying not to laugh.
I round the counter and come up behind her, hands resting lightly on her hips. She’s warm and soft and always in motion, even when she claims she’s resting. I press a kiss to the back of her neck.
“This is sexual harassment,” she murmurs.
Cass glances over, one brow raised. “File a complaint.”
She laughs—soft and exhausted, the kind of laugh that suggests she doesn’t really want help, but she’s glad we’re here.
And me?
God, I could cry.
Because there were nights when we didn’t know if we’d survive this town. And I felt like a man broken into pieces and mailed to a town that didn’t want him.
But now?
Now Cass tucks sandwiches into a paper bag with a note that says, “Baby needs food. Love, C.” Because we know she’s probably going to forget to eat on time—unless she has something to eat.
Delilah leans back into my chest, her fingers laced with mine, and murmurs, “You two are going to be absolute disasters when I go into labor.”
Now Hopper texts us pictures of the greenhouse they just finished and Nysa drops off eggs with hand-drawn smiley faces on them.
It’s strange that now we’re trying to figure out how to raise a baby that’s coming in two months without losing our minds.
We’re home.
Now I get why when CQS called, I had to come. That was my last call home—and here I am.