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reporter and had now found a larger audience as the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners host of the world’s top-rated current

affairs podcast, Conscience: Fair Reporting in an Unfair World .

Wes sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as he closed his eyes and breathed in through his nostrils and out through his

barely separated lips. Then he tilted his head and looked at me through one squinted eye. “I’m dropping out of the race, Addie.”

I felt my eyes grow wide in surprise and forced them back into an unaffected and mistrusting squint. Both of his eyes were

wide open and studying me now, waiting for a reaction, but apparently I had recovered quickly enough that he didn’t observe

one. I finally swallowed down the breath that had caught in my throat as the hand that had been squeezing the bridge of his

nose dropped to his thigh and he pulled his eyes away.

“No one knows. Well, almost no one. My campaign manager certainly doesn’t know. He thinks I’m in California right now, as

a matter of fact. And it’s... it’s, um... delicate. So yes, I’m hoping to find a sympathetic journalist in Sebastian

Sudworth—”

I cut him off with my scoff. I still wasn’t sure what all could be trusted and what couldn’t, and there were at least a hundred missing details, but it was easy enough to point out the ridiculousness of his statement while I kept trying to sort it out.

“You think Sebastian is going to be sympathetic? I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there.

Fair, unbiased reporting is sort of his brand, you know.

Besides, I realize you may not know this, but he’s practically the patron saint of this town now.

They love him much more than they love any of us who grew up here, and I think that’s because he loves Adelaide Springs with a passion that

every last one of us would have made fun of when we were younger. He’s not going to be sympathetic to anyone who hurt his

friends the way—”

“The way Brynn did?”

Wes knew as well as I did that I wasn’t about to say Brynn’s name, but our eye contact remained intact as he allowed what

he had just said to sink into my brain.

Touché.

Brynn and Sebastian had met when she came back to Adelaide Springs in an attempt to salvage her career, after a hot mic on

Sunup revealed her true thoughts about her hometown—and revealed her to be a bit of a mean girl in the process. I hadn’t been here

then, when all of that was happening, but you couldn’t escape the coverage. It was the most exciting love story anyone around

here had witnessed since Martina Layton moved to Montrose to marry that volunteer firefighter who rescued her when she tried

flambéing bananas Foster with half a bottle of Everclear, so it got told quite a lot. When you threw in the fact that Brynn’s

memoir, which recounted the story in detail, spent a few months on all the bestseller lists, it was safe to assume that everyone knew their story. Including Wes.

“Okay, yes, Sebastian came around on Brynn, but that’s not because he was sympathetic . Brynn changed.”

“ I’ve changed, Addie! But that’s not even what I mean.” He rubbed his face feverishly and then faced forward. “I’m not looking

for sympathy for myself. I’m really not.”

It was possible I was asking the wrong questions, I realized.

Focusing on the wrong things. I’d just been handed information that, if true, was going to send the entire world reeling.

Was he really dropping out of the race? If so, there was only one logical reason why.

He knew something that, as of right now, voters did not.

He knew he didn’t stand a chance, even while Washington power players gathered their sacrificial offerings to lay at his feet.

What was the going rate for a cabinet position these days, anyway?

Ten virgins and a couple oxen? The entire political landscape of our nation would change with the announcement, and shock waves would follow throughout the entire world.

And he was seeking a sympathetic journalist to help him break the story.

“Who?”

He kept staring at the layers of snow and slush being cleaned away with each cycle of the windshield wipers. “Hmm?”

“For whom are you seeking sympathy?”

His eyes glanced to the right, and then his head followed. I waited while he took in deep breaths and let them out slowly,

fogging up the window each time. This was it. Whatever he was hiding, whoever he was trying to protect, as part of whatever

scandalous misdeed was about to pop out of his closet and consume news cycles and possibly earn entry in future history books—alongside

a democracy’s worth of bribes and mistresses and treason and addictions—was being considered alongside meticulously deep breaths

right now.

And for reasons I didn’t understand, my heart hurt for him as he suffered whatever pain he was trying to breathe his way through.

“First things first: Why are you ‘sticky and cold from head to toe’?”

The fog he’d been creating on the window with the in-and-out consistency of a beating heart dissipated, and he turned back

to face me. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard me.”

He chuckled softly. “I told you. Hot chocolate.”

I crossed my arms. “Yes, but why were you drinking hot chocolate in an all-terrain vehicle you’re not remotely qualified to

handle?”

The smile was evident on his face as he looked down at his hands resting on his leg, but it was subdued nearly to the point of vanishing by the time he looked back up at me. “I wasn’t drinking it. It was for you.”

My eyes narrowed into slits. “What do you mean it was for me?”

“I remembered how much you used to like the hot chocolate from that diner on Kearney—”

“That diner isn’t even there anymore.”

He nodded. “Yep. I know that now. But there’s that little gas station at County Road 22.”

“That isn’t exactly on the way back into town.”

“It is if you take Banyon.” Wes shrugged, and a sheepish smile slanted at his lips. “And it was well worth it—for the variety

they offer, if nothing else. Today’s specials were powdered cappuccino, coffee with the grounds dumped right into the pot

as an extra treat, and, of course...” He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a messy, sticky, crumpled cup.

“Hot chocolate.”

He handed the cup to me, and I took it, pinching the rim with my thumb and forefinger at the one clean spot I could see. “And

why were you trying to get me hot chocolate?”

“Well, like I said, I remembered how much you—”

“Stop.” I held up the hand not holding the pathetic shell of a former cup, and he heeded the warning in my voice. “We’re not

walking down memory lane here, Senator. That’s not an option on the table. So if you were hoping to capture me in a net of

nostalgia or something—”

“No, Addie. No. That’s not what I meant at all. That’s not what I’m trying to do.” He rolled his eyes upward and seemed focused

on the light blue cloth interior of the old truck. His teeth grabbed at his bottom lip as he closed his eyes, and his eyes

remained closed as he finally spoke. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. And obviously, I’m sorry for a lot of things—”

“And hot chocolate’s going to make all of that okay?”

“No.” His eyes opened slowly. “Of course not. I just hated that you had to drive me around—”

“It’s my job.”

“What I mean is, I’m sorry to have just shown up out of the blue. I didn’t even know you were back in town, and I certainly didn’t know you would be my driver.”

My chest constricted as the implication of what he said—of one tiny part of what he said—washed over me. “I didn’t even know you were back in town.” Which meant he knew I had left town. Which meant that at some point or other, he’d heard—asked?—something about me. Funny.

For all the thought I had put into avoiding news of him and being unable to avoid news of him, for all the time I had wasted

imagining scenarios in which he came back to me and all the time I spent trying to convince myself I never wanted to see him

again... I had never once considered that maybe he’d checked up on me. I had never once wondered if he’d ever so much as

googled me.

“It’s not a big deal. We’ve now not known each other longer than we ever knew each other, so let’s not be weird about this, alright?” I faced forward and turned up

the defrost to begin clearing the fogged windows. “You could have just as easily been picked up by any other random person

from your past—”

“Don’t do that, Addie.” He cleared his throat and blinked rapidly. “Regardless of anything that happened between us, can we

please not act like you’re in the same category with anyone else in this town?”

“No, of course not.” I leaned down and stuffed the crumpled cup into the trash bag on the carpeted floor between us. “I’m

fully aware I’m the only one in the ‘Get out of here as quick as you can before you get stuck marrying her’ category.”

Shoot.

I pulled the handle on the door and then threw my shoulder into it when it wanted to stick closed. The snow and ice were coming

down so quickly that I stepped into a foot or more of white on the driveway path Wes had plowed earlier that morning, but

I was pretty sure the heat coursing through me was going to create puddles of water in my wake.

If only he’d had the decency to stick around long enough to break my heart to my face.

If only he’d treated me with even a modicum of the respect I deserved.

Then he could have said, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or “I hope we can still be friends,” or “You know I’ll always care about you,” or any of the clichéd, meaningless, insulting things that people say, and I wouldn’t have to put up with sticky gloves and crumpled cups and him acting like I’d been as special to him as I’d always believed I was.

Still, I wasn’t mad because he’d said what he’d just said. Not entirely, anyway. I was mad because I’d been the first to bring

up the “wedding that wasn’t”–sized elephant in the room.

“Here, let me get that,” he said as he appeared beside me at the back of the truck. I had pulled my hand away from the metal

in the instant I touched it, recognizing the contradictory burn of my fingers as a warning that my skin was going to freeze

to the chain if I lingered. By the time Wes got out of the truck, I was straddling the hitch and had stretched the hem of

my sweatshirt down below my coat to use the soft cotton as a very ineffective layer of protection.

“I’ve got it,” I insisted.

I must admit I didn’t hate that he ignored my insistence. He slipped his sticky gloves back on and disconnected the chains

and hooks and piled them into the back of the truck.

“Thank you,” I muttered with a tone usually reserved for words like, “I know you are, but what am I?” and “Take a picture.

It will last longer.” Then I was climbing back into the truck, and he was standing at my door.

“Don’t go. Not like this.”

“I have to get to work.” That wasn’t strictly true, since Neil was working today and all the calls were being forwarded to

his cell. I’d stopped him before he could give me answers to questions—big, potentially democracy-altering questions—I was,

in fact, curious about. But it was the fear that I might finally get some answers I wasn’t sure I was ready for—so many years

after I’d finally stopped asking the questions—that made me want to run away.

No... that wasn’t it exactly. I think I was in such a hurry to get away because I knew that if I slowed down, I might have to admit that my curiosity had been awakened— reawakened —about more than just the political scoop of the decade.

“Okay.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets, but his reflexes were sharp as he reached back out and grabbed the door before

I could slam it shut. “Then have dinner with me. Tonight. Just so we can talk. And we don’t have to talk about anything you

don’t want to talk about.”

I laughed and momentarily forgot about attempting to pull the door shut. “There’s nowhere in this town we could go without

being seen, and the moment you’re seen—”

“I’m not hiding from anything, Addie.”

It took me a moment, as the wind rushed between us, to realize that was all he’d said. The Are you? hadn’t come from him. It was apparently a question I was asking of myself. And if there was one thing I knew, it was that

there were already too many unanswered questions. I wasn’t in the mood to add another to the list.

“I’ll pick you up at seven, presuming you have something nonsticky to wear.”

Then I motioned for him to step away from the door, which he did, and slammed the door shut and looked over my shoulder as

I shifted into Reverse. But not before I caught the subdued smile spreading across his face.

Dang it.