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“Have you guys looked outside?” I called over the bells that jingled as I opened the door to the Bean Franklin. “Don’t hold

me to it, but I’m almost certain I saw some sunlight peeking through.”

“Just a trick of the mind.” Fenton Norris pulled his eyes away from the television on the counter just long enough to survey

the gray skies through the glass behind me. “This one’s set in good.”

He was right. Truth be told, I hadn’t even looked up from underneath my coat’s hood as I jogged from my parking spot on Main Street, but I knew there had been no sun.

I didn’t have to look up at the sky to understand that sunlight was going to be a rare treat for the next few days, just like it had been for the past several.

In Adelaide Springs you could just feel it.

These late-January storms made your bones feel wet and cold.

And if you could stand the blowing of thirty-miles-per-hour winds (and the snow those winds blew directly into your eyes and up your nostrils) long enough to look around, you’d notice that every bit of scenery that made Adelaide Springs beautiful was missing.

The storm was so set in that the twelve- and fourteen-thousand-foot peaks surrounding the town’s elevation—at just over nine thousand—were gone, like they’d been part of a movie set that had been torn down prematurely.

The bark of the aspens was nearly indecipherable against the pure-white ground and the slightly darker backdrop of the sky.

And the people, whose folksy Main Street presence usually made you feel as if the movie set you were on was constructed by Hallmark, were inside, for the most part.

Even the hearty, acclimated citizens of a rugged Colorado mountain town knew when to brew their own coffee and fry their own eggs rather than brave the elements.

Not that mornings at the Bean Franklin were ever really about coffee or eggs.

“Oh, come on, Fenton. Don’t be so glass-half-empty.” I smiled as he sipped his coffee and rolled his eyes at my ironic positivity.

Having only been back in the land of snowblowers, hand warmers, and avalanches for eleven months, my acclimation had been

slow, and my complaining had been vocal.

I’d known Fenton Norris—or, more accurately, Fenton Norris had known me—since I was born. Like so many of the citizens of

Adelaide Springs, he was a fixture. Almost part of the furniture. And no matter how much had changed about the town—and about

me—in my years away, some things would always remain. Fenton Norris would always have his eyes on the television and his mind

on the weather. The local diner—the Bean Franklin, it was now called—would always play host to a few stalwart regulars in

the morning, even when the rest of the town was taking advantage of a well-deserved snow day. And Adelaide Springs would always

operate at its own pace.

Slowly.

It wasn’t that there weren’t things to do, but in Adelaide Springs, people understood there wasn’t any real rush to get them done.

Most of the town got up with the sun and began thinking about the day.

But the best thinking came a little later, over that second or third leisurely cup of coffee.

Most mornings you’d find my childhood friend Laila Kimball expertly managing the relaxed chaos that defined breakfast time at the Bean Franklin on nonblizzard days.

Roland and Paula Cross’s oldest, Dustin, was turning out to be a natural in the kitchen (having learned under the expert tutelage of Laila’s husband, Cole).

And Laila may have barely known how to boil water, but she could serve the seven or eight tables of two to four people more efficiently than an entire waitstaff at any given chain restaurant in any given city.

Not that most of the patrons would have noticed if she’d ignored them altogether.

Like I said, mornings at the Bean Franklin weren’t really about breakfast.

On a morning like this one, when a lot more of the population enjoyed their coffee at home, it was quiet. Quiet enough to

make those of us who had spent the majority of our lives in much noisier environments uneasy. Uncomfortable. Nervous, even.

How long would I have to be back home before the nervousness went away? How many conversations would I have to sit through

with these people who had cared about me my entire life before I finally stopped waiting for the dreaded end of superficiality?

Before I finally stopped worrying that the next time they opened their mouths, it would be to ask a question I didn’t want

to answer?

I reached one of three occupied tables and threw my arms around my dad’s shoulders from behind. “Morning.”

“Hi, sweets.” He patted my hands and leaned into the kiss I was planting on his cheek.

As was my covert habit when I hugged my dad, I held him just tightly enough—just long enough—to check his pulse and perform

a general welfare check. No matter how much his energy level and abilities seemed to indicate he was fine— better than fine for his age, maybe—he always looked frail to me. I’d stayed away so long that he’d gotten old in my absence, and

it wasn’t easy to reconcile it all in my mind.

Most difficult of all to reconcile was the fear that frailty hadn’t been a companion of age but rather of concern and endless

worry about his wayward only child who hadn’t managed life so well in the months leading to her return to Colorado.

“What’s on the menu today? I’m starving.”

Josephine Stoddard spoke up from the seat on the other side of my dad. “There’s a new one today.” She raised her eyes above my head and called to the kitchen behind me. “What are you calling it again, Laila?”

Laila laughed before answering. “The Battle of Goudas-Burg Quiche.” She came around the corner and joined us at our table

while my dad was still midchuckle. “I know. It’s a bit of a stretch. Not to mention off-brand. But I swear, Andi—and Marietta

before her—already mined all viable punny American Revolution food ideas. I want to honor the legacy of this place, but I

just can’t with the John Hancock-a-Doodle-Doo Frittatas or Alexander Ham-and-Cheese Omelets or whatever. There’s seriously nothing left.”

Andi Franklin, the owner of the Bean Franklin, had still been going by Andrea Franklin when I last lived in town. Well, Andrea

Gardner, actually, since I left before she married her first husband. She was several years older than us—my school class

of five: Brynn, Cole, Laila, Wes, and me—and had always been Andrea when she babysat us. Somewhere along the line, she had

become known as Andi, which I couldn’t help but think might not have happened if I hadn’t moved away. When you only had a

few hundred people in your town, there was no need for confusion over names, and Andi was just a little too similar to Addie.

There were plenty of names to go around, so it was usually just a matter of letting the small town do its thing and determine

who would be known by what moniker. We couldn’t have two Mikes, so one had to go by Michael. One of the Roberts became Bob.

There was a Katherine, and there was a Kate.

(And for some inexplicable reason, when Thomas and Tallulah McAfee named their newborn son after his father, we all started

calling the baby BooBoo, when really Tom or Tommy probably would have sufficed. That baby was now a minor league baseball

pitching coach for the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, because, really, what else was the poor kid going to do with a name like BooBoo

McAfee?)

And I had always been Addie. Rarely Adelaide.

As a child I had often complained about being named after the place where I was born, and Cole had once said, “Just be glad you’re not from Booger Hole, West Virginia.

” From that point on, as teenagers, he’d occasionally called me “Boog” with mischievous affection. Other than that, I was just Addie.

Ah, well. Names change. For all sorts of reasons, but I’m pretty sure always for a reason that changes you in other ways too.

There’d sure been a lot of life changes for Andrea recently. Over the past few years, she’d lost her younger sister, Wray,

to cancer, met some environmental lobbyist guy in DC when she was there sorting out Wray’s personal affairs, and moved there

full-time when she married the guy, whom no one in town had even met.

(Speaking of names changing, Wray had been Wray Gardner-Hobbes ever since she left town—oh, nearly a couple of decades ago

now—and at some point along the line married Wes. As in the guy who left me at the altar.)

In any case, the Bean Franklin—one of three restaurants in town and the only coffeehouse—had been left high and dry with Andrea’s

abrupt departure, but Laila had refused to let the beloved Adelaide Springs institution die.

“I like it,” my dad finally contributed after more concentrated thought than most town mayors likely believed the naming of

a daily breakfast special deserved. “We couldn’t stay Revolutionary forever. It’s good that you’ve brought our quirky little

idiosyncrasies into the nineteenth century. You’ll be naming some waffles after Archduke Franz Ferdinand before you know it.

You’re doing great, kiddo.”

Laila laughed and wrapped her arm around my dad’s shoulder and briefly rested her head on his. “Thanks, Doc.”

Eighteenth-century American history—now nineteenth as well?—and breakfast foods. It was impossible to say which my odd little

hometown took more seriously.

“So what will it be, Addie?” Laila stood straight again and adjusted her apron.

“Well... why not? Let’s go with the Battle of Goudas-Burg.” No matter how morbid it feels to say it. It still definitely beat the occasional Boston Massa-Curry Chicken lunch special.

Laila smiled at me and nodded. “Coming right up.”