Like just about every other hometown woman he’d dated, Penny had accused Eli of being hung up on Reba Shannon, even though, by then, Reba had been long gone and good riddance to her.

Had he still cared for Reba back then?

No.

She’d screwed him over and nearly tanked his friendship with Cord and J.P. once and for all, and he hadn’t missed her.

Who he should have been missing was Brynne Bailey, but he hadn’t had the God-given sense to do that. Oh, he’d thought of her often, and wondered how she was doing, first in Chicago, where she’d gone to college, and then in Boston, doing whatever she’d done there.

Since she’d come back to the Creek and taken over Bailey’s though, she’d been on his mind with some regularity.

He thought back to that afternoon, when he’d finally gotten up the nerve to make a move, however tentative.

She’d been polite enough. Even asked him to stop in at her New Year’s Eve party, as a “friend.”

For all that, the message had been clear enough.

Don’t call me, Eli, I’ll call you. Not.

He’d deserved to be shot down, no doubt about it.

He’d hurt her, way back in high school, and been too much of an idiot to realize it.

Even now, Brynne was clearly wary of him.

And she’d relegated him politely but firmly to the friend-zone.

What was the point?

He’d be just another fool, standing around and hoping the next year would be better than the last one—or, at least, no worse.

Barely able to make out the shape of his mailbox, just up the road a way, Eli flipped the turn signal switch, even though there wasn’t another car in sight, coming or going.

It was habit.

Laura had passed this way with the plow, since the left-hand side of the road was relatively bare, but there was a two-foot berm blocking his dirt driveway, which was under about ten inches of snow as it was.

Eli didn’t stop at the mailbox—he paid his bills online and nobody wrote letters anymore—he merely shifted into low gear and barreled down the driveway, depending on momentum to keep him from spinning out and getting stuck.

He could see his house up ahead, between the dizzying flakes flying like frenzied bugs now, a plain log structure, rectangular in shape, with a stone chimney at one end and a cyclone fence out front.

There was one of those at the back, too, to contain his dog, Festus, who couldn’t be trusted not to chase a deer or a rabbit or some other critter into the next county, if he got loose.