“What the hell was that? I thought you two were ecstatic to be reunited?”

“Oh, you know,” Hannah said with the sort of loving nostalgic exasperation reserved for family you loved even when you didn’t like them, “leftover hurt feelings, old buttons getting pushed. Miriam and I have been butting heads since we were born. She thinks I’m controlling, and I never let anyone else be in charge.”

Noelle secretly thought Miriam was kind of right.

“I’m grateful to Cass for bringing us back together, but why did it have to be to clean up this gigantic mess she made?” Hannah chewed on the end of her braid, a sure sign she was processing something. Noelle waited for her to finish. “There’s no money, there’s no paper trail, there’s no system for contacting past guests! There are sticky notes that predate the invention of the sticky note!”

“I miss her, too,” Noelle said, and Hannah put her head on Noelle’s shoulder.

“Miriam’s right. This is a clusterfuck. I don’t know if even my supernatural powers of organization can save this farm.” Hannah blew out a breath.

“You can’t, alone,” Noelle reminded her. “But you don’t have to. We’re a team.”

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Miriam

The decision about whether to stay at Carrigan’s should have been an easy one. No matter how much Miriam had loved it as a child, Carrigan’s was her past. She had a beautiful, ambitious woman at home waiting to build a life with her, and a store she’d dreamt into being. Maybe she and Tara would never be in love, but they were an ironclad team.

Here, she had an unwanted attraction to a woman who didn’t like her and a mountain of emotional baggage to unpack. True, she had her family back, and a big, fascinating project she was collaborating on with her favorite cousin. Now that she had envisioned Carrigan’s All Year, she wanted to see what it could become, in person. She wanted to be a part of building it.

The real problem was, whenever she thought about going home, something wild and insistent inside of her whispered she was already there.

She’d been putting off calling Tara, because every time she decided she knew what she was going to do—for sure, definitely this time—she changed her mind as soon as she picked up the phone. Cole had told her to follow her heart, but Cole loved change and was adept at making himself large. Miriam had spent all her life trying to keep things from changing, trying to make herself so small as to be invisible. She’d invented an entire social media persona she could hide behind, so no one would ever see who she really was! Including herself. She had stopped listening to her heart, because she’d been burned so badly whenever she’d tried.