The field producer had decided to carbon copy him on all shooting schedules so he knew where he could find Cat. Part of him recognized that he should be bringing the issue to the field producer or Paige. But he’d prefer to yell at Cat. It was more satisfying.

Noah decided to walk the four blocks to the park. He’d spent so many hours the past few days holed up in his office, the amount of cleanup progress surprised him. The buildings that had seen floodwaters licking at their foundations had all been power washed and a temporary week-long parking restriction on the last three blocks of Main Street had allowed a team of street sweepers to clean up the leftover mud clogging gutters and curbs.

Window cleaners had made quick work of the entire downtown. The town was still devoid of any actual holiday decorations. While the bulk of the decorating didn’t happen until Black Friday, there were still touches here and there that he missed. The storage shed that held most of the park’s decorations had yielded the disappointing news that nearly every item had been damaged if not destroyed.

Cat hadn’t seemed fazed by it, but Noah couldn’t help but mourn the decades of history wiped out by relentless inches of black water.

There was a crew stacking drywall and materials in front of Reggie’s diner. Cat and her ambitions. How was one woman and a tightly run crew or two going to turn a flooded park into a winter wonderland, return a destroyed diner into the breakfast mecca it had been, and redo half a dozen houses into livable homes all in time for Christmas?

She wasn’t. And that fact was plain as day. Cat King was getting people’s hopes up, and they were only going to get crushed. It didn’t matter how many volunteers showed up with cleaning supplies and tools. There was no way in hell that some pretty little actress could save his town.

And he’d be the one to pick up the pieces when she packed up and left town. He’d be the one sweating over budgets and bills, making the tough choices that needed to be faced. Through his fog of anger, Noah waved at the handful of people who greeted him. Frieda Fawkes poked her head out of the hair salon to holler a hello, and Ismail Byler called a greeting over his newspaper from the bench in front of the insurance agency he’d run since 1967. Their cheerfulness grated. Noah knew they were weeks away from disappointment, and he wished he could prepare them for it.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and pressed on.