Page 25 of The Score We Never Settled

“Don’t be fillin’ her head with lies,” I hear Zoe lightly chide, bumping into my body as one of her legs comes over the tree’s dead trunk. “It’s going to be a civil war in this place.”

Close enough.

Zoe, another one of my best friends, nurses her own beer in her hands and stares off into the open flames. “I think we should bunker in and wait it out.”

Fallon scoffs. “Wait it out? When this is the only excitement we get in our lives?”

“You really need to get off the farm more, girl,” Zoe drones. “Because with Maebell and Agnes runnin’ the show, we get more chatter than we bargained for.”

“I thought you’d be happy about that over Mrs. Hale.”

“Ha!” Zoe takes another long swig of her beer, smacking her lips when she says, “I swear to God if that woman comes into my office one more time with Mrs. Dalton claiming that a house is painted the wrong color for the time period or the town’s clock is thirty seconds off, I might drown myself in Willowmere’s Pond.”

“Dramatic.”

“You deal with her.”

“She is a pain in the ass,” I chime in, nursing another sip of my beer. “She once told me I was usin’ the wrong flour for my muffins. I thought flour was flour. Mrs. Hale said it didn’t have enough bran.”

“Didn’t have enough, what now?” Fallon asks, sounding just as confused as I was, because who cares?

“It’s wheat,” Zoe says. “And she’s out of her mind.”

“Does she ever talk about Tucker?”

Fallon’s question has me craning my head over to look at Zoe since she first sat down. Her golden blonde hair is thrown up into a messy bun. She doesn’t return my stare, still looking into the fire and avoiding.

She avoids any talk about Tucker, as I do and have done with Briggs. If there is one thing Zoe and I have in common, it is that we both fell in love with two men born in Magnolia Ridge.

And her reason has a name, too, and it’s Thaddeus Delacroix, the town’s, now, mayor.

“If she does,” Zoe finally says. “I’ve already drowned her out of my head.”

I lean into her body in silent comfort, cuddling up to her warm black sweatshirt, which wasn’t like her before.

Zoe was Magnolia Ridge’s Southern belle in droves. Her mother prim and propered her to be the best example of Southern hospitality the South has ever seen. From volunteering to having herself perfectly thrown together all the time, Zoe was someone you aspired to be if you wanted to be a lovely Southern belle.

That wasn’t me.

I was the church girl. I volunteered and organized food drives and bake sales to raise money for the church’s new water heater or whatever else it needed.

Zoe and I ran into each other quite a bit, but her mother always tried to put Zoe out in the center of everything.

Now, she hides away in a dusty office, the town’s archivist, and she’s wasting away.

The Zoe Ridgeway I used to know loved life; she smiled, and she danced until her little feet couldn’t anymore.

But, now, she is no longer the grace of a Magnolia lady—as her mother used to call her—but someone who keeps to herself and out of the spotlight in Magnolia Ridge altogether.

It was a scandal, let me tell you.

“Wanna trade?” I ask her in all seriousness. “You take Briggs and Cruz, and I’ll take Mrs. Hale?”

“Hell no,” she immediately drawls. “Cruz Weston is a tool bag with not enough tools in his chest to be a real one, so absolutelynot. And Briggs…” She exhales heavily and finally looks over at me. “Girl…are you gonna put that man out of his misery or what?”

My brows crash together. “What do you mean ifI’mgoing to put him out ofhismisery? He’s done nothing but drag me along with his screwed-up emotional rollercoaster.”

“You’ve always liked Brigg’s screwed-up emotional rollercoaster. You’re the only one who could fully get to him. That’s a superpower.”