Sweet Romance12 min read
Second Chances, Peach Pastries, and a Broken Promise
ButterPicks12 views
The sun burned like judgment. I opened my eyes to a face larger than life and colder than winter.
"Hank—" I gasped, and before I thought, I flung myself into his arms, clutching him like a raft.
He shoved me back a little too hard. "If you do something that risks your life again, I won't save you next time," he snapped.
Those exact words. I froze.
That was the line he gave me the year I nearly drowned. The year I married Edmund Watkins and died waiting for him to love me. The year that ended with a hospital room and regrets.
I pressed my palm flat against the world and felt the truth: I had been sent back. I was in 1974, sixteen again. The same lake, the same afternoon, the same scorched sun. "No," I whispered to myself. "This is my chance."
Hank Roberts was a stranger to most in our village, but not to me. He lived like a shadow—steady, quiet, and always on the edge of things. He wore patched clothes, sleeves rolled up, dirt under his nails. He smelled like wood smoke and something else—something honest.
"You should sit up," Emmie Clarke, my mother, said as she bustled into the little room. She had always been gentle with me. "You gave us a fright."
"I slipped," I said. "I was at the lake."
Emmie squeezed my hand. "We were told you thought you couldn't live here. Who told us? Edmund came straight away."
Edmund Watkins. The smooth voice, the practiced concern, the man who would later teach me how to be small so he could be large. I felt the old bile rise and swallowed it.
"He told you I was thinking of...?" I asked.
"He said he found you by the water and worried," Emmie said. "Is anything wrong between you two?"
"No," I said. "No, nothing."
After everyone left, I sat up and studied the house that had been my cradle. Amos Franklin—my father—rode to work every day on an old bicycle from the county supply coop, and he smelled of ink and order. My brothers, Douglas Girard and Francisco Ikeda, were already asleep in their bunks. I was the only girl. The only one who'd been carried on a careful pedestal.
I had hated being precious once. I had married a man who wanted convenience more than tenderness. I had handed over my life. Not this time.
Two days later, they appointed me the record-keeper at the team office—the "work tally." The job was dull to some, but to me it was everything. I could watch. I could be near Hank without being a burden. I could make decisions that mattered to his day. I could write what was fair.
"You're sure you want this?" Calvin Choi, the team leader, asked.
"I will learn," I said.
Calvin's eyebrows lifted. "Good. We need someone careful."
The first day I carried my little cloth bundle to the office. Inside were peach pastries—home-made, crisp, still warm. Amos had winked at me. "For someone who works harder than she looks," he'd said.
"You're meeting him today?" Emmie had asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I will bring him a pastry."
The field at midday was a hot blur of backs and bent heads. Hank was a dot of motion at the far edge, working until everyone left. I waited. I waited until the late light bled gold into the earth, and when he finally rose, he shouldered his tools and walked straight past me.
"Hank!" I called.
He paused without turning. "Yes?"
"I wanted to thank you," I said, and offered the pastry like an offering.
He held out a hand. "I don't take gifts."
"Try," I said.
He looked at the pastry, looked at me, and then, abruptly, the corner of his mouth tipped. He took it and bit. "Good," he said.
My plan was tiny and honest: bring water and food; make sure he ate enough; keep his tally true. Little acts would become the web that caught us both.
I learned his routines. He woke early and worked later than anyone. He lived in an old mud-brick shelter by the foot of the hill, where a handbuilt table and a bare bed meant the place was more shelter than home. Once, when I came with a basket of chicken soup—because Emmie had insisted—and found Hank working by lamplight, he pretended not to need it at first.
"Stop pretending," I said, setting the bowl down. "You look thin."
He shrugged. "It is wind."
"Then let the wind be warm," I said.
He let me sit across from him. We ate in silence until he spoke, small mouthfuls between his words. "You shouldn't be here," he said at last.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because I don't want people to think—"
"Think what?"
"That I have a right to anything of yours," he said.
I blinked. "You saved my life."
Silence stretched. Hank's jaw flexed. For the first time, his eyes were not a cool glacier but something like a warm stone.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't make a habit of drowning," he replied, voice flat.
That was my first soft, ridiculous victory. He tolerated me. He accepted my food. He let me sit.
But I had more to fix than his dinner schedule. Edmund Watkins was moving himself into the center of county life. He would charm, lead the meetings, secure benefits. He would talk to my parents in the right way. He would be smooth, and I would be a ripple of complaint in his ocean. Last time, he used the rumor of my breakdown to push my family for silence, to frame himself as the protector. This time I would not blink.
"Why did you tell my mother I had...thought of jumping?" I asked Edmund when I crossed him near the co-op.
He took the question like a game. "Because someone had to keep you from making a mistake," he said, smile trained on public warmth. "Someone with better sense than you."
"Someone who benefits from being seen as my savior?" I said.
Edmund's jaw tightened. "Be grateful I thought of you."
I walked away. I would not give him anger for free.
The seasons turned. I learned the ledger: who did how many rows, who brought the tools back. I noticed that Hank's work was often credited to Ma's family—Greta Vazquez's clan—until I started writing numbers exactly as the day showed.
"You're splitting them?" Greta snarled on the day I insisted that Hank's work be tallied separately.
"He earned it," I said.
"He lives with us," she snapped. "You will make trouble."
I held the pen like a weapon. "He earns what he earns."
Greta's face went purple with fury. For a woman used to bullying the boy who lived under her roof, nobody had spoken back like that. People saw. The day I decided to write Hank's name alone was the day I became, in small ways, dangerous.
Hank stood up. He walked out, and before he was gone, he said, "Thank you."
When the harvest came, people saw Hank differently. He saved a child from a river, he worked twice the others, and at dusk he once single-handedly drove off a wolf that threatened a team of workers on the hillside—an image that stayed in people's mouths and eyes. Rumors changed: from suspicion to a grudging respect.
Edmund, though, was not to be left in the dust. He moved in like a tide, kindly in public and cruel in private. He needed me for favors and respect for his plans. I saw the tendencies I remembered: small deceptions that became habits, and habits that became betrayals. His smile at meetings was a business face; his hands could hold papers and also put stones into pockets no one checked.
And then one evening, as I balanced the ledger in the small square outside the team office, word arrived like a gust: the county would host a harvest exhibition and awards at the great square. Everyone would be there. Edmund would be there. So would the clerk from the city—someone who could change a life with a signature.
I planned like someone with a map etched on their bones. I had the records. I had ledgers. I had the proof of who did what. If Edmund had levers, I had the truth.
The square filled with people: tractors and buntings, the smell of taro and new leather. Children ran in the dust. Women with kerchiefs argued over ribbons. I sat at a small wooden table I had made for myself and spread the copies I'd transcribed—careful numbers, dates, signatures.
"Juniper," whispered Jaida Ray, my assistant for the day. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure," I said. "Read them."
At that same hour, Edmund walked onto the stage to accept a smooth, shiny plaque for "Coordinator of Growth." He smiled at the crowd and mouthed a rehearsed thanks. He bowed and took his microphone. "Our success," he said, "is proof of teamwork."
I stood. The square went from a murmur to a hush because there was nothing quiet about a woman standing in the middle of a harvest fair with a pen in her hand.
"Excuse me," I said. "I have the records."
Edmund's smile tightened. "Juniper—this is not—"
"Edmund," I said, and I did not lower my voice. "You told my family you saved me. You asked us to be grateful. You used that gratitude to move advantage into your hands. You've been lying. And more than lying—you have been taking."
I laid the pages on the stage like a confession.
"These are the tallies for the past twelve months," I said. "They show who worked which hours, who did what, and how the harvest was distributed. They also show the flow of the central fund you managed. You took funds, Edmund. You routed them through your accounts. You signed for equipment you never returned. You took our work and made it yours."
He did not speak at first. The hush deepened like a tide pulling away. Then his face shifted: surprise, then irritation, then an attempt at the old performance.
"That's false," Edmund said, too smooth still. "These are forgeries."
"Look at the ink," I said. "Look at the dates. And look at the people who stamped them." I called the names aloud. Each time, someone in the crowd lifted a hand. "If you deny this, you deny your neighbors their years."
"You're reckless," Edmund hissed.
"Perhaps," I replied. "Or perhaps I'm finally done being the quiet ornament."
Then I did something I had never had the courage to do before: I called someone to the stage.
"Hank, come up," I said.
He climbed onto the stage like a man who had avoided platforms his whole life. The crowd shifted, curious. I handed Hank a page. "Read what you did."
He took a breath and read the ledger aloud: dates, times, how many rows he had done, the months of extra work credited to Greta's household, the months where his food was supplemented and never accounted for. His voice was level, exact, without flourish.
As he spoke, people blinked. Faces that were bland with habit hardened. A few neighbors who had been in Greta's pocket glared down at the ground. The county clerk looked up, jaw dropped. Edmund's composure broke.
"You have no right," he stammered. "This is—this is libel."
Greta screamed. "You can't! I raised that boy! I fed him!"
"Then the records show the rest," Hank said. "And it shows how he was denied his share."
The crowd leaned in. One by one, people who had been quiet began to speak: a woman who had seen a sack moved at night; a man who had borrowed tools that never returned; a youth who had been promised work and never paid.
Edmund's face moved through a mask sequence I would remember forever: amusement, the flash of fury, disbelief, then a small, petulant attempt at charm—less effective now. "You all know me," he said, trying to pull them back. "I've done nothing but help this village."
A woman near the back laughed, a short bitter sound. "Help? You're the one who took our wheat when old Mr. Hargrove was sick."
"You—" Edmund began, then tripped on the truth like a man on stairs. His voice collapsed into denial. "That's not true. They're making this up."
There was a rustle. Somebody took out a scrap-book, another person a ledger, a third a stamped receipt they had kept folded in a drawer. The evidence multiplied like ants at sugar. Edmund's attempts at speeches turned thin and sharp.
He lost his temper in public. He shouted, he pointed, he accused me of being spiteful. He accused Hank of jealousy. The crowd's mood turned into a storm.
"Stop!" he cried. "Stop this slander!"
A woman spat in the dust. "Slander? We are the ones you've hurt."
Then the worst thing for Edmund happened: friends left him. A man who had bowed to him before turned his back and walked away. The county clerk, pale but steady, said into his microphone, "We will audit these records."
Edmund's face went from petulant to fear. He tried flattery, to charm the auditors, to call for calm. He begged some to remember him as he'd been polite. The crowd's voices swelled—not in awe but in accusation.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, my voice small but steady. "Why did you take from those who were hungry?"
Edmund's voice dissolved. "I—needed things," he said. "I—"
"You needed power," Hank told him. "You needed proof to show you were built for more than this town. You used us."
"You're lying!" Edmund pleaded, then mouthed petitions, "Please, please—"
He tried to leave. A group blocked his path. People had their phones—trembling new things—out, but more than that, they had names, dates, shame.
"I will repay," Edmund said. "I'll repay—"
"Repay what?" someone demanded. "Our dignity?"
He sank into a chair on the stage because there was nowhere else to put his failure. The crowd circled like a tide.
For a long time the square hummed. People demanded restitution. The committee called for an immediate review. Edmund stood on the stage in a suit that no longer fit the role he expected. He had been king of small favors; now he felt the slow cold mathematics of consequence.
He collapsed into private humiliation in front of everyone: shaking hands with the county comptroller as she read the ledger, his reputation liquefying. He tried to clap in apology. It felt like a bad play.
The punishment that followed was not legal punishment at first. It was public: forced apologies, the withdrawal of privileges—no one lent him a plow that winter; the co-op shut its doors; even the modest invitations to county dinners ceased. People who had stood in his shadow now refused to be in the light with him. He tried to call my father, but Amos passed the phone straight to the clerk: "We will wait for the auditors."
Edmund's face changed, stages shifting: bravado, then shock, then desperate denial, then, later, a raw pleading that made me look away. A man who once plotted smiles now pleaded. He came to my mother on his knees—on the dusty ground—begging for mercy, for forgiveness, for any arrangement that would keep him in the light. Emmie listened with a face like a closed door.
The village watched. Phones clicked. People recorded his fall like they would remember a storm, and when it was over, Edmund was left with the echo of his past favors gone wrong.
For me, the satisfaction was not only in his fall. It was in Hank's quiet face when he turned to me and, for the first time, did not look away.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "Because I am finally not afraid."
The harvest that year was better than the last. We worked together with a new sense of fairness. I kept the ledger clean. Hank ate properly. Even Greta had to learn humility; her public snarling had been recorded and replayed until apology took the form of odd, small kindnesses toward Hank. She never admitted wrong in so many words, but she began—slowly—to leave his share.
Between chores, we traded jokes like little currency. He began to let me into the small kingdom of his quiet humor. I began to make more practical requests.
"Make me a stool," I said one day. "I need a place to sit in the field."
"I'm making the cupboard," he countered. "A stool won't take long."
We traded favors like courtship. "We'll call it a trade," he said, not looking up from his plane. "Food for a stool."
Deals are small promises; I like them because they are tangible. He built me a small stool that fit under me like it had always been made for my legs. I carved my name into the underside so if any thief ever tried to claim it, the wood would say who had paid.
I told myself not to hope too hard. Rebirth had given me the chance to do better, but it hadn't guaranteed love. I could act with courage; I couldn't make a heart's weather. But when Hank left for the city to apprentice under a carpenter with better tools, he turned and said, quietly, "Don't go drowning again."
"Try not to die first," I teased.
He smiled. It was a small thing. It would have to be enough for now.
Months later, fate gave me one last sharp test. Edmund, stripped of his county favors, tried to worm his way back with a faint-hearted attempt at apology—at control. He traveled, he begged, he offered to repair the wrongs with money. I listened. I did not forgive. I offered instead to his face a ledger of the small restitutions he could make publicly: return the goods, apologize in the square, accept whatever work the team demanded to repay what he had taken.
He balked. He fled instead, and the square, having seen the ledger and the proof and the slow unraveling of kindness, refused his co-option. He was humiliated again, and this time it lasted. He left the county with no authority and a slower gait.
I watched him go. The name Edmund Watkins would always be a lesson for me: that some people can be taught, and some can only be shown the cost.
I had promised myself, the evening I woke under a too-bright sun, that I would not be a woman who waited and withered. I had kept that promise. I married no one out of convenience. I kept the ledger honest. I fed those who needed feeding. I defended those who were too small to stand alone.
And Hank—Hank began, with a caution that was almost reverence, to be something like a harbor. He laughed more, sometimes like a child, sometimes like a man who had found a small harbor. Once, as he handed me a carved stool that fit like a secret, he said, "You make the world better, Juniper."
"I make a good ledger," I replied, but my palms warmed.
When the autumn wind came, it rustled the stool and the little carved initials underneath. My name and his—small proof that some things could be repaired and some things remade.
We were young in the way that matters: trying, failing, trying again. I kept my ledger clean and my chest open. I kept bringing peach pastries and soup. I kept a record of kindness, in ink and in action.
If anyone asked what changed us, I'd point to the tally, to the public square, to the moment a village chose truth over convenience. But I would also point to the little stool, carved slowly in a workshop that smelled of pine and weather, with "Juniper" written on the bottom like a promise.
We were not perfect. None of us were. But we belonged to the same field now, and when the next winter came and the air went thin, I had Hank's steady presence like a blanket.
"Don't save me," I tease sometimes, "just hug me instead."
He always does.
The End
— Thank you for reading —