Cedar Hollow was the kind of town most people drove through without remembering the name of. One main street, a hardware store, a diner that had changed owners four times in 30 years, but never changed its menu. A courthouse square with a war memorial nobody quite remembered the dedication data of anymore. Population just under 6,000, most of them born within 20 mi of where they'd eventually be buried. It was the kind of town that measured its seasons by which crops were coming in and which football team was playing Friday night.
And it had never, not once in its long unremarkable history, produced a headline anyone outside the county would ever read. That was more than anything why Ren had chosen it. She had come to Cedar Hollow a year and a half ago in the middle of winter with two duffel bags and a grandmother who needed somebody closer than a 5-hour drive. Nobody in town asked too many questions about where she'd been before. People here didn't pry.
Not really. They watched patiently. The way you watch weather roll in over the hills, waiting to see what it might turn into. What they saw was a young woman who kept to herself, who worked hard and left early, who never once raised her voice, not at a rude customer, not at a driver who pulled away from the curb too fast, not even the one time a loose dog came barreling down Main Street and cut straight through a crowd of pedestrians outside the pharmacy. She'd stepped calmly between the dog and the crowd, and it had trotted off a minute later, like it had simply changed its mind.
People talked about that for a week. Then they forgot the way people do and went back to seeing what they expected to see. Quiet, timid, maybe a little broken. She let them believe it. It was easier, easier than explaining a version of her life that most people in Cedar Hollow would never have a frame for.
Anyway, the bus rolled two blocks before Grant Colton got on. He came up the steps like he owned the engine underneath them. Two friends behind him, Chase and Dylan, already laughing at something that wasn't funny yet, waiting to see if it would be. Grant was 30. Big shoulders, the kind built in a gym mirror.
He wore a jacket with his old high school number stitched on the sleeve a decade after he'd stopped needing it to mean anything. He'd been back then the kind of boy this town liked to build a whole Friday night around, and some part of him had never quite accepted that the cheering had stopped. His eyes moved down the aisle and landed on Ren. They always did. "Well, look who it is," he said loud enough for the whole bus to hear.
"Quiet, girl, still riding the bus like it's the last one out of town." A few people looked up. Most looked away faster. Ren didn't move. She kept her eyes on her hands folded in her lap.