Page 25

I really needed to get a beanie. I liked those better and I wasn’t sure where any of mine were now. I told Ville as much.

“There are knitters and crocheters in the family. As soon as they hear, they’ll race to make you one.”

I chuckled. Yeah. That was probably a good idea. I did love beanies because they didn’t crush my curls as much as ball caps and cowboy hats did. Or maybe they did, but in a different spot so it was easier to feel—I cut my thoughts off and went to pour us coffee.

We made plates with sandwiches, potato chips, and the cut up veggies and dip which seemed to always be around for the grandkids. It wasn’t a bad snack for adults, either. Once we’d made ourselves comfortable on the couch and I relaxed even further, Ville gave me his patented best friend look that said “out with it” just as easy as any words would.

I stalled, putting my thoughts together as I inhaled a sandwich. Then I took a sip of my coffee, cleared my throat, and blurted out, “I don’t know how to do this being so close to him thing.”

Ville hummed, the sound thoughtful as he finished what he was eating. “Well, I’ve been waiting for you to want to address that.”

Of course he had. He knew the “current day me” better than even Bodhi did, and not in just the sense of Ville knowing that I was in love with Bodhi while Bodhi probably had no clue. No, Ville had been by my side almost 24/7 for about a decade now. I’d of course seen Bodhi occasionally during those times, but we hadn’t been able to meet face to face and a lot of the upkeep of our friendship had been through other means. Emails, texts, voice messages, video calls. All the things that kept him firmly lodged in the part of my heart and brain that had ever only been for him.

I nibbled on a carrot stick and then pushed it into my mouth almost angrily as I shifted to sit fully on the couch, my legs curled underneath me. I reached for my coffee and sighed.

“I want to stay here. Not… not necessarily in Russell Crossing, although that’d be easiest because I want to have Nelson on the ranch. The last thing I want is to try to assimilate into another barn community somewhere else and I definitely don’t want another horse, you know.” Even getting a companion horse on a loan from someone meant that I’d have to take care of it and there’d be extra people added to my circle and I didn’t want that.

“Okay,” Ville said, then just waited me out, that bastard.

“And I want to bulldoze the old house and the barn. They’re hazards by now. Which means I have a whole empty property next door once I get that done. So why wouldn’t I settle there?”

He just raised a brow at me, so I reached to grab a piece of broccoli—Payton had been on a broccoli kick lately—and threw it at his face.

“You’re supposed to say something, Ville!”

Chuckling, he drank more coffee, then sighed and got serious again. “First of all, what are you going to do about music?”

Yeah. That… that was the question, wasn’t it?

I put the mug on the coffee table and leaned back against the couch, closing my eyes. My best friend, the mind reader he was, did the same with his mug and then moved closer until he could pull me to his side.

We sat there in silence for several minutes.

Eventually, I sighed again. “I don’t want to be Wren Paxton anymore.”

I felt him nod, with his cheek pressed against the top of my head. “Okay. So you’re not Wren Paxton anymore.”

“But who am I then?”

He hummed again in his usual way as he thought of what or how to say what was on his mind. “Merle seemed to think you were good at producing. Milton, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

Merle was my favorite producer and she was insanely good. If she thought I had something to give in that regard, well, I’d take it. Milton, a country singer with a good fifteen years on me, had his own recording studio at his homestead outside Nashville. He rented it out for people he liked, and that was where I’d recorded my last album.

I valued his opinion, too. I hadn’t produced anything for others and only been part of my own music like that, but… yeah. Of course I’d thought about it as an option.

“And you’re going to have a plot of land with nothing on it,” Ville continued after a while.

“Maybe I need to look into what kind of studios there are around and if there’d be a need for a new one?”

“It doesn’t need to be open to the public, either. You don’t need the money. But let’s say someone you like from your old life needs some peace and quiet and a studio….”

I mulled over his words. He wasn’t wrong. I could also extend an invitation to young talent, whether in the country circles or not. Sometimes getting away from Nashville had been the only way to feel creative at all once I’d gotten too stuck into the hamster wheel of what it was being an artist who wrote for himself.

“I should probably call Milton,” I mused out loud. “See if he has thoughts on what might work.”