First Light at Peach & Pine

The fog pressed against the front windows of the Main Street bakery, a thick, humid gray that swallowed the streetlamps and left Peach & Pine wrapped in a pre-dawn hush. The ovens were still cold. The glass pastry cases sat bare, waiting to be filled. I sat on a stool behind the counter, staring at the grease-smudged piece of paper lying next to a tray of unbaked peach hand pies. It was a proxy form. At the bottom, in black ink, sat the crisp, jagged signature of Harold Monroe. I traced the edge of the paper with my fingertip, feeling the heavy, textured grain of the county stock. As the late-shift records supervisor, I had handled thousands of forms just like this one, digitizing old land deeds and filing away the quiet histories of our town. But this one was different. This one meant that at noon today, when the town council convened to vote on the corporate buyout that would shutter the pine ridge orchard and the local mill, Harold’s deciding vote belonged to me. Marisol Keane bustled out from the back kitchen, wiping flour from her apron. She paused, leaning her hip against the doorframe, and eyed the paper. “You are overthinking it, Xanthe,” Marisol said, her voice a warm, bossy hum in the quiet room. “It is just paper until you speak for it. And you know what this town needs.” “Harold trusts my procedural integrity,” I replied, keeping my voice low. “He gave me this proxy because he assumed I would vote exactly as he instructed. He wants the shutdown. He thinks it is the only way to save his family from bankruptcy.” “And what do you think?” Marisol countered, tapping a wooden spoon against her palm. “Because I think if that mill closes, half the families that buy my day-old bread are going to have to pack up and leave Georgia. And I think you know that, too.” Before I could answer, the bell above the delivery door in the back alley jingled. The sound was sharp, cutting through the heavy air. I jumped, my hand instinctively covering the proxy form. Footsteps sounded in the narrow hallway. Slow, deliberate, and heavy. Killian Ellery stepped into the soft glow of the kitchen light. My breath caught in my throat, snagging on a sudden, sharp ache I had not felt in over a decade. He stood there, framed by the doorway, taking off his worn Stetson. His dark hair was slightly damp from the fog, and the lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered. But it was him. The boy I had married at twenty-one, the man I had annulled months later when the weight of his injuries and his trauma had driven him to beg me to let him go. “Sorry to intrude,” Killian said, his voice a low, measured drawl that sent a shiver down…