Blue Ribbon Between Us

by Hannah Brooks

Heat 3 / 5One-Shot1,752 words8m read~12m listen

Five years ago, Willa Crane left a note where a goodbye should have been — and a blue ribbon tied to a saddle she never meant to keep. Now she’s back in Peach & Pine, Georgia, just long enough to restore some old tack for the county fair and slip out before anyone notices. That was the plan, anyway.

The town council’s ‘heritage horsemanship’ scheme has other ideas. So does the scuffed Merritt family saddle hanging on the south fence of Pine Ridge Orchard, that ghost of a ribbon still clinging to the cantle like an accusation. And then there’s Cade Merritt himself — broad-shouldered, jaw set hard, and looking at her the way a man looks at something he lost that he never quite stopped searching for.

They’re supposed to be talking rider rosters and repair timelines. Instead, wedged inside a lantern-lit equipment shed while the fairgrounds flicker in the distance, five years of silence finally cracks open — his quiet grief, her old terror of being the line item that broke him, and the truth about the night she ran.

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