The box cutter sliced through the packing tape with a sound like a final, ragged sigh. Appropriate, really. My return to Oakhaven, the town I’d fled faster than a sprayed cat eighteen years ago, felt less like a homecoming and more like a strategic retreat ordered by a general who’d already lost the war.
The war, in this case, being my marriage to Richard “I Swear She’s Just a Friend Who Needs Constant Late-Night Emotional Support and Also My Tongue in Her Mouth” Sterling, and my subsequent burnout from a Chicago architectural preservation career that had started feeling less like saving history and more like negotiating hostage situations with developers whose souls were apparently constructed entirely of polished chrome and empty stock options.
So here I was, Elara Vance, forty-two years young (a phrase I used with the same forced cheerfulness one might employ while describing a root canal as ‘character-building’), surrounded by the ghosts of my former life packed neatly into cardboard sarcophagi.
My new/old life awaited assembly in this rented Craftsman bungalow on Elm Street, a house I vaguely remembered from childhood Halloweens as belonging to a woman who owned seventeen cats and was rumored to communicate with squirrels.
Now, it was mine – all creaky floorboards, dusty built-ins crying out for books they hadn’t seen in decades, and a faint, lingering aroma that might generously be called ‘vintage potpourri’ but probably leaned closer to ‘mouse graveyard.’
Stability. That was the goal. Find purpose. Lick my wounds. Maybe finally learn how to properly propagate a succulent without it staging a dramatic, slow-motion suicide. Small town life, redux. Oakhaven hadn’t changed much, visually at least. The same slightly listing Victorians lined Maple Avenue, the same town square boasted a gazebo desperately needing a paint job, the same river ambled along the edge of town like it had all the time in the world.
It was picturesque in that way that could either feel charmingly timeless or suffocatingly stagnant, depending on your blood caffeine level and recent life implosions. Mine were currently high and catastrophic, respectively, so the jury was still out.
I wrestled a particularly heavy box labeled ‘BOOKS – HIST. ARCH. – FRAGILE EGO’ onto the floor, the effort sending a puff of dust motes dancing in the afternoon sun slicing through the wavy, antique glass of the bay window. Fragile Ego was right. Richard had done a number on it, bless his mendacious heart. And the last project in Chicago…
God. Fighting tooth and nail to save the intricate terracotta facade of the old Marlowe building, only to have the developer find a loophole the size of Texas, slap up a glass monstrosity, and call the single preserved gargoyle above the entrance a ‘heritage feature.’ It had hollowed me out. Made me question if fighting for beauty and history was just tilting at windmills made of reinforced concrete and greed.
Hence, Oakhaven. A place where the windmills were, theoretically, smaller. A place where I could maybe make a difference on a scale that didn’t require Prozac as a chaser. A place where my best friend since kindergarten, Maya trussed, still lived and breathed and ran the most gloriously chaotic bookstore-slash-cafe imaginable, ‘The Daily Grind & Bind.’
My phone buzzed from its precarious perch on a stack of bubble wrap. Maya.
‘Caffeine + Gossip transfusion stat? Heard the prodigal daughter hath returned. Need visual confirmation you haven’t spontaneously combusted from Oakhaven quaintness overload yet.’
A smile tugged at my lips, the first genuine one all day. Maya was my anchor, the one constant besides my crippling addiction to dark chocolate and my ability to identify original crown molding from fifty paces.
‘On my way. Currently battling dust bunnies the size of small rodents. Might need hazard pay.’
‘Consider a triple-shot latte your danger money. See ya in 10.’
Abandoning the box battlefield felt like desertion, but caffeine and Maya called. I grabbed my worn leather satchel, automatically checking for my tape measure and notebook – old habits – and stepped out into the Oakhaven afternoon. The air smelled different here than in Chicago. Greener. Less exhaust fumes, more damp earth and blooming hydrangeas spilling over white picket fences. It was… nice. Annoyingly nice. Like it was trying too hard to soothe my jangled city nerves.
The Daily Grind & Bind was exactly as I remembered and exactly as it should be: a cozy explosion of mismatched armchairs, towering stacks of books that threatened imminent collapse, the scent of roasting coffee beans mingling with old paper, and Maya herself, a whirlwind of bright scarves and kinetic energy, holding court behind a counter laden with pastries that looked both delicious and potentially lethal in their sugar content.
“There she is!” Maya shrieked the moment I walked in, abandoning a customer mid-sentence about organic chamomile. She flung herself around the counter and enveloped me in a hug that smelled like espresso and lavender hand soap. “Ellie! You’re real! You’re back!”