Sweet Deception

Chapter 4-What the SummerTook

I didn't sleep that night. Not really. I lay in the narrow bed of my childhood room—my father had never changed it, somehow, in fifteen years, down to the faded star stickers still clinging to the ceiling above me—and replayed the look on Jace's face when he'd stopped himself mid-sentence.

Done with—

Done with what. Done with him. Done with Harborne. Done with everything that town had ever meant to me, including, apparently, a boy who'd stayed behind and built his entire adult life inside a decision he hadn't fully chosen.

I thought about the version of that summer I'd carried with me for fifteen years—the one where I left because I was ambitious, because Harborne was too small for what I wanted, because my father cared more about beating the Monroes than he ever cared about understanding his own daughter. That version was true. It had always been true.

But sitting there in the dark, staring at star stickers I'd stuck to my ceiling at eleven years old, I let myself remember the parts of that summer I'd spent fifteen years carefully not examining.

The night before I left, Jace had shown up at the back door of my father's bakery at nearly midnight, flour still on his hands from closing his own shop, looking like he'd run the whole length of Harborne Street to get there.

Don't go, he'd said. Just that. No explanation, no grand declaration, just two words and an expression I'd spent the better part of a decade trying not to remember, because remembering it made leaving so much harder than it already was.

I'd told him I had to. Told him this town would swallow me whole if I stayed, that I needed more than endless competition and a father who measured my worth in blue ribbons. All of it true. All of it exactly what I'd needed to say to make myself walk away.

What I hadn't said—what I'd buried so deep I'd almost convinced myself it never happened—was the way he'd looked at me in that doorway like I was taking something from him that he'd never get back. Like leaving wasn't just about ambition or escape. Like there'd been something real growing underneath fifteen years of pastry-case sabotage and festival rivalry, something neither of us had ever been brave enough to name out loud, and I'd walked away from it anyway without ever looking back.

You didn't call once, you know.

He hadn't called either. But maybe, I was starting to realize with a kind of slow, unwelcome dread, that wasn't because he hadn't wanted to. Maybe it was because calling would have meant admitting what don't go had actually meant, and neither of us had been ready, at eighteen, to carry something that heavy.

I found him at five the next morning, before the ovens were even properly warm, sitting on the back steps with a mug of coffee he wasn't drinking, staring out at the harbor like it held answers.

"You're up early," I said, settling onto the step beside him without asking permission, the same way he'd settled beside me without asking that night in the doorway fifteen years ago.

"Couldn't sleep." He didn't look at me. "Been a lot of that lately, since you got back."

"Jace." I took a breath, steadying myself against whatever was about to come out of my mouth. "What were you going to say yesterday? Before you stopped yourself."

For a long moment, I thought he'd deflect again, retreat behind charm and pastry-case banter the way he'd done every single time this conversation threatened to get too close to something real.

He didn't, quite. But he didn't finish it either.

"I was going to say I wasn't just done watching you compete against me," he said slowly, finally turning to face me, some of the practiced ease slipping from his expression. "There was more to that summer than rivalry, Mila. More than either of us ever let ourselves say out loud." He shook his head, a rough, almost rueful laugh escaping him. "I'm not sure I'm ready to hand you the rest of that sentence yet. Some things take longer than one sunrise to say properly."

It wasn't an answer. It was the shape of one, warm and careful around the edges, and somehow that felt more honest than if he'd simply said it outright.

"That's fair," I said quietly, surprising myself with how much I meant it. "I'm not sure I'm ready to hear all of it yet either."

Something eased in his shoulders at that, like he'd been bracing for me to push and was grateful, instead, for the room to breathe. He turned his coffee mug slowly in his hands, looking out at the gray harbor instead of at me, though the silence between us now felt entirely different than it had five minutes earlier—softer, less like a standoff and more like two people quietly agreeing to walk toward something instead of away from it.

"For what it's worth," he said eventually, "I'm glad you came back. Whatever the reason. Whatever our fathers thought they were doing, forcing us into this." A small, genuine smile, nothing like his usual confident grin. "I'd forgotten what it felt like, having someone in that kitchen who actually keeps up with me."

"Don't get used to it," I said, though there was no real bite left in it anymore, just warmth wearing the costume of our old rivalry. "I still fully intend to win Best of the Harbor this summer."

"Good." His smile widened, easy and real. "I'd be disappointed if you didn't try."

We sat there a while longer, the harbor slowly waking up around us, coffee going cold between us, neither of us in any particular hurry to break whatever fragile, unfamiliar peace we'd just stumbled into.

"So where does that leave us?" I asked eventually, quieter now. "A year of forced partnership, and whatever this is, sitting underneath it."

"I don't know yet." Jace's hand found mine on the step between us—not a declaration, just warmth, just presence, steady in a way that asked nothing and promised nothing beyond this exact moment. "But I'm in no rush to figure it out by force. Some things are worth doing slowly."

I let my fingers curl around his, fifteen years of careful distance easing, just slightly, into something that felt a great deal more like coming home than I was ready to admit out loud.