Chapter Two
With a city this size, it was hard to imagine too much would change over the course of ten years, but Noelle was pleasantly surprised as she peered from her apartment window down Main Street on the pre-dawn Black Friday morning. There had definitely been some changes. All for the good from what she could see.
While some of the paper mills that had reigned this area for more than a hundred years were no longer spitting out converted paper by the railcar full, the abandoned bones of those structures had been razed or replaced. Now the areas had become greenspace or been repurposed into trendy city living for the homegrown young professionals who were coming back to town after establishing careers in bigger areas.
Chapel Falls wasn’t her hometown, but it sure did feel like home. It was where she’d taken her first job when she’d graduated from college. That, and the place where she’d found her first love. And experienced her first heartache.
Noelle glanced down at her left hand as she tossed a piece of lettuce into her guinea pig’s cage. Thewheek,wheek,wheek chatter subsided as Cocoa chomped on the leaf, appreciative of the treat.
Thinking about Chapel Falls made her consider her past. She absentmindedly touched her ring finger and could almost feel that silver band that had encircled her finger for two years. It had been custom designed at J. Anthony Jewelers just a couple blocks down from her apartment building. The pear-cut labradorite stone, also known as firestone—prized in the Inuit culture for its interior beauty and resemblance to the Northern Lights—was surrounded by nine round matching stones. One for each month of their courtship. It had never left her finger until the day she took it off for good.
She’d been enamored with the ring from the moment she saw it. “Wish you could’ve seen that ring, Cocoa. It was so pretty,” she said wistfully to the guinea pig. The cut of the center stone reminded her of a tear, emblematic of the tears of joy she’d shed on that day when it had been slipped on her ring finger ten years ago. Little did she know that two years later, those tears would be of regret, sadness, and abandonment.
After she and her fiancé hadamicably parted ways, Noelle moved back home to ponder her life choices. She swore she’d never step foot in Chapel Falls again. But the job opportunities in Homer, Alaska, for someone in her field—or any field, for that matter—were scarce, to say the least. A degree in pulp and paper engineering was ideal for someone residing in a city built by paper barons. Not so practical in the frozen North, where the once-booming timber industry had dried up as more land was closed to timber harvesting.
One last scratch on the guinea pig’s head, and she pulled the top of the cage down. “Be good, Cocoa. I’ll be back in a couple hours.” She grabbed her gloves and stepped out of the apartment.
As humbling as it was to admit, in the ten years since the breakup, Noelle had been the stereotypical millennial living under her parents’ roof. Not in the basement—since most homes in Alaska didn’t have such a thing—but in the converted attic she’d taken over in high school after she’d gotten sick of sharing a bedroom with her younger sister, Hannah.
The elevator door slid open, and Noelle stepped into the lobby and through the doorway to the coffee shop on the first floor of her building.
To her credit, after she’d gone back to Alaska, she didn’t put her degree to use working as a barista. Not that there was anything wrong with that—she gave her friend behind the counter at Globe Coffee a smile—but with the employment picture being what it was, she’d been relegated to the position of administrative assistant, the glorified term for secretary, at a local insurance company.
“Hey, Rosalia,” Noelle said as she made her way to the counter of the cozy and festive Globe Coffee.
Rosalia shut the medical textbook she’d been studying and set it aside. “Morning, Noelle. What can I get for you today?”
Noelle scanned
