Free The BFF Bride by Allison Leigh

and back.
    When the weather was good and there were no accidents or semitrucks to slow you down, the trip wasn’t difficult. But when the snow and ice came?
    Different story.
    “Don’t envy you that,” Justin said and lifted his hand before leaving.
    Even though his borrowed truck was in the parking lot, Justin could have walked from the hospital back to Tabby’s.
    It was no farther than walking to the diner from the triplex.
    Knowing that she did so—regularly—annoyed the hell out of him. Weaver was still a small town, yes. But it wasn’t the same small town in which they’d grown up.
    The streets weren’t the same streets where they’d raced around on their bicycles when they were ten. These days, you were just as likely to encounter a stranger on the street as you were a person you’d known your entire life. And a weekend pool tournament like the one his cousin-in-law had just thrown didn’t have to be going on to draw strangers to town.
    These days, strangers were actually moving to town.
    He dumped his messenger bag on the passenger seat and headed home. His cell phone buzzed before he got there. Half the time, the cell service didn’t work around Weaver, so he was surprised enough that he glanced at the display.
    The sight of Gillian’s name had him grimacing. He silenced the thing, not answering, and shoved the phone into the messenger bag. Two minutes later, he turned onto Tabby’s street and parked in the driveway next to a gunboat of a vehicle left over from a dozen decades ago. Mrs. Wachowski’s, no doubt.
    He wasn’t sure if Tabby still drove the sporty little coupe she’d had years ago. He hadn’t seen it around. But he also hadn’t seen any other car he could peg as hers, either.
    When he got to his front door, there was a piece of paper taped to it, and he peeled it off and unfolded it.
    Tabby’s handwriting was as illegible as it always had been. For a girl who’d been able to draw circles around his stick figures from way back, she’d always had the most atrocious penmanship. And no amount of trying was going to help him decipher the scratchings. He was too far out of practice.
    He went inside long enough to dump off the messenger bag, then walked down to her door and knocked.
    And knocked.
    And knocked.
    He’d given up and was turning to go back to his place when the door finally squeaked open and Tabby stood there, several paintbrushes threaded through the fingers of one hand. Her hair was haphazardly pinned on top of her head in a messy knot, and she had a smear of red paint on her cheek.
    “Looks like you still throw yourself entirely into your painting,” he said and swiped his thumb over the dab of paint, holding it up to show her.
    She tossed the rag that was hanging over the shoulder of her misshapen T-shirt at him. “If your plumbing’s stopped up, call a plumber.”
    “Nice landlady you make.”
    She made a face at him and turned on her bare foot. “Come in and close the door. You’re letting out the heat. I suppose you’re here about the note,” she said, heading out of the living room.
    He wiped the paint off his thumb and pushed the door closed with his shoulder before following her. “Since I could only make out about three words of it, yeah.” He stopped in the doorway of the bedroom she’d entered and stared. “Damn, Tabby.” There seemed to be dozens of paintings stacked up against the walls. Large canvases. Small canvases. And every size in between. “Do you paint instead of sleep these days?”
    “Sometimes,” she muttered. She’d sat down on a tall wooden stool in front of her easel positioned near the window but remained facing him. She took up another rag from a stack of them and started cleaning her brushes. “Any night’ll work.”
    He tilted the nearest stack of paintings away from the wall so he could look through them. They were all abstracts. “Looks like Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe had a baby.” He glanced at her. “Any