Quarter to five. He walked past the aisles to see if he’d missed a customer, but the store was still empty, as it’d been for the last two hours.He hung his hammer on the storage room wall. The people in this town should be done shunning him because of Axel. If he’d been implicated in his friend’s shenanigans, the sheriff would have hauled him in already.But no matter how much he berated the townsfolk in his mind, they didn’t listen.Though there was one good thing about being spurned: he could close the store early every day and look for Eliza. He’d walked past the butcher every afternoon since first seeing her there—hoping to catch her dumping her mop bucket.He wasn’t about to court her on the butcher’s stairs, but was hoping to talk to her for a minute or two so bad?He’d only caught her twice. Both days had been Thursdays, and today was Thursday again. But if he didn’t find her, he ought to go see Silas Jonesey. Will hadn’t been invited back to his farm, but the man needed some human conversation and perhaps a game of chess to keep his spirits up.
