Chapter 67 - The Midsummer Festival
The solstice arrived in late June with a brilliant, golden blaze that warmed the valley from dawn until late into the humid night. Down in the county seat, the annual Midsummer Festival brought together local farmers, artisans, and families for a day of community celebration, live fiddle music, and competitive pie-baking.
For a long time, we had avoided crowds, treating strangers as potential threats and public gatherings as tactical liabilities. But stepping into the crowded town square hand-in-hand with Clara, surrounded by children running with cotton candy and neighbors greeting each other by name, those old instincts felt absurd.
"Look at this," Clara whispered, her eyes wide as she took in the colorful banners strung between the brick storefronts and the smell of roasted corn and funnel cakes. "We are officially small-town folk."
"Speak for yourself," I smiled, though I couldn't keep the grin off my face. "I'm still a formidable urban operative when it comes to winning the ring-toss game."
"Prove it," she challenged, pointing toward a carnival booth where a bearded man was shouting odds.
Ten minutes and three rings later, I walked away with a ridiculously oversized stuffed teddy bear, which I promptly handed to Emma, who laughed so hard she nearly dropped her lemonade.
May you like
As the afternoon melted into dusk, long wooden tables were dragged into the center of the park, laden with potluck dishes brought by every family in the township. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder with dairy farmers, schoolteachers, and carpenters who knew nothing of our past, our aliases, or the shadow war we had left behind. To them, we were simply the newcomers from the old farmhouse on the creek—hard-working, quiet, and kind.
And in their eyes, we found the most precious thing of all: complete invisibility. We were finally just ordinary people living an ordinary life.
