There’s a particular kind of hard that comes with heartbreak in a small town.
In a city, you can reroute. Take a different street. Find a different coffee shop. You can arrange your life so that your old geography and your new grief don’t run into each other at the corner table.
In Silverton Lake, Illinois, you cannot do that.
Anna Anderson knows this when she shows up at her grandmother Sandra’s door asking to move in for the summer. Her reason is simple and devastating: she and Evan broke up, and Evan is going to be in Silverton all summer. She can’t see him ordering a burger at the place that used to be theirs, or walking the beach, or being fine while she’s — and she stops herself there, because the end of that sentence is too honest to say out loud.
Sandra understands this immediately. She doesn’t need the full explanation.
She knows about the geography of heartbreak. She knows how a town can become a minefield of ordinary places that have been made into something else. The diner where you shared pie. The corner where someone said goodnight for the last time. The gymnasium door through which a song can escape at exactly the wrong moment.
Sandra is seventy-two years old and she still knows where all her mines are.
What I love about writing small-town romance is that the setting isn’t just backdrop. It’s a character. The town remembers things. It keeps records in sidewalks and storefronts and the particular booth at the back of a diner where a conversation happened that you can’t un-have.
Silverton Lake has been holding Sandra’s history for fifty-some years, patient and particular. And when Kevin comes home — picks up a carryout order on a Tuesday night like it’s nothing — the town lets her know.
You can’t hide in a small town. You can only decide what you’re going to do next.
