Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of a serialized novel we will publish over the next four months, with new chapters posted on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Dispatch From The Past

The sun had dipped low over the lake by the time Rebecca stepped off the Yazoo Freshet and onto the dock.

The edits to her latest episode of High Water, centered on the obscure and mostly forgotten history of Fort Charlotte, were finished and scheduled for upload. The effort had drained her more than she expected. She needed fresh air and movement.

She carried a mug of green tea – reheated and more symbolic than satisfying – and wandered down the marina’s gravel path, settling on a worn wooden bench at the water’s edge. The lake shimmered in the Tuesday evening twilight, brushed with streaks of lavender and rust. The water was still except for the occasional ripple stirred by a breeze or the lazy glide of a blue heron.

Rebecca’s thoughts drifted, unbidden, to Brantley Forge. He was yet another complicated man who had quickly grabbed her heart and then gently, carefully broken it. Still, her memories of him always made her smile.

She had met Brantley in a South Carolina history class during her sophomore year at Furman University. Rebecca, immersed in her English major and already obsessed with investigative reporting, had taken the course as a breather. Brantley sat one row over, early to class every day.

Brantley was at Furman on a football scholarship, a compact and powerful defensive tackle, but he never quite fit the jock archetype. He read deeply, listened intently, and sometimes challenged the professor during classroom discussions in ways that made Rebecca sit up and pay attention.

Their conversations started casually, walking back to the dorms from class, grabbing coffee, drifting toward campus events together. He was calm, grounded. While other students chased internships and ambition in big cities, Brantley always talked about Edgefield County with the devotion of a man already rooted, who knew his destiny was to be found close to his boyhood home.

As an athlete, he could have gone pro. NFL scouts were sniffing around by his junior year, noting his speed, his tenacity. But Brantley brushed them off.

“I’m not hauling ass to Atlanta or Miami or L.A. to play ball,” he told her one afternoon, stretched out on the grass with her beside the library’s iconic fountain. “I love Edgefield too much. That’s my home.”

He meant it. After graduation, he returned to Edgefield County and joined his father’s construction company, Forge & Son Builders. Brantley’s daddy was a key player in the real estate game whose fortunes grew as Edgefield County’s southwest corner, the once-pristine land nearest to Augusta and North Augusta, continued to explode with new subdivisions.

Brantley took to the work with quiet resolve – raising neighborhoods from pine scrub and red clay, managing crews, juggling clients, getting his hands dirty.

Rebecca had stayed behind in Greenville a little longer after graduation to work on her master’s degree and work part-time for the Greenville News for weekend beer money. Finally, she landed a full-time job back in Edgefield at the Dispatch and came home.

Her early days as a young journalist were filled with town council meetings, ribbon cuttings, church fundraisers and weekend festivals. But soon she was digging deeper, chasing leads, falling in love with investigative reporting the way some people fall in love with God.

Rebecca always loved the puzzle of journalism – interviews, deadlines, headlines that could rattle cages. It was the only drug besides craft beer she ever cared to ingest.

Brantley and Rebecca stayed close for a while – phone calls, occasional weekend meetups – but by 1994, the pull of their diverging lives had become undeniable. Her world was fast-paced, emotional, constantly shifting with the breaking news. His was steady, grounded, bound by brick and lumber and contracts.

Their last lunch as a couple had been at Tillman’s, a small family-owned cafe in an old farmhouse along the lonely stretch of highway between Johnston and Trenton. It was early autumn, and they talked about everything and nothing.

There was no dramatic goodbye. Just an unspoken knowing. A chapter closing.

Brantley had loved her without asking her to change. He had given her a kind of peace she hadn’t known she needed. And when they drifted apart, it hadn’t been a rupture; it was a gentle, mutual letting-go.

He reminded her that not all dreams require escape, that staying true to one’s calling over all else can be its own kind of courage. He reminded her that an enduring friendship trumps romance kindled merely for the sake of not being alone.

When their gentle romance faded, it hurt Rebecca more than she cared to admit, but she didn’t allow herself to wallow. She turned the aching into fuel. Her intensity sharpened. Her focus doubled. The newsroom became her battleground, and the truth was her crusade.

Her work became her lover. She eventually earned the opportunity to interview with the Dispatch‘s ownership group in Athens, Georgia, for the editor’s job. She easily won the assignment to lead her hometown newspaper.

She was tireless. Unapologetic. The kind of small-town editor who made county clerks sweat and town administrators avoid eye contact in the grocery store. The president of Town Square News Group, the company that owned the Dispatch and 18 other weekly newspapers in the Carolinas and Georgia, once called her “tenacious almost to a fault.” She took that as a compliment.

Sometimes, in the quiet evenings alone with her thoughts – ones not unlike this – she wondered what Brantley would’ve thought of her biggest stories. The nursing home scandal. The statehouse nepotism ring. The corrupt mayor who had tried to block COVID testing sites in his town.

But once they drifted apart, they never really shared the kind of intimate conversations they once enjoyed. They saw each other on the street, of course, nodded and spoke cordially at community events. Neither wanted to risk anything that resembled a couple.

Rebecca liked to believe Brantley, if she had been coming home at the end of a long day in the newsroom, would’ve smiled that easy smile and told her he was proud. She missed him, but her work had been an effective replacement. For a while, at least.

And then one day, Brantley was gone. Forever.

When the call came in May 2001, it knocked the wind out of Rebecca. Brantley was dead at age 35. Found in his hotel room while at a builder’s conference in Raleigh. Heart attack, the coroner there had concluded.

Rebecca barely remembered driving to the First Presbyterian Church of Trenton for the funeral, her old childhood Bible clutched uselessly in her lap. The sanctuary was packed with men in construction boots and women in Sunday hats, tears hidden behind tissues and sunglasses. She was surrounded by Brantley’s old Furman football teammates, business partners, family, and the small-town crowd that knew Brantley as a gentle giant, the golden boy who came home, the heir-apparent to his daddy’s construction empire.

Rebecca sat toward the back row, numb, her curiosity about the menagerie of mourners dulled by grief. Her father offered one of the eulogies at the request of Brantley’s mother, who had always hoped Brantley would convinced Rebecca to marry him and give her brilliant and beautiful grandchildren. But like Rebecca, Brantley never married.

It wasn’t until Brantley’s burial at the Forge family cemetery, a few miles from Edgefield down Sweetwater Road, that Rebecca noticed the man standing just outside the knot of mourners. He had a musician’s build – tall, lean, black suit hanging just a little loose – and a tired face that looked carved from memory.

When the prayers were over and the crowd thinned, she found herself walking toward him, weaving through tombstones dating back to the early 1820s.

“Terrence Broome,” he said, before she could ask, extending his hand. “Brantley and I were best friends growing up. Played ball together at Strom Thurmond High. And you’re Rebecca. He talked about you. A lot.”

Rebecca nodded, unsure of what to say. There was something about his voice – low, measured, almost melodic – that settled her, comforted her, awakened her the daze.

They talked for a long time after the graveside service, just out of earshot of the handful of others who lingered as much to study the old headstones as to pay their respects. Rebecca and Terrence stood at Brantley’s grave, and Terrence finally pulled out a fifth of Jack Daniels. They toasted their friend, taking long drags from the same bottle.

Rebecca learned about Brantley’s career as a Nashville songwriter, about the bar gigs and broken recording contracts, his six number-one country hits, and his growing disillusionment with the industry. Terrence learned about Rebecca’s love for journalism and Pat Conroy, her fear of spiders and her cynicism about most things political.

Shared grief turned out to be a powerful binding agent. Rebecca and Terrence kept in touch over the summer after Brantley’s funeral. Emails that started formally soon grew more personal. Phone calls that began as quick well-being checks eventually lasted until well past midnight. Subtle flirtations were tucked between sharing memories of Brantley.

By the end of that summer, just three days before the world would tilt on its axis, Rebecca and Terrence agreed to meet again in Greenville for the Furman-Elon football game.

“For Brantley,” Terrence said.

“For Brantley,” Rebecca concurred.

The evening air was sticky as they sat side by side in the stands that September 8th with 10,000 other Paladin fans, watching the game through a fog of nostalgia and longing. After the Paladins crushed Elon, they walked around downtown, stumbled into a quiet pub, and talked about everything but football.

That night in Greenville, something shifted. Terrence leaned in to kiss Rebecca in the stairwell of her hotel where they had booked separate rooms, and she didn’t stop him.

The evening ended not with fireworks, but with a taut electricity neither of them fully understood at the time. It was a moment born from the ache of lingering shared grief and the desperate hope of finding something new and comforting to fill the void of missing their mutual friend.

That Sunday morning began with Rebecca driving back to Edgefield, humming the song Terrence had sung to her as she drifted off to dream in his arms.

Now, years later in the low lamplight of the Yazoo Freshet, Rebecca smiled as her tea sat cooling beside her. The wind off the lake rattled the sail lines gently, a lullaby for the lonely.

And still, somewhere deep in her chest, the echo of Brantley’s laugh lingered – and so did the feel of Terrence’s hand brushing hers in that dark stairwell, just before the world was forever changed.

Next up: The Invitation