It was fear.
I understood it. I’d given her every reason. Laid it all out for her father at seven in the morning on a gravel bar. I was a man with unfinished business. A man who called things temporary right up until they weren’t.
What I needed her to understand was that something had shifted.
I wasn’t going to chase her tonight. She needed space to sit with what she’d heard, and space was the one thing I’d always known how to give. But I was done being temporary. I’d made that decision before her father ever came down that bank. Him showing up hadn’t changed it.
It had just made the order of things clear. There were things I needed to take care of first. Then I’d go to her.
I picked up my phone and pulled up Rowan’s number. It was late, but Rowan wasn’t the type to turn in early. He answered on the second ring.
“We need to talk,” I said. “About making this permanent.”
A pause. Then, “I was wondering when you’d get there.” Another beat. “Come by in the morning. Before the water.”
“I’ll be there.”
I hung up and set the phone on the nightstand.
Outside, the valley was dark and still. The mountains stood against the sky the way they always did—solid, unmoving, indifferent to men trying to figure out where they belonged.
I already knew where I belonged.
I just had to prove it to her.
9
MIA
Imade it through my shift.
That’s what I kept coming back to—the comfort of a routine I’d run so many times my hands didn’t need to think.
Grind the beans. Steam the milk. Set the plate down before they asked. Smile at Mae when she said something kind I wasn’t ready to hear.
Six hours of that. Then I drove home, sat down on my couch in my café clothes…and didn’t move for a long time.
The apartment was quiet. I'd lived here for three years, and I knew every sound it made—the creak of the baseboard heat coming on, the way the wind came through the gap under the front door in a certain direction, the neighbor's dog that barked twice at nine o'clock every night like it had an alarm set.
I knew all of it. Right now, none of it was enough to fill the room.
I'd stood up to my father this morning for the first time in my life.
It had felt right. That part wasn't the problem. I didn't regret it. I wasn't going to regret it. He was a fair man, and he'd listened and he'd backed down because the facts warranted it.I'd been the one to make him look at the facts, and somewhere underneath the noise of everything else, I was proud of that. That part of the morning was solid.
The other part was what I couldn't stop thinking about.
I'd heard most of what Hale had said on the gravel bar. I'd come down from the road on the far side of the bend, and I'd stopped when I'd heard voices.
I'd stood there in the willows and listened to him tell my father the truth. All of it. Not the careful partial version a man tells when he's managing an impression—the whole thing, laid out plainly, in the same direct way he did everything.
Three cities in four months.
A situation that wasn't resolved.
A man who'd landed in Hollow Peak telling himself it was temporary.
I'd known all of that. He'd told me himself on the canyon river, sitting on that gravel bar in the sun, and I'd listened and I'd understood. I'd chosen him anyway on the overlook two days later with the whole valley spread out below us and the mountains doing whatever the mountains did.
