The words during crew hours made my stomach dip.
Zane looked at me.
I looked back at the bean vine.
The sun pressed hotter against my shoulders.
By noon, my green tank top clung to my back, my hair had escaped the twist I’d stabbed it into with two pins and misplaced hope, and a thin scratch marked one shin from a bean stake I had personally offended. I’d moved from trellis work to helping Zane lay drip line along the row, which meant kneeling beside him while he showed me where the emitters needed to sit.
“Point it toward the root zone,” Zane said.
I crouched beside him, one knee in the path, one foot braced against the bed frame. “I’m starting to think everything here has a root zone.”
“Most plants do.”
“Do people?”
His hand paused on the black tubing.
I regretted the question the second it escaped. It sounded like something a woman said right before she admitted too much to a man who still didn’t know why she was here.
Zane glanced at me. “Sometimes.”
My throat tightened.
Gus’s voice drifted from the fence. “Some people are all weeds.”
Tyler said, “I feel like that’s about me.”
“It can be,” Gus said.
The moment broke, and I was grateful enough to laugh.
Zane kept his eyes on the drip line, but his shoulder eased beside mine. He didn’t ask what I meant. He didn’t push. He just handed me the next little plastic stake and let me press it into the soil.
The stake dug into my palm. Julian had always wanted the version of a story that made him look reasonable. He’d asked questions like traps, stood there with that wounded expression after I found out what he’d done, and somehow made me feel like the unstable one because I’d stopped being polite about being humiliated.
My hand pressed too hard on the stake.
It snapped.
I stared at the broken plastic in my palm.
Zane reached out, not touching me this time. “Hey.”
I blinked.
“You okay?”
“Yes.” I closed my fingers around the broken piece. “I murdered irrigation equipment.”
His gaze stayed on my face. “It happens.”
“Does it?”
“To Tyler, usually.”
“Hey,” Tyler called.
