After a moment, she let out a long, slow breath, and I felt her squeeze my hand, and I brought both our hands up and pressed my mouth softly against the back of her knuckles.
“Ready?” I said against her hand.
“Yes.”
I cut the engine. I got out and walked around to her side and opened the door. She took my hand, and I realized that I was holding the hand of a woman I was falling for, and I was keeping a secret about my future. Both things were real, and I could not change either of them.
Chapter 23
Jasper
The Hearthstone sat at the far end of Willowmist Falls’ main strip, warm light spilling through its windows onto the darkened sidewalk. In the quiet that followed, I heard Cara pull in a sharp breath.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded, then took a deep breath. Whatever had moved across her face was already being set aside, carefully and with some effort. “Eric took me here,” she said. Just that.
I sat with it for a second. Thought about the reservation I’d made three days ago, pleased with myself for remembering the place. Thought about every birthday dinner my mom had brought us here for, the way the smell of the smoke from the grill and the butter hit you the second you opened the door, the feeling of being somewhere that meant something good was coming. I had nothing but warmth attached to this building, and Cara had sat in it across from a man who had spent two hours treating her like a foregone conclusion.
“We can go somewhere else,” I offered.
She was quiet for a moment, looking at the entrance. Then something resolved in her expression—a decision, made and settled. “No,” she said. “I want to go in.” She turned to look at mefully. “He took me here and made it feel like something I had to manage. I’d like to know what it feels like when it isn’t that.” A pause. “I think tonight can do that. I’m reclaiming it. It’s a whole thing I’ve decided—just now.”
I looked at her in the low light of the parking lot—the set of her chin, the steadiness in her eyes, the quiet courage of a woman who had learned to hold her ground without making noise about it. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go in.”
I offered her my hand, and she took it without hesitation.
“I’ve been coming here since I was eight,” I said, as we walked toward the entrance. “Birthdays, mostly. My mom had a thing about marking occasions properly. The ribeye hasn’t changed in twenty years.”
Cara glanced up at me. “Good memories?”
“All of them,” I said. “We’re going to make better ones.”
Her face went warm and open, and she didn’t say anything, just squeezed my hand once as I reached for the door.
The hostess led us to a corner booth near the back—dark wood, low light. I let Cara slide in first and settled across from her, and for a moment neither of us said anything. The room moved around us pleasantly, voices and warmth and the smell of fresh flowers on the table and something rich from the kitchen, but none of it touched us.
Cara looked around the restaurant slowly, taking it in, and I watched her face as she did it—watched her consciously replacing her previous experience here with something better, putting the last time she’d sat in this room down somewhere and leaving it there.
Then she looked at me and smiled, and I felt myself relax in a way I hadn’t since I’d knocked on her door and forgotten how to speak. The menus came and went. A server appeared and disappeared. At some point, food was ordered, though I couldn’t have told you precisely when, because Cara had her chinresting lightly in her hand and was looking at me with the type of attention that made everything else in the room blur into the background.
The food arrived somewhere in the middle of all of it, and Cara looked down at her plate and then back up at me as if she’d momentarily forgotten there was food.
“We should probably eat,” she said.
“Probably.”
“We could also just keep talking.”
“We can do both,” I said.
She picked up her fork with the air of someone making a concession and then immediately leaned forward again. “Okay. Tell me something. Anything. I want to know things.”
I cut into my steak and looked at her—the way she was sitting forward with her elbows on the table, glasses slightly askew from where she’d been resting her chin on her hand, completely unaware of it—and felt the kind of helplessness you feel when someone is entirely themselves in front of you, and you have absolutely no defense against it.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Your cabin,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it, and I keep thinking about it.” A small pause where she registered what she’d said and kept going anyway, which I appreciated. “I want to know what it feels like to be there.”
