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"Obviously I meant Atlas."

Noah gives me a look. Then someone walks behind him. I recognize the gray T-shirt before I see his face. "Noah."

"What?"

"Turn around."

He does. Javier is carrying a crate toward the greenhouse. "Javier!" Noah shouts. "Aunt Maddy's on!"

Javier stops. Even through a phone screen, I see the moment he realizes it's me. His face changes. Not dramatically. Just enough. He sets the crate down and walks over. "Hey."

"Hey." For a second, the farm disappears around him. "How are you?"

"Good. You?"

"Good." He looks like himself. Sun-browned. A little tired. Beautiful. I swallow.

Noah swings the phone back toward himself. "Diego fixed the watering system."

"He did?"

"Mostly," Javier says somewhere behind the camera.

"He says you helped."

"I held things."

"You dug a trench," Noah says.

"Things were held."

I laugh. Then Ranger barks and Noah takes off after him, carrying me along in a blur of grass and sky. The moment is gone. But for the rest of the day, I can see Javier standing in the sunlight beside the greenhouse.

Nearly two and a half months after I came back to New York, the restaurant no longer feels new. That's how I know we're doing well. The expanded dining room is simply part of the restaurant now. The kitchen works. The staff has adjusted. Reservations are strong. The private room is booked through next month. Julian takes an entire Sunday off and doesn't call me once. I consider alerting the authorities. Everything is good. Better than good. It's what we worked for.

One Tuesday night, I leave the restaurant just after ten. The air has turned colder. I pull my coat tighter and start toward home. New York moves around me. Headlights. Music spilling from somewhere. People talking too loudly on the sidewalk. A horn from the avenue. For years, I loved this most at night. The sense that nothing ever really stops. That if I wanted dinner at midnight or coffee at two in the morning, somebody somewhere would hand it to me. I still love it. I just don't know if I want it every day anymore.

The thought slows my steps. I pass a restaurant with people crowded around the bar. A delivery bike cuts through the intersection. Someone bumps my shoulder and keeps walking. And suddenly I want my mother's kitchen. Not for a holiday. Not for anything important. I want a Tuesday night. I want Noah dropping his backpack where it doesn't belong. Mom making too much garlic bread. Betty knowing my order. Emma. Ranger. Atlas. I want dirt beneath my shoes. The farm in the morning. Food pulled from the ground instead of delivered through a kitchen door. Space. Quiet. Javier. God, I miss Javier.

I stop at the corner. Across the street, reflected in the dark glass of another building, I can see the glow of my restaurant behind me. Beautiful. Busy. Everything Julian and I dreamed it could be. I'm proud of it. I love it. That's what makes this so difficult.

The light changes. People move around me. I don't. For weeks, I've told myself I'm homesick because I miss Javier. I do. More than I know what to do with. But standing beneath the lights of the city I worked so hard to make mine, I finally understand. I miss Oakridge too.

New York is still part of the life I want.

I just don't think I want it to be all of it anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Javier

Diego calls me Dad for the first time on a Saturday morning while we're standing ankle-deep in mud. He doesn't notice. I do.

"Dad, hand me the wrench."

Everything in me stops. Diego is half under the irrigation control box with one arm stretched toward me.

"The wrench?"