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PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rowan
Gia showed up at the cottage an hour before they were due to leave for the airport. She hovered in the doorway of the little bedroom as Rowan finished packing her small suitcase. Rowan still shook from her encounter with Harry in the meadow.
“Extra socks,” Gia said.
Rowan paused at the dresser. “Hmm. I won’t need socks with these shoes. It’s summer.”
“Hotel rooms get cold. Cold feet, no sleep.”
Rowan threw a single pair of socks into her bag, and Gia looked back with a self-satisfied smile.
“Have a sweater in there?”
“Gia, it’s almost a hundred degrees in Austin right now.”
Gia crossed her arms over her chest. “Take a cardigan. Air-conditioning.”
For the past month, Gia had been bringing Rowan dinner leftovers in little glass bowls with plastic lids. Whenever she’d see Rowan around the property during the day, Gia would ask if she was hydrated. At first, she’d balked at Gia’s brand of proactive caretaking. Rowan was thirty years old and fully capable of looking after herself. But now, the attention from the other woman felt natural and right.
God, she wanted to melt to the floor and cry in Gia’s arms about Harry.
How different would her life have been if she’d grown up with a mother like Gia Brady? A father like Will? Was she broken because she hadn’t had this, or did she not have this because she’d always been broken?
Rowan folded a gray cardigan on top of the rest of her clothes, and paused, palms pressed down into the soft knit. Feelings didn’t manifest reality. No matter how she felt about any of the Bradys, they werenother family, and her time there had reached the closing end of temporary. She tried to disguise a renegade sob with a cough, blinking Harry’s agonized face out of her mind. When she zipped the bag closed, she snagged the fabric of the sweater.
Rowan could feel Gia’s narrowed eyes on her. “Could you make some of your rose-hip-and-mint tea?” Her voice sounded subtly different, too practiced in its nonchalance to be authentic. “It’s still a bit too early to leave.”
Alarms clamored in Rowan’s head, but she made the tea anyway. They sat at the little kitchenette table by the window, quiet for a while.
When Gia spoke again, it was in the same judiciously innocent, conversational tone. “William and I were only eighteen when we married, did you know that? We met in Galicia—I still lived with my family. Will’s parents were both journalists. They’d come to cover Spain’s first democratic elections in forty years. He’d dropped out of college and come along with them.
“Back then, my family had the vineyards, and a tiny floristería in Cambados. I’d work in the afternoons. Will was at the café across the street, at a table on the patio. We always left the door to the shop propped open, and I saw him watching me. Fordays,he did this, looking ridiculous with those little espresso cups in his huge hands, trying to pretend he wasn’t staring. I waited and waited for him to come and say hello.
“When he finally came into the shop, he introduced himself as my mierdo futuro.” Gia laughed so hard, she had to put her tea down on the table. Dabbing tears from her eyes with the side of her pinkie finger, she said, “Do you know what it means in Spanish?”
Rowan knew enough Spanish to infer. “Your ‘future shit’?” She couldn’t help laughing along with her.
“Yes! He meant to say marido futuro. Future husband.” Gia sniffed, sighed happily. “For the next two weeks, he brought me a little bouquet of wildflowers every day. The confidence of that man, bringing wildflowers to a woman working in a floristería, surrounded by some of the world’s loveliest blooms! But those flowers he brought were more beautiful than anything we sold, darling. To me, they were priceless.”
Gia continued, “William still brings me wildflowers, you know. I told the kids this story once, and Harry was the only one who really paid attention. He was around Grey’s age, maybe seven? After that, Harry started bringing me flowers—dandelions and violets from the yard. Clover, sometimes. I asked him once, why did he do it?” She paused for a moment to smile fondly, awash in memory. “He told me—he wanted to show he loved me as much as Daddy did.”
Rowan pictured round-cheeked Harry clutching a bouquet of carefully picked flowers in a tiny fist, proudly gifting them to his ma. She sipped her tea, and it scalded her tongue, making her eyes water.
Gia shook her head, chuckling. “One year, he pulled up an entire bed of Spanish poppies I’d grown from seed.”
If she tried, Rowan could probably recall every single wildflower he’d given her.
He wanted to show he loved me.
She felt her throat closing, choked by emotion. She tried listing grape varietals in her mind, desperate to redirect from whereher heart was trying to take her. She managed to think of three—Chardonnay, Merlot, Traminette—before her thoughts snapped back to Harry. She repeated the chemical formula of chlorophyll in her head, and recited the seven assumptions of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The steps of the Krebs cycle. Names of women scientists. Her brain stumbled over every attempt.
Instead, a little boy toddled in her imagination with a chubby fist full of dandelions. He looked like Harry. But he wasn’t Harry—he was theirson. The image was sweet and searing, like cinnamon candy on her tongue.
Her imagination had gone all in on a family fantasy starring Harry Brady.
