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His face.
How had she not noticed then the way he’d looked at her? How emotionally stunted was she to have missed the devastating ache in his expression?
Gia pushed across the final photo.
This one was a grainy, poor-quality print of Arden’s photo of Rowan and Harry dancing at the Three Birds festival lastNovember. Rowan choked back a laugh—it seemed such a mom thing to do, to print a photo from one of her adult child’s social media profiles. In the image, Harry looked down at her with the same urgent, intense gaze Will favored Gia with in the decades-old photo. Even the tilt of his head was the same.
Their conversation was as fresh in Rowan’s mind as the one they’d had that morning. They’d talked about the nature of lust. And of love. That longing adoration wasn’t only apparent in Harry’s expression. It was also clear in her own.
God, they’d barely known each other two months.
Gia began gently, “I also know you well enough to know that until now, you’ve been using your career as a substitute for everything else in your life. You’re a hummingbird, sipping sugar water from a feeder. The bird can survive that way, but how much flavor and color and beauty is she missing by not being nourished by flowers, as she was meant to be? You can have more. You can have both.”
Rowan pushed the photos back. “I don’t know how to be the person he thinks he sees, Gia. I’m not who he needs.”
Gia made a small, thoughtful sound. “That’s not for you to decide. What you need to decide is if he is the oneyouneed. If that matches what he needs, the rest falls into place.”
Rowan looked down into her pinkish tea. It reflected a wobbly likeness of her face, a monochromatic pastel Picasso.
She didn’t recognize the person she saw. For most of her life, she’d seen herself through the lens of academia. Science endured. It wasn’t subject to the whims of human emotion. Now, it felt like her future was as blurry as her reflection in the tea. Every day, Harry and his family’s roots grew tighter around her, making it harder and harder to run. Once she was outside of the soft-focused sphere of life in Vesper Valley, her conviction would return.
It had to.
Gia stood, pushing her chair in. “I know you have choices to make about what comes next for you, and you have important work to do. You helped my son find himself again, and regardless of what happens in the future, I will always be grateful to you for that. But make sure you’re not confusing cowardice for caution, darling. It’s safe to make the leap when you know who’s waiting to catch you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Harry
A shitty mood hung over Harry like a cartoon rain cloud.
Rowan had only been gone two days. Her presence had become the nucleus of his new normal, and without her there, he’d begun sliding back into the despair that had wracked him when he was still in Los Angeles. The last thing she’d said to him had been a request to let her go.
“Make this easy. For both of us.”
Maybe he needed to be gone by the time she returned. Sinclair wasn’t being gentle anymore about needing him back at the practice. Maybe he just needed to rip off the fucking bandage while Rowan was away pursuing her own out.
“Why do you run, Harry? When you run, do you mean to stay gone?”
Today he was helping Duncan with repairs after a tractor took out half a dozen posts in the Chambourcin block. He was sweating off most of the weight he’d gained back in the last few months, slamming a post hole digger into the ground with more force than necessary. The impact vibrated up his arms and along his jaw.
The first night Rowan was gone, Harry had called her. No answer. He tried not to give it too much credence, telling himself she was probably prepping for her interview the followingday. Earlier today, he’d texted her to ask how it went. He’d also typed and deleted “I miss you” four times before ultimately deciding to leave it off.
Today, the glass of his phone was a smear of sweaty mud from all the times he’d checked for a reply from her.
Nothing.
Again and again, he rammed the digger into the dry ground.
The greenhouse loomed like a cathedral over the part of the vineyard he was in. Rowan had breathed new life into that old building, made it her personal monument to Mother Nature. But without her vibrant light inside it, the big glass building was a lantern without a candle. Cold glass and metal.
Over the last nine months, wielding a hammer and crowbar had become as natural to him as using a stethoscope and fetal doppler. He barely recognized his own body in the mirror, or the landscape of his own mind. Much of the interior transformation had been because of Rowan, though it wasn’t that she’d changed him. She’d simply revealed to him who he still was.
“I trusted you to respect this had an expiration date.”
Shoulders bunching and burning, Harry raged against soil and stone. The force of it rattled his teeth. Dust flurried. Grit settled into every pore. Sweat stung his eyes as it shook down from his hair.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy, John Wick.” Duncan clapped a big hand on Harry’s shoulder.
