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Rowan kept her tone even, but firm. “You never gave me the chance to tell you why what you said in the meadow that day scared me. Why learning about Nicola hurt so bad.”
“No backstory, remember?” he snapped. “I tried formonthsto get you to open up to me. You don’t get to use that as an excuse.”
“Youdidn’t have to run all the way back to California. That’s your pattern though, isn’t it? Bounce back and forth between coastlines, whenever shit gets too hard?”
That found a target. He turned to face her. His bottom lip was tucked tight against his teeth, and his nostrils flared.
“You have the nerve to callmeavoidant?” he said.
“If you’d stop interrupting—”
“Istilldon’t know about Noah. The only reason I know that fucking name at all is because Temperance dropped it accidentally.”
Rowan bit back, “You could’ve answered your phone once in the last two months, you absolute jackass.”
A breeze came in from the north. It rippled the waves of his hair and rattled the cattails at the water’s edge. Harry shifted his weight from foot to foot. The rapid rise and fall of his chest betrayed his outer coolness. “I am trying really hard to not walk away right now. I need you to understand that.”
Rowan still blocked his way off the dock. “What are you going to do, push me in the water?”
“I’m considering it.”
“I’d take you with me. From now on, you go where I go.”
It was meant to be funny—a peace offering. Harry didn’t laugh. Rowan’s confidence sputtered like a candle on a mountaintop. When she spoke again, her words were quiet.
“His name was Noah Tully. He was a paramedic. We met when my junior-year roommate almost burned our apartment down making a silly grilled cheese sandwich.”
Harry’s eyes were hooded, and he was finally still. She had his attention.
“He was—incredible. Handsome, funny, competent. I was twenty-one, and obsessed with him. For six months, it wasconstant intensity. Everyone he met was awed by him, utterly charmed. Noah had his own gravity, this way of making everything revolve around him. And youlikedit, being in his orbit, even though you knew you weren’t the one steering the ship.”
Humiliation was layered inside her. She imagined peeling back each stratum of shame, exposing the story of her year with Noah Tully the same way the rings of a tree would reveal the environment it grew in. It wasn’t only that she’d been so utterly overcome by his slick charm. It was that she’d planned a life and shared a bed with a man who was already another woman’s husband. Rowan had been theotherwoman.
This time, instead of burying the shame as she always did, she set her teeth and let it rise to the surface from the darkest places inside her. Rowan gathered it all—the self-contempt and the unworthiness and the guilt—and exhaled it into the clean valley air, like it was a toxin she could simply breathe away.
“After those first six months, I saw less of him. Work was busy, he said. Being a paramedic meant unpredictable hours. Anytime I’d bring it up, he’d sulk. Tell me I wasn’t being supportive. But ifIdared miss a single call from him, or had to cancel a date because of school, or work, or anything else, he’drage. Question me—‘Do you love me, Rowan?’ Challenge my priorities. Mock my ‘plant shit,’ and how much I studied. We’d fight and make up, and I didn’t realize until later he’d pick fightsjustso we could make up. He constantly chased those highs, engineering our entire relationship so it was nonstop ups and downs. I thought it was passion. I thought—that was how love was.”
“That was abuse.” Harry’s top lip snagged upward in a snarl. “It wasn’t love.”
Rowan plucked a few petals from the dried daisy, crumbling each one to dust.
He loves me.
He loves me not.
“Tell me, Harry—how would I know? After Edie died, I didn’t have anyone to model it for me. I didn’t have any family when I met Noah. Nobody to meet him and say, ‘Hey, honey, this guy seems pretty sketchy, better not.’ That’s why he picked me, I think.”
Petals rained down from her fingers. Harry watched her, eyes shining in the moonlight. His chin trembled. The first crack in his armor.
He loves me.
He loves me not.
She went on, “You can’t imagine what this year has been like for me. Being with you. With your family. To be thirty years old, feeling all theserealthings for the first time. It was like being screamed at in a language I’d never heard before. It was overwhelming and jarring and confusing.”
Late-summer wind rustled tonelessly, endlessly, through the white pines and hemlocks to the east.
“Anyway. Noah,” Rowan began again, slowly. “Little things started bothering me. We had no mutual friends. There was no pattern to his work schedule. I’d never met any of his family, but I tried convincing myself that was okay—I’d have just been anxious about it anyway. I’d go for a week at a time without seeing him. Once, I ran into him off campus, and he’d had twokidswith him, Harry. Little ones, maybe two and four. His sister’s kids, he’d said.”
