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By mid-March, she’d submitted the final revised version of her manuscript to the botany journal. Her laptop hadn’t been powered on since.
Rowan worked with Gianna to begin rehabilitating the extensive landscaped beds around the property. They spent hours head-to-head on their knees in the dirt each day, pulling weeds, testing soil samples, identifying early perennials as they emerged from the still-chilly ground. Robins learned to lurk close to them, snagging worms out of the freshly disturbed earth. Giawas candid and funny, and Rowan found herself looking forward to their chats in the dirt. With Gia, it never felt like small talk. It was cozy talk.
William had given her a stack of organic seed catalogues and asked her to help him plan a kitchen garden. Every night for the following few weeks, she’d curled up in a thick sweater with a hot mug of tea, losing herself in the catalogues’ colorful photos and lush descriptions, dreaming of warmer days. For Will, she ordered sunset runner beans, snap peas, and black turtle beans. Brandywine tomatoes for slicing, engine-red Romas for saucing, and a cherry tomato cultivar called Pearly Pink for eating sun-warmed straight from the vine. Sugar pie pumpkins, creamy yellow and raven squash, butternuts for roasting. Japanese eggplant. Peppers, too: bells, Cubanelles, jalapeños. For herb selections, Rowan took three whole evenings to decide. Did they really need five varieties of basil? Absolutely.
Will, Harrison, and Duncan built four enormous raised vegetable beds outside the greenhouse. Rich black soil was delivered by a small dump truck, and Rowan worked alongside the Brady men, shoveling dirt and pushing wheelbarrows for hours. Her body was more toned than it had ever been. It felt good to be so strong.
The newfound strength was only physiological, though. Inside, Harrison had weakened her. But it wasn’t a diminishing weakness, like with Noah. She ached to surrender to vulnerability. It was the most frightening weakness of all, because it meant trustingherself.
For months, Harrison had loomed in her consciousness, crowding her out of private mental spaces that had, until him, been exclusively and uncompromisingly hers alone. He was a ceaseless ocean tide bearing down on her silent shoreline, occasionally receding, periodically returning, and inevitably transforming her.
Since the night she’d spent in his bed, she’d carefully avoided him. It was shitty of her and she knew it, but she wasn’t equipped to cope with the big things he made her feel. When he’d started dropping in on her again in the vineyard during his morning runs, she changed her schedule, randomizing how and when she worked, making it impossible for him to align his jogs with when he’d bump into her. Now that she lived on-site and daylight persisted longer, it became easier and easier to do.
Several times a week, she declined the Bradys’ invitations to dinner, but her excuses were beginning to sound tired, even to her own ears.
This weekend would stretch her avoidance strategies to their limits. It was Mercedes and Patrick’s wedding weekend in the Poconos, and Duncan had asked her to come as his date. “Just friends,” he’d emphasized, and she hadn’t been able to muster the heart to decline. With her overnight bag in hand, she walked down the hill to the house, wishing she was spending the weekend alone with several bottles of wine and a few bags of cheese popcorn instead.
At least Temperance would be there too. Several days after Duncan had asked Rowan along, Temperance had called to tell her she’d be there—as Harrison’s date. “Just friends,” T.J. had said as Duncan had, though the qualifier had hardly been necessary.
When she arrived at the Brady house for the carpool that morning, Mercedes answered the door, greeting Rowan with a familiar hug. She was a willowy brown-skinned beauty with a luminous smile and husky laugh. Rowan dropped her bag and blinked at the ceiling with her chin squashed against the shoulder-length curls of the slightly taller woman. Rowan awkwardly patted her in the middle of her back.
Mercedes wasn’t a Brady quite yet, but she hugged like one.
Harrison was already there. From the foyer, she heard the low tones of his voice from deeper inside the house.
Everyone gathered in the kitchen, chatting over coffee and mimosas. Buttery sunshine slanted through the windows, gilding the new chrome fixtures and ivory marble countertops with warmth. As he always did, Harrison stood when she entered the room. He shuffled awkwardly for a moment, sticking his hands in his pockets before removing them again. It was a little dance of apprehension only she seemed to notice. Rowan gave him a quick, tight-lipped smile.
Frankie lurked half-hidden in the doorway to the den on the opposite end of the kitchen. Her camera sported a short lens as big around as a tea saucer, and Rowan caught her snapping a photo of Harrison as he stood there. Mercedes and Patrick had hired Frankie to shoot their wedding after a glowing recommendation from Temperance. T.J. had evidently made it a personal crusade to find employment for her friends with the Brady family.
Frankie snuck out of sight as Harrison sat back down. The kitchen bustled, filled with the murmur of conversation and the burble of a new pot of coffee. Temperance stood with Mercedes’s sister, Courtney, at the counter, preparing sandwiches for what looked to be an army. Arden was there too, wrapping the finished sandwiches and stuffing them into brown paper bags with chips and bananas. They greeted Rowan with genuinely cheerful “heys” and warm smiles.
Duncan perched on the countertop next to the stove like an oversized child, legs dangling down. He slapped his knee as Rowan followed Mercedes into the kitchen.
“I just realized, your name is going to be Mercedes Brady,” he laughed.
Mercedes arched a brow. “Why is that funny?”
“It rhymes,” Rowan said.
Duncan grinned, snapped his fingers, and pointed at Rowan in acknowledgment. “This is why she’s my date. She gets me.”
“Maybe Patrick is going to takemylast name,” Mercedes said.
Patrick heard his name and looked up from across the kitchen. He and Nathan were identical, except Patrick sported a short, tidy beard. He sat with Mercedes’s older brother, Omar, and a scowly dark-haired guy Rowan had never met. “What’d I do?” Patrick said, blinking.
The scowly guy was rangy and lean like Harrison, but he shared Gia Brady’s duskier palette with his other brothers and Arden. He had an ambiguous look about him, like a character in a fantasy movie who you couldn’t quite place as friend or foe until they dramatically revealed their true motivations later in the film. Raven hair was cut fashionably shaggy around his ears and long at his neck. He had an aggressive nose and heavy brows over deep-set eyes. He scowled into a mug of coffee, looking like he’d rather be on the surface of the sun than there. When he looked up—forehead deeply creased in a James Dean frown—Rowan recognized him. He was thefamousBrady. The author, Malcolm.
Rowan felt a pang of empathy for him, as clearly uncomfortable as he was. But when he turned his head to fire a withering look of contempt at Frankie and her camera, all her tenderness dissolved. Frankie blithely carried on with her shot of the three men at the table, pointedly allowing her lens to linger in Malcolm’s direction in spite of his glower. She winked at him as she disappeared back into the den, and Rowan saw his nostrils flare at the provocation.
Good for Frankie.
The only place left to sit was on a high barstool at the center island, which was littered with magazines, cookbooks, a fruit-and-cheese platter, and a mostly empty pan of gooey homemade cinnamon rolls. On top of a stack of mail, a letter caught Rowan’s eye. It was addressed to Dr. Harrison Brady, written in the same flourishing cursive handwriting she’d noticed in his bedroom a few weeks ago. Strange that someone would handwrite a letter using a person’s full name and professional title. This time, she noticed a Los Angeles postmark.
When she let her attention track from the letter to Harrison himself, he was looking right at her.
Rowan quickly regretted the decision to sit on the high stool, elevated above everyone else in the center of the room. In a room so packed with people, he couldn’t stare at her openly without it being obvious, but she still felt his surreptitious glances every time his eyes shifted during conversation.
She only lasted a few more minutes before escalating anxiety had her heading for seclusion. “Excuse me,” she said to nobody in particular, sliding off the stool to make a break for the bathroom in the hall.
