EPILOGUE
RILEY: 5 YEARS LATER
Austin had his father’s focus and my stubbornness, which meant that once he decided something needed doing, the rest of the world ceased to exist.
Right now, he’d decided that the small patch of bare soil near the garden gate needed to be thoroughly investigated with both hands. And he’d been at it for the better part of twenty minutes while I sat on the porch steps watching him and resting my feet and doing the math on how many more weeks before I couldn’t see my own ankles.
The answer was “not many.”
Harlan came around the side of the house with a basket of early greens and paused when he saw Austin’s hands, which were black to the wrists. “He found the bed I turned earlier this morning.”
“He found it twenty minutes ago.”
Harlan set the basket down on the porch rail and crouched in the dirt next to our son, who looked up at him with complete seriousness and held out both filthy hands like he was presenting evidence.
“Dirt,” Austin said.
“Real good dirt,” Harlan agreed in the same tone. He turned Austin’s hands over, examining them, and I watched them together and felt the familiar thing move through me—big and quiet and almost too much to hold.
I’d been in Wildwood Valley for five years. Austin was two and a half and already built like a small, determined version of his father, all focused brow and unhurried movement. The girl we hadn’t named yet was making her presence known with a firm heel under my ribs. And we were sitting in the yard of a homestead on the North Carolina side of the mountains on a Tuesday morning, and I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life.
My father had been here last week. That still sat strangely sometimes—not badly, just strangely, the way things do when they resolve in ways you didn’t let yourself predict. He’d changed in the way that grandchildren change people who were too rigid to change for anything else. He’d sat in this same yard and let Austin drag him around the garden and identify every plant by name in his two-year-old vocabulary, and my father had listened like it was a sermon worth hearing.
He hadn’t said anything about my wildflower tattoo, which had become a fixture of Wildwood Valley over the years once Bobbi spotted it one summer afternoon and announced it to the entire diner. Half the town called me Wildflower now. Bobbi had started it, and once Bobbi named something it stuck.
My father called me Riley, same as always. But he’d hugged me goodbye at the door and held on an extra beat, and that was its own kind of language.
He and my mother stayed at the inn while they visited, but they watched Austin for a few hours so Harlan and I could have the beautiful spring day to ourselves. We’d done what we always did on the anniversary of the week we met—driven out to the trailhead, walked in through the trees, listened to the water getting louder.
The memory moved through me warm and specific, and I shifted on the porch step and looked away from my husband very deliberately so he wouldn’t see my face and know exactly what I was thinking about. He would know anyway. He always knew.
I’d been thinking about it since we got back. I’d probably be thinking about it for a while.
Austin abandoned the dirt and came toddling toward me, arms out, and I caught him and settled him carefully against my side, mindful of my stomach. He patted my belly with one dirty hand.
“Baby,” he said.
“Baby,” I confirmed. “Careful.”
He was gentle, in that solemn way of toddlers who have been told something is important and taken it seriously. He pressed his ear against my stomach, which he’d seen Harlan do, and listened with great concentration.
“Baby sleeping,” he announced.
“She does a lot of that,” I said. “And a lot of kicking. She takes after her dad.”
Harlan came up the steps and sat beside me, and Austin immediately transferred himself onto his father’s lap, dirty hands and all. Harlan took him without hesitation.
“Name baby?” Austin asked, in the way he’d been asking for weeks.
“We’re still deciding,” I told him.
“We could name her Wildwood,” Harlan said, straight-faced.
I looked at him.
“After the valley,” he said. “Where she was made.”
“We are not naming our daughter Wildwood.”
