“You did mention it.”
“Trail’s about forty minutes from here. Easy grade, good payoff. Waterfall’s running high right now because of the spring melt.”
I turned my coffee cup in my hands.
“Your shift ends at two. The light on that trail is best in the late afternoon.”
She was quiet for a moment, and I let her be quiet. Pushing wasn’t the move. She’d had someone push her around for long enough. I could tell that much already.
“You do this trail often?” she asked.
“I’ve done it a hundred times.”
“So it’s not a you-need-a-guide situation.”
“You don’t need a guide,” I agreed. “You could do it yourself, no problem. I’m just offering company.”
I paused.
“And someone to tell you the names of things, if you want them.”
She looked at me steadily, doing that thing she did where she seemed to be running a quiet calculation behind her eyes. I got the feeling she’d learned young to be careful about what she agreed to, and careful about who she trusted, and I didn’t mind her taking her time.
“The wildflowers,” she said finally. “That’s why it’s called the Wildflower Festival.”
“The whole mountain turns over in spring. There are species up here you won’t see anywhere else—some of them have ranges of a few hundred square feet. Just growing in one spot on earth, as far as anyone knows. And if you don’t know where to look, you’ll walk right past them.”
She was quiet again. Something in her expression had shifted, though.
“You really do know where to look,” she said. It wasn’t skeptical. It was something closer to curious.
“I do.”
Riley straightened up from the counter and pulled the ties on her apron. She looked at the dining room, at Lauralie already moving through the last few tables with a practiced ease that said she had it covered, and then she looked back at me.
“Two o’clock,” she said. “I’ll need twenty minutes to change.”
She tucked her apron under the counter and went back to her tables.And I picked up my coffee and finished the last of it and thought about a woman who had driven up a mountain alone with everything she owned and started over and hadn’t broken. I thought about the way she’d handed half her tips to Lauralie without expecting credit for it.
Every instinct I had was saying the same thing, clear as the water coming off those high peaks.
I left Bobbi a good tip and went out to my truck to wait.
3
RILEY
Harlan drove the way he did everything else—without rushing, without explaining himself, easy with the silence in a way that made the silence feel easy for me too.
I’d changed into jeans and a light jacket and my most broken-in sneakers, and I’d sat on the edge of the inn bed for a full minute talking myself out of texting him some excuse before I talked myself back into going.
I was in a new town. I had a job. A hot-as-heck man who knew the mountain wanted to show me wildflowers, and I was twenty-three years old. I’d spent enough of my life finding reasons not to do things.
I went.
The trailhead was a gravel pull-off about eight miles from town, the mountain rising up on both sides of the road and the tree cover dropping the temperature by several degrees the moment we stepped into it. Harlan handed me a water bottle from his pack without making a thing of it, and we started walking.
He hadn’t been wrong about the trail. It was easy—a steady, gentle grade with good footing and the sound of water getting louder the farther in we went.
