But “easy” didn’t mean “plain.” The forest here was doing something I’d never seen a forest do before. Every few steps, there was something new. A spray of pale purple blooms spilling over a mossy rock, a cluster of white flowers so small I would have walked past them if Harlan hadn’t paused.
“Trout lily,” he said, crouching down near a patch of mottled leaves. “Takes seven years to bloom. Most of what you see out here—just the leaves, no flower—those are still years away.”
I crouched next to him. The flower was yellow, small, nodding on its stem like it wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
“Seven years,” I said.
“Some things take the time they take.”
He stood, and we kept walking, and I turned that over in my mind for a while.
We talked the way you talk when you’re moving through somewhere beautiful—easily, without the pressure of eye contact, thoughts arriving in the rhythm of footsteps. He asked how my first shift had gone, and I told him honestly—the egg situation, the spilled juice, the woman at table four who’d changed her order four times and then tipped fifteen percent.
He listened with unhurried attention and said the woman at table four came in every Saturday and was the same every time.
“Lauralie has a system for her,” he said.
“She told me. I should have asked first.”
“You handled it yourself. That counts for something.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything, and he seemed fine with that too.
The waterfall announced itself before we saw it—a low, constant roar growing through the trees until we came around a bend and there it was, dropping maybe thirty feet down a darkrock face into a wide pool that was the color of cold glass. The spray reached us where we stood. I stopped walking and just looked at it.
“Worth it?” Harlan asked.
“Very worth it.”
We found a flat rock near the pool and sat, and the conversation went quiet for a while in the way it can when a place earns the silence. I ate one of the granola bars he’d brought without being asked if I wanted one. He stretched his legs out and looked at the water.
“You mentioned your father yesterday,” he said eventually. Not pressing. Just opening a door and standing back from it.
I’d been waiting for this, I realized. Bracing for the questions, the way people always wanted the whole story once they had a thread of it.
“He’s a pastor,” I said. “Small town in East Tennessee. Small enough that everybody’s business is everybody’s business and the pastor’s daughter’s business is the Sunday sermon.”
I picked at the granola bar wrapper.
“I got a tattoo my junior year of college. Didn’t tell anyone for two years, and then I came home after graduation and told my parents because I can’tnottell them things. It’s a problem I have.”
Harlan didn’t say anything.
“It’s small,” I said. “It’s on my hip. No one would ever see it unless?—”
I stopped.
“The point is, it wasn’t what they saw. It was what it meant to them. My father said some things he can’t unsay, and I left.”
“Where do you go from there,” Harlan said quietly. It wasn’t a question exactly.
“Apparently, you go to Wildwood Valley.” I looked at the falls. “I saw the listing and I looked up the town and therewere pictures of the mountains in spring, and I just—it felt like somewhere I could breathe.”
I paused.
“That sounds dramatic,” I added.
“It doesn’t.”
