I looked at him. He was watching the water, not me, which made it easier.
“Do you want to know what the tattoo is?” I asked.
“If you want to tell me.”
“It’s a wildflower.”
I felt him go still next to me, just slightly.
“I got it because I wanted something that meant I was growing toward something instead of just—standing still, waiting to be approved of. My dad saw wildflower and heard wild. That’s the whole story.”
Harlan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Can I see it?”
The way he asked it—no pressure, no performance behind it, just a man asking a real question—made it easy to say yes.
I shifted on the rock and lifted the hem of my jacket and the edge of my shirt, and he leaned over and looked at it the way he looked at the trout lily. Like it was something small and specific and worth crouching down to see properly.
“It’s a fire pink,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “What?”
“The flower. That’s a fire pink.Silene virginica. They grow on these slopes.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were warm and very close. “Your father called it wild. I’d call it native.”
“It’s like me,” I said quietly. “I was a lot more virgin than wild. He just couldn’t see the difference.”
Something moved through his expression—not pity, nothing that soft. More like recognition.
“Most people can’t, when they’ve already made up their minds.”
I pulled my shirt back down, and we sat close enough that his shoulder was an inch from mine. Neither of us moved. The words had come out of the same place the tattoo story had—that part of me that couldn’t carry things quietly for long—and now they were just sitting there between us.
“Does that change anything?” I asked. “For you.”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know. It changes how people look at me sometimes.”
“People look at you however they’ve decided to look at you before you open your mouth,” he said. “That’s not about you.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“There’s no rush, Riley. Not for anything. You set the pace, whatever that looks like, and I’ll follow it.”
I believed him.
That was the part that scared me, a little—how easy it was to believe him. I’d been careful my whole life about who I believed, and I’d been right to be careful, and here was this man I’d known for one day, and I believed him without having to work for it.
“How are you this calm about everything?” I asked.
Something shifted in his expression. Almost a smile, but quieter.
“I’m not always calm. I spent a lot of years very far from calm.”
He looked at the water.
“I had a company. Tech. Austin. I built it for ten years and sold it and walked away and moved to the mountains, and everyone I knew thought I’d lost my mind.”
I stared at him. “You built a tech company.”
