"It was always going to work," he says.
I look up at him. He's watching the garden, the people in it, Gina and her son on the bench near the center stone. His jaw is set the way it gets when he's feeling something he doesn't have words for.
I break the silence. "This is where I'm supposed to be."
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then he turns to face me and takes my face in both hands and kisses me right there in the middle of the garden with half the town still on the hill.
It's not a careful kiss.
When he pulls back, I'm gripping the front of his jacket with both hands, but I don't remember reaching for it.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay," he says.
Reid walks past us on his way down the hill, clocks us, and looks at the sky like he's checking the weather. "About time," he says, to no one in particular, and keeps walking.
Flint watches him go. The corner of his mouth moves.
"Was that a smile?" I ask.
"No."
"It was almost a smile."
"Walk with me," he says, and takes my hand.
The afternoon light holds. The valley spreads below us. The garden breathes around us, the stone at its heart, and Silver Ridge moves through it the way people move through spaces built to hold them: slowly, quietly, with their hands out.
Epilogue
Ivy
Ifindthenoteat six-fifteen when I get up to use the bathroom for the second time since midnight, which is my life now.
Gone to the quarry. Coffee's on.
Four words. A year together, and he still writes notes like he's billing by the letter. I've started saving them in the drawer of my desk — thirty-two of them, ranging fromback by noontothe serviceberries are into, memorably,don't move the level, which I had absolutely moved and which we have agreed to never discuss again.
I pour the coffee and pull on his canvas jacket over my pajamas and take my mug outside.
The foundation is nearly done. He's at it every morning before the crew arrives, an hour at a time. The walls go up in the fall. We've decided not to rush it. We have the quarry property, we have the converted office, and — as Flint said when I tried to set a completion date —stone doesn't care about your timeline.
I told him that was the most romantic thing he'd ever said to me.
He looked at me for a long moment. "It wasn't meant to be romantic."
"I know," I said. "That's why it was."
He's at the far edge of the foundation when I cross the yard, crouched over the east wall, and he doesn't look up, but his hand comes out automatically. I put the second mug into it without breaking stride. We've learned each other's mornings. I stand beside him and look at what he's built since yesterday — three more courses, gray-green granite from the quarry's east face, the same vein as the memorial path, the same stone as the piece on my desk that saysDanielon it.
Everything from the same ground. He decided that without telling me.I understood.
"How's the east wall?" I ask.
"Plumb."
"The west?"
