“You should be. It was harder than it looked.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Sarah always told on me.”
The mention of her sister landed gently between them. It wasn’t exactly grief. It was more like tenderness.
Wes looked at the trunk.
There, just above eye level, half obscured by bark that had grown and shifted over the years were two sets of initials inside a lopsided heart.
W.B. + R.K.
He reached up and ran his thumb across the letters. “I remember doing this.”
Rowan looked at the carving. “I remember you doing it too. I was terrified you were going to cut yourself with that pocketknife.”
“I almost did.” His lips twitched with a smile.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I was seventeen. I was trying to impress you.”
She laughed—a real one, quiet and unguarded. It was the kind that had been rare this week.
Wes looked at her. “The first time I kissed you . . .”
“Was under this tree,” she finished.
He smiled. “I almost didn’t do it. I must have talked myself into it and out of it four times.”
Rowan blinked. “You were nervous?”
“I was terrified.”
“I had no idea.” She shook her head slowly. “I thought you were the most confident person I’d ever met.”
“I was confident about everything except you.” He looked back at the initials. “That was always the thing about you, Rowan. You were the one thing I could never quite get steady footing around.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I remember the kiss differently.”
“How do you remember it?”
Her gaze moved up through the branches before coming back to him. “I remember thinking that nothing in my life had ever felt that certain before.” She paused. “And then being terrified of how certain it felt.”
Wes held her gaze. “So you ran.”
“Eventually.” Her voice dropped. “Not that night. That night I just stood here and tried to memorize everything.”
The evening went still around them. Somewhere in the distance a bird moved through the tree line, and the oak shifted slightly overhead, and everything else was quiet.
“I need to tell you something,” Rowan whispered.
“Okay.”
She turned toward him fully. The fading light caught the tiredness in her face and the thing underneath the tiredness that had been there since she’d come home—the part of her that had been trying to find its way back to something real.
“Leaving you was a mistake,” she said. “Not leaving Virginia. Not going to Hollywood. Leavingyou.”
He said nothing.
She held his gaze without flinching. “I told myself I was choosing my career. But I think I was just scared of how much you meant to me. I’ve spent ten years trying to build a life thatwould feel as certain as standing under this tree felt when I was with you.” Her voice thinned slightly. “Nothing ever came close.”
