The food comes, and we eat with the gratitude of people who forgot calories existed yesterday.
We’re halfway through breakfast when Griffin speaks again. “You never told me you finally went to the Sunvale Festival.”
My fork pauses midair. “Who said I went?”
He shrugs, the edge of his mouth twitching like he knows he’s caught me. “I saw the list.”
I blink. “What list?”
“The one you wrote. Hotel notebook. It was sitting on the nightstand this morning. ‘Sunvale Festival’—crossed out.”
My stomach clenches around the bite of pancake I just took. I swallow it down, suddenly dry-mouthed. “Right. That.”
He eyes me carefully. “Did I say the wrong thing?”
I shake my head and press the edge of my napkin to my mouth. “No. I just forgot I wrote that down.”
He nods and goes back to cutting into his eggs.
“They’re all things I’d planned to do,” I say after a beat. “Over the last year or two. Just… stuff I never got around to.”
He leans in, the weight of his gaze heavier now. “Because Ezra was busy?”
I don’t answer right away. My shoulders inch up like they’re trying to shield me. I pick up my coffee instead, take a sip that tastes more bitter than it did a minute ago.
“Yeah,” I admit. “He always had something. A work trip. A client dinner. Golf with his dad. There was always a reason.”
Griffin doesn’t move, but something shifts in his jaw. That muscle ticks again.
I glance at his arm resting on the table. The tattoos I remember from college—his parents’ initials, the wave line for his hometown, that small lightning bolt near his elbow—are all still there, but there’s a new one near his inner forearm. Faded black lines form a tree, tucked just beneath the crook of his arm.
Without thinking, I reach out and trace it with the tip of my finger. “That’s new.”
His head tilts, eyes dropping to where my fingers linger on his skin. “A couple of years ago,” he says quietly.
I want to ask why, or what it means, but I’m not sure I have the right.
So instead, I let my hand fall away and murmur, “I like it.”
He watches me for a beat until he says, “You should do the rest of the list.”
I blink. “What?”
“Finish it. Every one of them.” He sets his fork down and rests his elbows on the table. “If they were important enough to write down, they’re important enough to do.”
Damn it, that’s a hard thing to hear when you’re sitting across from a man who looks at you like he remembers who you were before you forgot.
“Can I ask you something? Those five years you were gone, what did you actually do?”
He exhales through his nose. “Contract jobs. Infrastructure. New York. Seattle, Portland. Montana for eight months.”
“Montana? That seems like a lot of flannel, even for you.”
His mouth curves. “I grew a beard for a winter. Nearly married a woman named Cassidy who made elk stew.”
I put my fork down. “Younearlygot married?”
“It wasn’t serious, but for a while, it felt easier to stay than leave.”
