She looked at me. Her eyes dropped to the flowers. Something moved across her face, and she pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything.
“Black-eyed Susans,” I said.
She blinked.
“Rudbeckia hirta.” I held them out. “They grow along the river road. I can’t turn off the guide part of myself, apparently.”
Something broke open in her expression—not quite a laugh, not quite a cry, somewhere in between—and she took the flowers and looked down at them. I watched her try to find solid ground.
“Cade—”
“You don’t have to say anything yet.” I leaned against the doorframe. “I need you to hear something.”
She looked up.
“You’ve been running somebody else’s race your whole life,” I said. “I could see it the second you stepped onto that dock. The way you held yourself. The way you were standing on that dock like you had somewhere more important to be. The way you said thank you like you’d practiced it.” I paused. “And then I watched you climb twenty feet up an oak tree and jump into a river because you wanted to. Not because it was on a list. Not because it looked good. Because you wanted to.”
Her eyes were bright. She wasn’t bothering to hide it anymore.
“Whatever you decide,” I said. “I want it to be a decision you made. Not one that got made for you.”
“And if what I decide involves staying in Wildwood Valley?”
Her voice was quiet. Careful. Like she was testing the weight of the words before she set them all the way down.
“Then I’d say the river’s got good fishing year-round and the rope swing works in every season.” I held her gaze. “And I’d say I’ve never brought anyone to that spot before. In case that matters.”
She looked down at the black-eyed Susans in her hands. Then back up at me.
She stepped back from the door and opened it wider.
I went in. She turned to the nightstand and set the flowers in the water glass, stems first, yellow heads tipping slightly to one side. She picked up her phone. She held it for a long moment—the missed calls, whatever was waiting for her there—and then she turned it off, set it on the nightstand, and turned back to me.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
I crossed the room, and she met me halfway. That was the end of running somebody else’s race.
EPILOGUE
ANNALEISE: 5 YEARS LATER
Five years ago, I stood on a dock in Wildwood Valley with my jaw clenched, my watch checked, and my whole life accounted for.
I didn’t have a watch anymore. Hadn’t worn one in years. Cade had found it in my bag about six months after I moved to Wildwood Valley and held it up with one eyebrow raised. I’d laughed and told him to throw it in a drawer somewhere. We’d never discussed it again.
The hammock was strung between two white oaks in the center of the yard where the ground started to slope toward the river, close enough that you could hear the water if the afternoon was quiet enough. This one was. A Saturday in July, the air thick and sweet and completely still. I had a novel open on my chest that I hadn’t looked at in twenty minutes because the river was doing something interesting with the light and I’d gotten distracted watching it.
This was my life now. Getting distracted by rivers.
I spread my hand over the small, firm rise of my belly, a move that made me feel closer to the baby. Number two. We hadn’t told anyone yet except Bobbi, who’d taken one look at me threeweeks ago and said, “Again?” in a tone that managed to be both accusatory and delighted.
I didn’t know how she did that. It was a gift.
Our daughter Millie had been told there was a baby coming and had received this information with the same unruffled calm she received most things—a slow blink and a considering look, and then she’d gone back to whatever she was doing. Four years old and already more like her father than I’d ever be. I found it both humbling and hilarious.
The screen door opened, and Cade came out onto the porch. He was smiling in a way that meant Millie was down, which could last anywhere from forty minutes to two and a half hours depending on how much of the morning she’d spent at the river with him. From the look of things—his jeans were still damp at the hem—I was guessing two hours minimum.
He came across the yard toward me, and I watched him the way I still always watched him. That unhurried way he moved. The way he always seemed to know exactly where he was going without making a production of it.
