"You're still here," I said. "I thought you'd left after breakfast."
"I was reading." She held up the textbook. "I didn't want to interrupt your father's calls. He seemed... busy."
"He's always busy."
"Yes." She marked her place with a torn piece of paper—a receipt, maybe, or a napkin—and closed the book. "But he's notalways here. Not really. Even when he's sitting right across from me."
I sat down in the chair beside her. The wicker creaked under my weight, and the orchids rustled behind us, their petals brushing against the glass.
"You noticed that," I said.
"Everyone notices. They just don't say anything." She turned toward me, pulling her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around her knees. She was wearing jeans today—not the dress from dinner, not the apron from the diner. Just jeans and a sweater and her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked younger like this. More like the girl she would have been if the farm hadn't failed. "What are you doing here? I thought you'd be studying."
"I was. I couldn't concentrate."
"Why not?"
I looked at her. The light was gold on her face, picking out the freckles across her nose, the small scar on her chin that she said came from a barbed wire fence when she was twelve. She was so beautiful. Not in the way the women in my father's world were beautiful—polished and painted and carefully constructed. She was beautiful the way a storm was beautiful. The way a wound was beautiful. The way something that mattered was beautiful.
"You," I said. "I couldn't concentrate because of you."
She didn't look away.
That was one of the things I loved about her—one of the things I was beginning to understand I would never stop loving. She didn't look away. When I said something too honest, too raw, too much, she stayed. She held my gaze. She let me be seen.
"Gabriel," she said. "You need to stop saying things like that."
"Why?"
"Because they make me want to believe them."
"They're true."
"True and believable aren't the same thing." She reached out and touched my hand—just a brush of her fingers against my knuckles, the same gesture she'd used in the diner a lifetime ago. "I've been lied to before. By people who sounded just as sincere as you."
"I'm not lying."
"I know." She pulled her hand back. "That's what scares me."
We sat in silence for a moment. The greenhouse hummed around us—the faint whir of the humidifier, the drip of water from the irrigation system, the soft rustle of leaves. Outside, the sun was beginning to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that bled through the glass like watercolors.
"Can I tell you something?" I asked.
"Of course."
"Something I haven't told anyone."
Her eyes met mine. Brown. Steady. The color of earth after rain.
"You can tell me anything."
I told her about my mother.
Not the version I told at dinner, the cleaned-up version, the one that made her death sound like something that happened to someone else. I told her the real version. The one I kept locked in a box in the deepest part of my chest, wrapped in layers of shame and guilt and the kind of grief that never fully heals.
"She was sick for a long time," I said. "Not at first. At first, it was just... tiredness. She'd fall asleep at the table. She'd forget things. My father took her to doctors, specialists, people who charged more for a consultation than most families make in a year. They ran tests. They ran more tests. And then they told us there was nothing they could do."
"What was it?"
