She looped her arm in mine again. “Tell me about it. I turned around and you were justgone.”
“So were you!”
“I,” she said gallantly, “was talking to the voice of my truest love.”
That surprised me, because I hadn’t heard her talking at all, and the Hedges wasn’tthatbig. “Who?”
She rolled her eyes, as if it were a question I should already know the answer to, and dragged me out of the Hedges and toward the next part of the garden. There was always something more to see. Somewhere to sit. Somewhere alone, where the bugs were loud and the birds shouted and everything just felt . . .slow.
Timeless.
I could stay here forever, I thought as we crossed a bridge over a pond, lily pads and cat grass lush against its banks.
As the last of the evening’s golden light spilled across the smooth rocks and dotted the well-manicured shrubs and the pops of lilies vibrant and pink, we found ourselves exactly where we began—the Central Garden. The way Henry Beck had laid out the paths, they all wound their way back to the middle. It was a beautiful design choice, and because of it, the path maps looked like an unfurling flower.
I bent down to read a placard for a particularly red poppy, as Harrie raised her camera to me. I quickly put my hands up over my face. “No, I look terrible!” I complained.
“Oh,whatever, no one can look terrible during golden hour. It’s the rules. Smile!” And instead of just taking one of me, she flipped the camera around and took it of the both of us instead.
I mumbled, “It probably won’t even come out good.”
“Of course it will,” she replied, sticking out her tongue at me, and wound up her next photo, but then she paused and put down her camera, staring up at the old oak tree in the middle of the Central Garden—Lilymoor’s centerpiece. It was crooked and bent, battered by storms and struck by lightning, but still it persisted. It was almost as breathtaking as thewillows in the grove. I glanced over at my best friend, and there was a strange look on her face. Not lost, exactly, but . . .
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You look a thousand miles away.”
“That’s the thing, I guess,” she replied, “it sort of hit me that we’ll be on opposite sides of the country soon.”
Ah. The realization had finally caught up to her. I was the one looking at the next season—gardeners tended to—but she was always so focused on the moment. I loved that about her. She lived now, not in some enchanted someday.
“Yeah,” I said, kicking a pebble. It skittered along the dirt path in muted thumps. “I’ll have to find someone else to split chores with.”
“And you’ll have to recordThe Bachelorso we can watch it together with the three-hour time difference.”
“That means I won’t go to bed until, like,midnight. That’s way too late,” I complained. “You know how early I have to get up.”
She gave a pout and wobbled her bottom lip. “You won’t stay up, not even for me?”
“I love my sleep.”
“But you love me more,” she pointed out.
Which … yes. Yes, I did. “Fine,” I groused. “Butonlyonce a week. And you have to be the first one to come visit me.”
“Deal, as long as I can take the left side of your bed.”
“I hate the left side, so sure. Christmas? I hear it’s pretty in New York.”
She grinned sheepishly. “And cold. Which I absolutely hate. My fingers go all numb and white. How about the spring?”
“That’ll be a busy time for me with the botanical garden,” I replied, and she huffed a frustrated sigh.
“Well, we’ll figure something out. We always do.” She glanced back down at the plaque in front of the old oak. It detailed how it had been there for as long as the house itself, planted the first year Lilymoor was built. In ten years, it’d be two hundred years old. Her eyebrows furrowed in thought, and then she turned to me with an idea. “Let’s promise to come back here regardless. In ten years. I’m sure there will be some sort of celebration, right?”
I gave it a thought. “Ten years is a long time . . .”
“Enough time to plan it out, so we won’t have an excuse. I’ll have a book by then, I’m sure. Maybe a husband. Kids!” Her eyes sparkled with the idea. “We’ll havekids.”
I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, and doing so now made me feel uneasy. “Maybe.”
