I look for her. She's still at the barrier. Watching.
I walk toward the edge of the grounds.
She's moved by the time I get there — walking the vendor lane, making notes, doing the very professional thing she's been doing for three days. I fall into step beside her and she doesn't startle. She clocks me, keeps moving.
"Nice shooting," she said.
"Throwing."
"Sorry. Nicethrowing." She turns to face me. We're between vendor stalls, away from the main foot traffic — not private exactly, but not on display either. The afternoon light is doing that August thing where it turns everything golden-edged and I wish it wouldn't.
"Owen."
"I want to finish what you started the other day," I say. "The conversation."
"I didn't start a conversation. I tried to end one."
"Same thing."
She sighs, letting out ten years of frustration. “I left because you told me to go."
"I know."
"You sat across from me at the diner and you saidyou should take itand I asked if you'd come with me and you said Silver Ridge was home and that was — Owen, that was it. That was the whole conversation."
"I know what I said."
"So what were you expecting me to do?"
"I expected you to come back," I say.
The silence that follows is longer than any silence should be on a festival grounds in August with the log-rolling crowd shouting thirty meters away.
"You expected…?"
"I was wrong," I say. "That's what I'm saying. I was wrong to expect it and I was wrong about the other thing too. The telling you to go. I told myself I was letting you choose. I wasn't."
Her clipboard is down at her side, she shoulders slumped. "What were you doing?" she asks.
"Being too proud to ask you to stay."
Grace hesitates. Her mouth opens slightly and then closes. She looks like herself at twenty-three, before she learned to keep her reactions half a step behind her face.
Then she says, "I wanted you to ask."
I take a step toward her. She doesn't step back.
The space between us at that point is about two feet, and then it isn't, and the first time I touch her in ten years is both hands on her face, tilting her up to me, and she makes a small sound that I felt all the way down to my boots.
I feel her hands close on my shirt. I feel her lean in.
We're in the vendor lane at the Timber Festival in front of whatever portion of Silver Ridge might be watching and I could not care less.
When we break apart, her eyes are closed for a moment. Then they open.
"I need to think."
"Take all the time you need."
