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“You look very happy,” her mother said on one of their video calls that Raemy took from one of the viewpoints over the beach, because it wasn’t too windy or wet that day. Her parents were docked in Sydney Harbour and were sitting out on their balcony with its view of the iconic Opera House behind them, looking wonderfully relaxed. “Though it looks cold there.”

“It’s misty and moody and I absolutely love it,” Raemy replied.

“Travel agrees with us all,” her father said from beside her mother, looking downright jolly again, the way he was in all of Raemy’s memories. “He would love it.”

And there were things they didn’t say, these days, because they’d all been said. They’d bared their broken hearts too many times to count. They’d all cried and held each other through the tears and picked themselves up again and again.

They all talked to William and about William all the time. He was woven into all of these moments. He was like a golden thread that was stitched deep into each of them, and through them, connecting them to each other and to his memory and to the future he would always be a part of, because he was a part of them.

“Love looks good on all of us,” Raemy said.

They talked a while longer and then her parents had to go and meet up with some friends to explore Circular Quay. Raemy looked out over the ocean, smiling, and imagined her parents all the way on the other side. It had her heart ache in a good way.

And she was thinking about love as she took the path that wound back toward her inn along the beach, breathing in the salt air.

It came to her slowly, like the tide coming in. So slowly, at first, and then the waves were sneaking up higher than you expected, and then you were wet.

Maybe one of the reasons that she was falling so deeply in love with Wild Rose Point wasn’t because it was the prettiest little beach town in this lovely, foggy fall that anyone could imagine, though it was. Maybe she wasn’t wondering how she’d survived without the Pacific Northwest her whole life because she was partial to fairy-tale-like moss-covered forests and mountains that met the sea, though she was.

Maybe it was because she was falling in love with Noah Kendrick, too.

Raemy stopped dead on the path and laughed out loud, like a loon, startling a woman walking her dogs and a passel of teenagers. She didn’t mind.

Because she hadn’t let herself think like that. Not until now. And it seemed ridiculous that she’d been pretending that the way she’d fallen so in love with this place was anything else.

But that wasn’t why she was laughing.

That was because all she could think about was Noah. Beautiful, impossible Noah, who would absolutely flip out if she ever told him. He might even personally deliver her to a therapist. He would certainly try to break up with her.

Though he wouldn’t call it that, because Raemy was pretty sure he had no idea they were dating in the first place.

But that was okay, she told herself, and smiled out at the ocean and the sea stacks that could definitely keep her secrets. She didn’t have to tell him she loved him.

She could just love him, simple as that. Hell, she already did.

Maybe something in her had known all along. Maybe it had recognized him at the funeral and tucked it away until grief had finished pummeling her the way it had at first, when she couldn’t possibly have handled something like this.

Something like him, so noble and yet so convinced he was the villain when he was anything but, by any measure.

Maybe she’d been in love with him all along, so it made sense that she could just keep on going.

And if she did it well enough, and long enough, Raemy figured—it was entirely possible that Noah himself wouldn’t really notice until it was too late to do anything else but love her back.

7

September ended, October was more than halfway gone, and she was still here.

Noah didn’t really know what to do about that.

He kept waiting for her to say something. To indicate that she knew that it was time she got going. To start acting restless and talking about the road, because he knew she’d loved traveling around out there. He’d assumed it was only a matter of time before she started planning her next stop.

But that never seemed to happen.

“What’s next in your itinerary?” he asked one morning. She’d turned up in the diner for breakfast, at the tail end of the rush, which meant he could sit and have a cup of coffee with her once the place cleared out.

They’d done this so often now that he barely paid attention to the way the men were always watching. Or maybe they’d stopped, by this point. After all, there was nothing new here. There was nothing to tell their little jokes about.

“What itinerary?” she asked, her blue eyes wide and open and locked to his.