Chapter Three. Duncan
It was near midnight.
After everyone had left the campfire to settle in for the night, Duncan went up to the equipment garage to change the front tire on the Gator so it would be ready for Rowan and the vineyard crew in the morning. On his way back down the hill, he noticed a narrow wisp of smoke coming from where they’d had the campfire. The land around him was still and silent. No wind in the trees, no faraway sounds of cars on the county roads.
Temperance was there, alone in the dark. She sat on the picnic table bench with her arms wrapped around her middle, staring glassy-eyed into the remains of the fire. The embers cast her in shifting garnet and ruby and gold.
Duncan parked the truck and hopped out. “Hey,” he said. “What are you still doing up?”
“Can’t sleep.”
“This can’t be healthy, Temperance.”
“Don’t doctor me, Duncan,” she said. “You’re still up, too.”
Duncan didn’t reply. He sat across from her at the fire and stared at the embers until his eyes began to water, hypnotized by the pulse of heat and color.
After a while, Temperance wavered where she sat. In a sleep-husky voice, she said, “Fire seeds.”
He chuckled. “What?”
“Embers are like”—she rubbed her eyes—“little fire seeds.”
Sometimes, she was so cute, it caused him physical pain. He used to get to see this fanciful, unfiltered side of her all the time.
He missed her. How cruel, to have to miss a person who sat right across from you.
Duncan cracked his knuckles and stood. “Can I put this out?”
She shook her head and shoulders like she was coming out of a fog. “Yeah. I’m going back to the house soon.”
He poured the water from a nearby bucket on the fire. Some of the charred wood continued to glow red in places, even after he doused it.
“They want to be fire again. The embers.” She pointed to the tiny rubies near the center of the circle. “They’re stubborn.”
Duncan set the bucket down. “Nah, they’re hopeful.”
“Stubborn, hopeful.” Temperance stood and stretched her arms high. “Same thing.”
The embers hissed and sent up tendrils of steam and smoke when he poured on more water. This time, the fire went dark.
“You need a ride to the house?” he asked.
She breathed a little laugh through her nose. “Duncan, the house is fifty yards away.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m fragile.” The whimsy was gone from her voice, but her eyes glinted in the darkness. Like she’d drawn down the moon and banked its glow there. “Good night, Duncan.” Temperance didn’t bother to put on her sandals. She wandered toward the house with them dangling from her hand.
“’Night,” he said, quieter than she’d have been able to hear. He watched her until she disappeared around the front of the house.
Duncan stayed for a while. The land was dark except for the muted blue of the solar lights through the hedges around the pool to the east, and the greenhouse high on the hill. It was almost supernatural in its pale inner glow, always seeming to catch whatever light the moon offered.
The window to Temperance’s room lit with a cozy apricot glow a few minutes after she went inside. Ma and Dad always put her in the Primrose room because it was the best room in the bed-and-breakfast wing—complete with a double-sided fireplace between the bathroom and bedroom.
A tiny tuft of steam rose from the doused fire. Near the outer edge of the pit, a single ember remained.
Duncan picked up a pencil that had rolled off the picnic table into the grass. On the summer solstice, Spaniards would sometimes write a name or a wish on a piece of paper, then burn it at midnight to make the wish come true. They’d bring old items of clothing to burn, or jump over the bonfires to encourage good luck. In coastal cities, many people would walk backward into the sea for a new beginning. Duncan and his siblings never got to burn clothes or jump over fires, but Ma liked to keep her Galician and Spanish roots alive in the little ways she could.
Leftover squares of paper were weighed down beneath the candle tins on the table. Duncan slid a piece free and laid the pencil beside it. For a while, he simply looked at it.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a text in the family group chat, from Arden.
WELCOME TO THE
FAMILY, ROWAN!
Since everyone but Mal had moved back to the valley, the group chat wasn’t as lively as it had been when Maren and Nate and the kids had still lived in Westfall, and Patrick and Mercy were still in Philly. Recently, the chat was mostly selfies of Arden and her pet tortoise, Otis, and a video montage of farting dogs shared by Nate. Since Rowan had been added in the fall, she shared photos of plants and bugs and birds from around the vineyards, often with a brief treatise on some weird aspect of their biology.
Ma replied to Arden’s recent text with a flurry of botanical emojis, including an entire row of eggplants. The chat then shifted into an explanation of why she shouldn’t ever do that again.
Temperance had been added to the family group chat years ago at Maren’s request, since there were often details shared about the kids’ birthday parties and school events. She only ever participated in the chat if she was addressed directly, though.
Duncan wondered what it felt like for her, seeing the text from Arden welcoming Rowan into the family. On a summer night like this one when they were eighteen, Temperance had told him how jealous she’d been that Maren got to take the Brady name when she’d married Nate. How much she’d wanted to be a Brady.
“I’ll see what I can do,”Duncan had said.
“Is that a proposal?”she’d teased. Her hair had been in two braided buns, and she’d been wearing an old Foo Fighters T-shirt that kept sliding off her shoulder. She’d had a sunburn there.
And then he’d said, “When I ask you to marry me, Temperance—you’ll know it.”
Duncan looked again at the blank paper.
Her.
Write it, damn it.
Phone still in his hand, he tapped in Temperance’s name. A single message from last fall was the only thing there, in lonely black pixels:
Are you there?
He’d sent it back in September after he’d impulsively driven to the city to see her at almost eleven o’clock at night. It wasn’t until he reached the Philadelphia city limits that he realized he had no idea what the hell her address was. So, he’d pulled over on a tree-lined residential street, cut the ignition, sent the text, and waited.
Shortly after one o’clock in the morning, a police officer had tapped on his window and encouraged him to “get to wherever he was going.”
Temperance never replied.
Hell. What did “Are you there?” even mean, really? Of course she was there. She was always somewhere out there. Doing life in her big, important way. Entirely separate from him. There wasn’t a day since he’d met her nearly two decades ago that he wasn’t acutely aware of her, even when they went months without contact.
Are you there?
Duncan stared at those unanswered words for so long, they felt burned into his retinas.
He put the phone down and picked up the pencil.
Her.
Things between them were never easy or effortless. Either they stalled out for years or barreled forth without caution for consequences. He’d spent the last fourteen years being so preoccupied with the thought of not having her that it never occurred to him to attempt it. Now that he had the means, the motivation, and the clarity to try, the timing could absolutely not be worse. His literal dream was under his literal nose, and he didn’t have the time or the bandwidth necessary to launch the most ambitious and high-stakes project of his life.
Duncan let the pencil hover over the paper until his hand began to shake.
Her.
When he looked up at the house again, she’d turned the light off in her room. Now, the darkened panes of glass stared back at him like a dead eye.
For several weeks after that pointless late-night drive into Philly last fall, his thoughts had been consumed by Temperance Madigan. The things he’d done wrong. The unfairness of it all. The possibility that there could be a chance for them again. All his other responsibilities began to slip, distracted as he’d been. It was the only time in his life he’d missed a deadline for Dad—and it wasn’t even that he’d missed just one.
He’d missed three.
Duncan didn’t write anything on the paper. Instead, he crumpled it in his hand and tucked it into his jeans pocket.
Stubborn, hopeful. It didn’t matter.
Duncan put out the last persistent little ember with the heel of his boot and headed back to his cabin in the dark.