Chapter 9
“Grandma’s moon garden,” Aidan said immediately, his voice carrying the resonance of memory made physical. “She planted it their first year of marriage—all white flowers that bloomed at night, designed to be beautiful in moonlight.”
They left the cemetery with appropriate reverence, walking back toward where the ranch vehicles were kept.
The morning had warmed enough to make Dylan’s jacket unnecessary, and she felt Aidan watching as she tied it around her waist, his gaze carrying weight that had nothing to do with outdoor apparel.
“We could walk to the garden,” he suggested. “But it’s two miles of rough trail. Or we could take the ATVs.”
“Let’s ride.”
The barn smelled of hay and machine oil, horse and history. Dylan immediately moved to the newer ATV, checking it over with professional interest that made Aidan smile.
“Most people just get on and ride,” he observed.
“Most people aren’t mechanics. “
They set off across property that seemed to expand with every hill they crested, following trails worn by generations of O’Hara adventures.
The freedom of it—racing through private land with no witnesses except mountains and sky—loosened something that had been twisted tight in Dylan’s chest since Victoria’s appearance.
When Aidan took a trail that launched them over a rise, she followed without hesitation, both machines leaving earth for a moment that felt like flight, landing hard enough to jar teeth but laughing at the sheer joy of controlled recklessness.
They stopped at a creek to rest, sitting on sun-warmed rocks that November hadn’t yet stolen heat from, watching water write stories over stones.
“Haven’t seen you smile like that in days,” Aidan said, pulling off his helmet to reveal hair standing in every direction like he’d been electrocuted by happiness.
“Haven’t had much reason to.”
“Victoria really rattled you.”
It wasn’t a question, but Dylan answered anyway. “She’s everything I’m not. Polished, sophisticated, from your world—”
“Stop.” The command in his voice made her look at him fully. “Victoria is from a world I was supposed to want. You’re from the world I actually want. There’s a difference between choosing what looks right and choosing what is right.”
Before she could parse that declaration, another ATV’s growl announced company. Duncan appeared through the trees, his grin promising trouble or gossip or both.
“Thought I heard engines,” he said, pulling up beside them. “Hattie sent me to find you. She said I’m getting too moody because I’m having trouble with a commissioned piece. I don’t get moody.”
He scowled and Aidan laughed. “Whatever you say, brother. What’s the news?”
“Hattie wanted to warn you. She said Victoria’s been making rounds in town, asking subtle questions about Dylan at various shops. Everybody remembers Victoria and the way she left, so I’m not sure she’s being met with a lot of warmth, but you know how people here like to talk.”
“Like it’s fresh air?” Aidan asked.
Dylan’s stomach performed an unpleasant maneuver. “She’s investigating me?”
“More like fishing for information. But Sophie and Raven are onto her. They’re telling her how famous people from all over the country are clamoring for you to restore their cars.”
“It was only one famous person,” Dylan said.
“I’m sure there are more where that came from,” Duncan said. “Raven told her about how the Smithsonian asked you to consult on a vintage restoration project.”
“Oh, God,” Dylan said, covering her face with her hands.
“You do good work,” Duncan said. “Be proud. And you’ll get used to Raven and Sophie. That’s what family does. We protect our own.”
After he left, they continued to the moon garden, but Dylan’s mind kept circling back to Victoria’s reconnaissance mission, the way she was gathering intelligence like this was some kind of campaign for territory that had already been claimed.
The garden, when they reached it, temporarily erased all thoughts of Victoria.
It was magnificent in its architecture—geometric beds outlined in boxwood that had survived for decades, paths of stone and gravel, and in the center, a sundial on a pedestal that had been marking time since long before Dylan was born.
“She designed it herself,” Aidan said, moving through the space with the respect of someone in a museum.
“Every plant chosen for how it looked in moonlight. They’d sit out here summer nights, just watching stars and each other.
My mother has kept it up since Grandma passed, though she’ll tell you she doesn’t have as green of a thumb. ”
“It’s beautiful,” Dylan said, already seeing the potential beneath the ruin.
They settled on a bench near the sundial to wait for four o’clock, time stretching before them like an unmapped road.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” Aidan said, his thigh warm against hers on the cold stone bench.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Everything. Why you became a mechanic. What you dream about. What you’re afraid of.”
Dylan pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them in a defensive posture she hadn’t needed in years.
“My father was a mechanic. After my mother left—I was ten—working on engines was the only time he seemed truly alive. Not happy, exactly, but…purposeful. I learned by watching, by handing him tools, by being useful in the only way that seemed to matter.”
“She left you both?”
“Decided she wanted more than a mechanic husband and a daughter who preferred grease to dolls. We weren’t enough for her vision of life.”
Dylan remembered the morning her mother left with the clarity that only trauma provides—standing in the kitchen doorway with two suitcases, wearing the pearl earrings Dad had saved six months to buy. Her lipstick was perfect, a red Dylan would later see on other women and feel her stomach clench.
“Take care of your father,” she’d said, not quite meeting Dylan’s eyes. “You’re more like him anyway.”
The words had been meant as explanation but landed like prophecy.
Dylan had become exactly that—her father’s keeper through the good years, then his nurse through the bad ones.
She’d learned to read his silences, to know which meant contentment and which meant the hollow ache of abandonment.
They’d developed their own language in the garage, one built of socket wrenches and comfortable quiet, of teaching moments that were really about holding on to something solid while everything else felt untethered.
“When the cancer diagnosis came,” Dylan said quietly, “he apologized to me. Can you imagine? Dying man apologizing to his twenty-two-year-old daughter for the inconvenience of his mortality.” Her voice caught.
“He was more worried about me being stuck taking care of him than about his own death. Said he didn’t want me to waste my youth changing his bedpans and fighting with insurance companies. ”
She paused, remembering those last months with a vividness that still stole her breath.
“But I wasn’t stuck. I was terrified. Every morning I’d stand outside his door, listening for breathing, bargaining with a God I wasn’t sure existed for just one more day.
One more joke about my terrible coffee. One more argument about the proper way to gap spark plugs. One more anything.”
The weight of those days settled over her—the smell of antiseptic mixing with motor oil, the way his hands had thinned until his wedding ring slipped off and he’d asked her to put it somewhere safe, not realizing he was asking her to acknowledge the ending.
“The last six months were the worst,” she continued.
“He couldn’t work anymore, could barely hold tools.
For a man who’d defined himself by what his hands could fix, it was its own kind of death before the actual one.
I kept the shop running, lied to his customers, said he was just slow on their repairs, not dying by degrees in the apartment above.
He made me promise to finish every project.
Said a mechanic’s reputation was all they left behind. ”
Her hands clenched involuntarily, remembering.
“The night he died, he asked me to bring him a torque wrench. Just wanted to hold it. His fingers could barely close around it, but he smiled like I’d brought him salvation.
‘At least I’ll die with clean hands for once,’ he said.
I laughed—God help me, I actually laughed—because even with the morphine eating holes in his awareness, he could still make jokes.
He died two hours later, still holding that wrench, and I sat there until dawn, afraid that if I took it from his hands, he’d really be gone. ”
She looked at Aidan then, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“I finished every project in that shop. Delivered the last car the day after his funeral. Then I packed everything I could fit in my Charger and ran. I’ve been running ever since, because staying means watching things end, and I’d already watched the two most important people in my life leave—one by choice, one by force. I couldn’t do it again.”
“Is that why you run? Because you watched him wait?”
The question cut deeper than intended, finding the soft place she’d protected for thirteen years. “I run because staying hurts more when it ends. And everything ends, Aidan. Your grandfather’s treasure hunt is literally about finding a ring in a cemetery where the love story is already over.”
“No,” he said with surprising firmness. “It’s about finding a ring that survived the ending. That continues, waiting for the next story. Love doesn’t die just because people do.”
They sat in comfortable silence while shadows crept across the sundial face like time made visible. Sophie appeared at some point with a picnic basket, took one look at their proximity on the bench, and left with a smile that promised immediate family-wide notification.