Chapter One #2
I followed him back into the glare.
The sun had climbed high enough to press heat into the back of my neck.
Bees moved through purple flowers near the gate.
Tomato vines climbed their cages in green tangles.
A sprinkler ticked somewhere beyond the far row, sending tiny flashes into the air.
The whole place buzzed with life and other people’s competence.
My ballet flats sank slightly into the soft dirt path.
I looked down.
One tiny bow had already collected dust.
“First casualty,” I muttered.
Zane glanced over his shoulder. “Your shoes?”
“My dignity, but the shoes are in critical condition.”
“That happened before the dirt.”
I looked up sharply.
He watched the path ahead, not me, but that almost-smile tugged at his mouth again.
I shouldn’t have liked him. I absolutely shouldn’t have liked him.
He stopped near the tomato cages. “Birdie Jenkins, volunteer and unofficial keeper of everything I don’t have time to remember. Gus Pike and Tyler Ames are on crew today.”
Birdie pulled off one glove and offered her hand. She was older than my mother, with silver hair tucked beneath her straw hat, warm brown skin, and sharp eyes that missed nothing. She wore a faded yellow T-shirt, garden clogs, and turquoise earrings shaped like tiny leaves.
“Welcome to Larch Bend P-Patch, Daphne,” she said. “We’re glad to have help.”
“Thank you.” I shook her hand. “I’m glad to be helpful.”
That was almost true. I was glad helpfulness had been offered as an alternative to worse consequences.
Gus Pike gave me a nod. Up close, he looked even more intimidating. Black T-shirt, tattooed knuckles, thick gray beard, heavy boots, sun-browned arms. His eyes, though, were calm and amused.
“Ma’am,” he said.
I nodded back. “Hi.”
Tyler raised one hand. He looked early twenties, with sandy hair sticking out from under a baseball cap and a T-shirt that said LARCH BEND LITTLE LEAGUE even though he was much too old to be on the team. Dirt already streaked one cheek.
“Hey,” he said. “If he gives you compost duty first, don’t breathe through your nose.”
Zane looked at him. “Tyler.”
“What? That’s practical advice.”
“It’s also not her job today.”
Tyler’s relief was immediate and visible. “Good. Great. I mean, good for her.”
Gus grunted, then seemed to remember grunting might count as communication and added, “Compost builds character.”
“Does it?” I asked.
“No,” Gus said. “But people say that before they make you shovel things.”
Birdie laughed. Zane shook his head, but his face stayed relaxed, and something in my chest loosened. They weren’t leering at me. They weren’t whispering about why I was here. At least not yet.
Maybe this would be survivable.
Then Zane pointed to a bed full of green chaos and said, “Weeding.”
Maybe this wouldn’t be survivable.
He walked me to the bed, crouched, and braced one forearm across his knee. The position made his shoulder flex beneath his shirt. His tattoos shifted over muscle, dark ink against sun-browned skin.
I focused on the plants.
Plants were safer.
“This row is carrots,” Zane said. “These feathery tops stay. These broadleaf weeds go. Get the root when you can, or they come back.”
I crouched beside him, my knees immediately protesting the fact that I worked at a desk and considered walking from the parking lot to the office a meaningful cardio event.
“These stay,” I said, touching the carrot tops.
“Right.”
“These go.”
“Right.”
“This one?”
“That’s a carrot.”
I snatched my hand back. “I was testing you.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
Birdie coughed into her glove. Gus looked away. Tyler didn’t bother hiding his grin.
Zane’s mouth curved again, and this time I was close enough to notice the tiny lines at the corner of his eyes. “Ask before you pull. You’ll get it.”
The words were ordinary. The tone wasn’t soft, exactly, but it wasn’t impatient either. He didn’t make me feel stupid. He just showed me again, steady and sure, his big hand closing around a weed near the base.
“You want to loosen the soil first.” He worked his fingers around the stem. “If you yank from the top, it snaps.”
He pulled. The weed came free with a long, pale root.
I stared at it. “That was weirdly satisfying.”
“It gets better.”
“That sounds like propaganda.”
“It’s gardening.”
“Same delivery system.”
His gaze flicked to mine. For one hot second, we were close enough that the noise of the garden thinned out: the sprinkler tick, the scrape of Gus’s rake, Tyler dragging his shovel through compost, Birdie clipping tomato stems. Zane’s eyes were a clear, hard blue-green, mountain water under sun, and they stayed on me a beat too long to be only supervisory.
Then he stood.
The garden sounds rushed back in.
“You take this section to the marker,” he said. “Keep the carrot tops. Pull the broadleaf weeds. If you’re unsure, call me.”
My mouth went dry in a way water wouldn’t fix. “Got it.”
He stepped back, and I still felt exactly where he’d been.
I pressed my gloved fingers into the soil and worked them around the base of a weed.
It snapped off in my hand.
Zane, who had made it only three steps away, stopped.
I held up the leafy top. “It surrendered.”
“It hid.”
“Cowardly plant.”
“Root’s still in there.”
“Right.” I turned back to the bed. “Follow-up question.”
“Already?”
“I’m building confidence through inquiry.”
“Ask.”
“How personal is too personal with a root system?”
Birdie wheezed. Tyler laughed so hard he had to set down his shovel. Gus’s beard twitched.
Zane looked up at the sky for a second, as if asking Montana for patience.
When he faced me again, his expression was stern and his eyes weren’t. “Daphne.”
“Yes?”
“Dig around it.”
“Great. Practical. I can do practical.”
I dug around it.
The weed came free, root and all.
I held it up like a trophy. “I’d like the record to show personal works.”
“Put it in the bucket.”
I dropped it into the orange five-gallon bucket beside me. The hollow thump felt absurdly satisfying.
For the next hour, I weeded.
I did it badly at first, then less badly.
The sun climbed. Sweat gathered along my spine and beneath the edge of my bra. My blouse clung in places I didn’t want a blouse to cling while performing public penance. Dirt streaked my forearms, worked under my borrowed gloves, and dusted the tops of my poor doomed flats.
The pink bows disappeared under a layer of brown grit.
Somewhere around weed number fifty, I stopped trying to crouch gracefully. There was no graceful way to fight a plant. There was only leverage, stubbornness, and the ugly little grunt I made when one root finally gave.
Tyler heard it and glanced over. “That one sounded personal.”
“It knew what it did,” I said.
Gus nodded solemnly. “Some weeds need consequences.”
My hand froze in the soil.
The word consequences hit harder than it should’ve.
It was everywhere now: on paperwork, in Nadine Purcell’s office, in the way people lowered their voices when they said community service, and in the way Julian had looked so wounded after I’d done one stupid thing in response to his many polished lies.
I shoved the weed into the bucket.
Nope, I wasn’t doing this here in front of Zane McCrae, Birdie Jenkins, and a city garden full of squash witnesses.
A shadow fell over my section.
“Water,” Zane said.
I looked up. He stood at the edge of the bed with another bottle in his hand.
“I’m okay.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
A tiny spark went through me at his tone. It wasn’t fear or offense. It was something lower and much less helpful.
I sat back on my heels and took the bottle. “Do you always issue hydration like a command?”
“Only when people show up in brunch shoes.”
I twisted the cap open. “They weren’t brunch shoes.”
He checked my feet.
“They were light-errand shoes,” I said. “Possibly farmer’s-market-adjacent.”
“They’re mud now.”
I looked down. He was right. The pink had become a memory.
“Honestly, this may be an improvement,” I said. “They had too much optimism.”
Zane crouched beside the bed, far enough away to be appropriate and close enough that I felt the distance in every nerve under my skin.
“You’re doing fine,” he said.
The simple praise hit harder than it should’ve. My throat tightened before I could stop it.
I busied myself with drinking water. “You sound surprised.”
“I saw the shoes.”
“Fair.”
“And the blouse.”
“It’s breathable.”
“It’s white.”
“It used to be.”
His eyes dropped briefly to the dirt smudged across my front, then lifted again fast. He was careful about it, and that carefulness made the moment hotter, which felt deeply unfair.
“I’ve had people show up in worse,” he said.
“Really?”
“One guy wore flip-flops.”
“What happened to him?”
“He met a thistle.”
I winced. “Did he survive?”
“Physically.”
I laughed, then drank more water because laughing with Zane this close made my chest feel crowded.
Birdie appeared at the end of the bed with a bundle of twine. “Zane, I’m moving the extra tomato ties to the shed. Gus found another split cage.”
“Thanks.” He stood. “I’ll grab wire after I check Tyler’s trench.”
Tyler’s head snapped up from the far row. “It’s supposed to be a trench?”
Zane turned.
Tyler looked down. “That explains things.”
Gus muttered, “Boy’s digging a decorative ditch.”
“I heard that,” Tyler said.
“You were meant to.”
Birdie winked at me. “See? Community.”
“I’m learning so much.”
Zane looked at me. “Keep going to the marker. Then we’ll switch you to mulch.”
“Mulch sounds friendly.”
“It isn’t.”
“Why would you tell me that?”
“So you don’t trust it.”
He walked away toward Tyler, and I watched him go for exactly one second longer than I should’ve.
Fine, I watched him for three seconds.
His jeans rode low on his hips. He moved like he knew every inch of the path. The muscles in his shoulders shifted under that black shirt, all that strength somehow assigned to municipal volunteer policy and crooked rows.
I turned back to the bed and jammed my fingers into the soil.
“Absolutely not,” I whispered to myself.