Chapter 2 Harlan
HARLAN
Itold myself I was coming back for the coffee.
Bobbi’s coffee was good. It had always been good. That was a fact completely independent of whether a particular dark-haired woman in a white blouse might be the one pouring it.
The Pancake House was already running full when I walked in the next morning. Festival season always brought people into town days before the festival itself—hikers, day-trippers, couples who’d seen the mountains online and wanted their own version of them.
Bobbi’s tables were full. The counter had two open stools. The kitchen noise carried all the way to the door. I took a seat at the counter and picked up a menu I didn’t need.
Riley came out of the kitchen carrying two plates and a ticket tucked under her arm. Even in the middle of a full floor, she moved like she had a system. Efficient without looking rushed.
She set the plates down at a booth, said something that made the couple laugh, and was already turning back before they finished thanking her.
She’d clearly been doing this a long time—long enough that waiting tables had become muscle memory.
She moved through the room like she knew where everything was going to be before she got there.
Lauralie said something to her from the end of the counter. Riley nodded, pivoted, and grabbed a carafe on her way past without breaking stride. She made it to me eventually.
“Harlan,” she said. The way she said my name was careful, like she was still deciding what to do with me. “What can I get you?”
“Just coffee and the short stack.”
She turned the mug over in front of me and poured. I watched her, and I didn’t bother pretending I wasn’t watching.
Her hair was pulled back for work. Two buttons undone at the collar of her blouse. There was a small scar on her chin—barely visible—that I hadn’t noticed the day before.
I noticed it now.
“Be up in a few minutes,” she said, already moving again.
The rush stayed heavy for the better part of an hour. I ate my pancakes without hurrying, drank my coffee, and watched Riley work.
She was good.
Better than good.
A man at the window table sent his eggs back, and she handled it without fuss—no apology spiral, no defensiveness. Just a calm nod and a quick, “We’ll get that fixed for you,” already calling the correction to the kitchen before she’d even reached the window.
A kid knocked a glass of juice off the counter, and she had a rag on the spill before the father was halfway out of his chair.
There was a quiet competence to her that I recognized immediately.
I’d spent ten years hiring for it—the ability to stay functional when things went sideways, to keep the machine running without making everyone aware of the effort.
My mug was three-quarters empty when she appeared at my elbow and topped it off. I hadn’t flagged her down. Hadn’t held up the cup. She just noticed.
She set the carafe on the counter and looked at me with those careful eyes.
“You take it black. No sugar, no cream—you didn’t touch the little bowl Lauralie put out.”
A beat.
“You also haven’t looked at your phone once since you sat down, which is statistically unusual for a man I’m guessing to be in his thirties.”
I smiled at that. “I don’t like my phone much.”
“Most people are dependent on them.”
“Most people are,” I agreed. “I find it more useful to pay attention to the world around me.”
She studied me for a moment, like she was deciding whether that was a line or just something I’d said. Then she refilled Lauralie’s customer two seats down and disappeared back onto the floor.
I sat with my coffee and let my eyes move around the room.
I’d already picked up a few things about her.
Her ring finger was bare. She drove a small white sedan parked near the front door of the inn. And earlier, when the big round table paid out, she’d slipped the tip into her apron pocket…then two minutes later quietly folded half of it and slid it to Lauralie when she thought no one was looking.
The noticing part was normal.
I’d built a company from a two-man operation in a rented room in Austin into something big enough to get acquired for more money than I’d ever realistically spend.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen because you’re the smartest guy in the room.
It happens because you pay attention—to rooms, to people, to the details that tell you how things really work before anyone says a word.
Observation was just how my brain ran.
What wasn’t normal was what those observations were doing to me.
Because the same conclusion kept showing up, steady and unavoidable, before I’d even decided I was looking for one. The instinct that had carried me through all of it—the one that told me when something was real and when it was just noise—wasn’t giving me noise right now.
I stayed until the rush started to thin. Not hovering. Just finishing my coffee, reading the local paper someone had left two stools down.
When Riley finally slowed long enough to lean against the counter for a second, she looked like someone who’d been on her feet for three hours and wasn’t about to admit it. “You’re still here,” she said.
“I’m a slow eater.”
She glanced at empty plate, which had been empty for forty-five minutes.
“I had a lot on my mind,” I said.
One corner of her mouth moved. “What do people think about in Wildwood Valley?”
“Trails, mostly. I was thinking about the waterfall hike.” I looked at her. “I mentioned it yesterday. The wildflowers.”
“You did mention it.”
“Trail’s about forty minutes from here. Easy grade, good payoff. Waterfall’s running high right now because of the spring melt.”
I turned my coffee cup in my hands.
“Your shift ends at two. The light on that trail is best in the late afternoon.”
She was quiet for a moment, and I let her be quiet. Pushing wasn’t the move. She’d had someone push her around for long enough. I could tell that much already.
“You do this trail often?” she asked.
“I’ve done it a hundred times.”
“So it’s not a you-need-a-guide situation.”
“You don’t need a guide,” I agreed. “You could do it yourself, no problem. I’m just offering company.”
I paused.
“And someone to tell you the names of things, if you want them.”
She looked at me steadily, doing that thing she did where she seemed to be running a quiet calculation behind her eyes. I got the feeling she’d learned young to be careful about what she agreed to, and careful about who she trusted, and I didn’t mind her taking her time.
“The wildflowers,” she said finally. “That’s why it’s called the Wildflower Festival.”
“The whole mountain turns over in spring. There are species up here you won’t see anywhere else—some of them have ranges of a few hundred square feet. Just growing in one spot on earth, as far as anyone knows. And if you don’t know where to look, you’ll walk right past them.”
She was quiet again. Something in her expression had shifted, though.
“You really do know where to look,” she said. It wasn’t skeptical. It was something closer to curious.
“I do.”
Riley straightened up from the counter and pulled the ties on her apron. She looked at the dining room, at Lauralie already moving through the last few tables with a practiced ease that said she had it covered, and then she looked back at me.
“Two o’clock,” she said. “I’ll need twenty minutes to change.”
She tucked her apron under the counter and went back to her tables.And I picked up my coffee and finished the last of it and thought about a woman who had driven up a mountain alone with everything she owned and started over and hadn’t broken.
I thought about the way she’d handed half her tips to Lauralie without expecting credit for it.
Every instinct I had was saying the same thing, clear as the water coming off those high peaks.
I left Bobbi a good tip and went out to my truck to wait.