Chapter 3 Riley
RILEY
Harlan drove the way he did everything else—without rushing, without explaining himself, easy with the silence in a way that made the silence feel easy for me too.
I’d changed into jeans and a light jacket and my most broken-in sneakers, and I’d sat on the edge of the inn bed for a full minute talking myself out of texting him some excuse before I talked myself back into going.
I was in a new town. I had a job. A hot-as-heck man who knew the mountain wanted to show me wildflowers, and I was twenty-three years old. I’d spent enough of my life finding reasons not to do things.
I went.
The trailhead was a gravel pull-off about eight miles from town, the mountain rising up on both sides of the road and the tree cover dropping the temperature by several degrees the moment we stepped into it.
Harlan handed me a water bottle from his pack without making a thing of it, and we started walking.
He hadn’t been wrong about the trail. It was easy—a steady, gentle grade with good footing and the sound of water getting louder the farther in we went.
But “easy” didn’t mean “plain.” The forest here was doing something I’d never seen a forest do before. Every few steps, there was something new. A spray of pale purple blooms spilling over a mossy rock, a cluster of white flowers so small I would have walked past them if Harlan hadn’t paused.
“Trout lily,” he said, crouching down near a patch of mottled leaves. “Takes seven years to bloom. Most of what you see out here—just the leaves, no flower—those are still years away.”
I crouched next to him. The flower was yellow, small, nodding on its stem like it wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
“Seven years,” I said.
“Some things take the time they take.”
He stood, and we kept walking, and I turned that over in my mind for a while.
We talked the way you talk when you’re moving through somewhere beautiful—easily, without the pressure of eye contact, thoughts arriving in the rhythm of footsteps.
He asked how my first shift had gone, and I told him honestly—the egg situation, the spilled juice, the woman at table four who’d changed her order four times and then tipped fifteen percent.
He listened with unhurried attention and said the woman at table four came in every Saturday and was the same every time.
“Lauralie has a system for her,” he said.
“She told me. I should have asked first.”
“You handled it yourself. That counts for something.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything, and he seemed fine with that too.
The waterfall announced itself before we saw it—a low, constant roar growing through the trees until we came around a bend and there it was, dropping maybe thirty feet down a dark rock face into a wide pool that was the color of cold glass.
The spray reached us where we stood. I stopped walking and just looked at it.
“Worth it?” Harlan asked.
“Very worth it.”
We found a flat rock near the pool and sat, and the conversation went quiet for a while in the way it can when a place earns the silence. I ate one of the granola bars he’d brought without being asked if I wanted one. He stretched his legs out and looked at the water.
“You mentioned your father yesterday,” he said eventually. Not pressing. Just opening a door and standing back from it.
I’d been waiting for this, I realized. Bracing for the questions, the way people always wanted the whole story once they had a thread of it.
“He’s a pastor,” I said. “Small town in East Tennessee. Small enough that everybody’s business is everybody’s business and the pastor’s daughter’s business is the Sunday sermon.”
I picked at the granola bar wrapper.
“I got a tattoo my junior year of college. Didn’t tell anyone for two years, and then I came home after graduation and told my parents because I can’t not tell them things. It’s a problem I have.”
Harlan didn’t say anything.
“It’s small,” I said. “It’s on my hip. No one would ever see it unless—”
I stopped.
“The point is, it wasn’t what they saw. It was what it meant to them. My father said some things he can’t unsay, and I left.”
“Where do you go from there,” Harlan said quietly. It wasn’t a question exactly.
“Apparently, you go to Wildwood Valley.” I looked at the falls. “I saw the listing and I looked up the town and there were pictures of the mountains in spring, and I just—it felt like somewhere I could breathe.”
I paused.
“That sounds dramatic,” I added.
“It doesn’t.”
I looked at him. He was watching the water, not me, which made it easier.
“Do you want to know what the tattoo is?” I asked.
“If you want to tell me.”
“It’s a wildflower.”
I felt him go still next to me, just slightly.
“I got it because I wanted something that meant I was growing toward something instead of just—standing still, waiting to be approved of. My dad saw wildflower and heard wild. That’s the whole story.”
Harlan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Can I see it?”
The way he asked it—no pressure, no performance behind it, just a man asking a real question—made it easy to say yes.
I shifted on the rock and lifted the hem of my jacket and the edge of my shirt, and he leaned over and looked at it the way he looked at the trout lily. Like it was something small and specific and worth crouching down to see properly.
“It’s a fire pink,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “What?”
“The flower. That’s a fire pink. Silene virginica. They grow on these slopes.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were warm and very close. “Your father called it wild. I’d call it native.”
“It’s like me,” I said quietly. “I was a lot more virgin than wild. He just couldn’t see the difference.”
Something moved through his expression—not pity, nothing that soft. More like recognition.
“Most people can’t, when they’ve already made up their minds.”
I pulled my shirt back down, and we sat close enough that his shoulder was an inch from mine. Neither of us moved. The words had come out of the same place the tattoo story had—that part of me that couldn’t carry things quietly for long—and now they were just sitting there between us.
“Does that change anything?” I asked. “For you.”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know. It changes how people look at me sometimes.”
“People look at you however they’ve decided to look at you before you open your mouth,” he said. “That’s not about you.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“There’s no rush, Riley. Not for anything. You set the pace, whatever that looks like, and I’ll follow it.”
I believed him.
That was the part that scared me, a little—how easy it was to believe him. I’d been careful my whole life about who I believed, and I’d been right to be careful, and here was this man I’d known for one day, and I believed him without having to work for it.
“How are you this calm about everything?” I asked.
Something shifted in his expression. Almost a smile, but quieter.
“I’m not always calm. I spent a lot of years very far from calm.”
He looked at the water.
“I had a company. Tech. Austin. I built it for ten years and sold it and walked away and moved to the mountains, and everyone I knew thought I’d lost my mind.”
I stared at him. “You built a tech company.”
“Mm.”
“And sold it.”
“For enough to build a homestead and stop looking at screens.” He glanced over at me. “I told you I don’t like my phone.”
I laughed before I could stop myself—a real one, surprised out of me—and he smiled, finally, a full one, and it rearranged his face into something that made it hard to look away.
The sun had dropped behind the ridge and the spray off the falls was cool on my skin, and I was sitting on a rock next to a man who’d built an empire and traded it for a mountain and thought my tattoo was native and not wild, and I was not moving away from him.
Not even a little.