23. Vaughn
TWENTY-THREE
VAUGHN
Harvest and Root’s location at the edge of town makes its windows the perfect frame for the sun setting over the mountains. In a few short months, the green view will be replaced with white, but for now it couldn’t be a more perfect time to bring Silas out.
He picks up the menu and leafs through the pages.
“The menu changes most days,” I tell him. “It depends on what the local farms can supply. Almost nothing on that menu came from more than fifty miles away.”
He looks up. “Almost nothing?”
“There are things you can’t grow easily in Colorado.”
“That makes sense. This is extraordinary. Roasted beet from Clayton’s farm. They actually say where the produce comes from.”
“Yes. It also promotes local businesses. ‘If you like the beets, then you might want to buy some from Clayton at the Saturday farmers market’—that sort of thing.”
The server comes and takes our orders. When she’s gone, Silas leans back in his chair and gazes around the restaurant. Today it’s full. I managed to get a table because they had a cancellation, which feels like a minor miracle during a festival week.
“Do you come here often?” he asks.
“Once a month with my team. It’s become a tradition. We come here and eat together and talk about things that aren’t work,” I say. “Or try to. We usually end up talking about work anyway, but the intention is there.”
“Always here?”
“Most of the time. This place is special because what we do in the lab is about this. About food that comes from where you are, that’s grown in healthy soil, that reaches people without traveling halfway around the world first. When we eat here, it reminds us why the research matters.
Not the publications or the conferences or the grant applications.
This. A meal made from things that grew nearby. ”
Silas is quiet for a moment.
“What you do is really important,” he finally says, his voice even and direct. “I want you to know that I’m really proud of you.”
I’ve received professional recognition, peer reviews, and conference feedback. Rowan has said he’s proud of me in that warm but slightly awkward way only a child can manage. But I’ve never had someone say I’m really proud of you how a lover would. I don’t know what to do with it.
“Thank you,” I say, which is inadequate but all I have.
He holds my gaze for a moment, then picks up his water glass and looks out the window.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, after a while.
He turns back to me. “Of course.”
“How did you end up with Rowan at college? I never asked because I didn’t want to pry, or more accurately, I didn’t want to get that close. To knowing you. But I always wondered. Rowan wasn’t even nineteen when you met. You were older.”
Silas sets down his water glass.
“I was twenty-two,” he says. “I started late.”
“Why?”
He’s quiet for a moment, like he’s considering not how much to share but what to share.
“I grew up in foster care,” he says.
My heart breaks for him.
“My parents died when I was young. I don’t have any memory of them. I went into the system, and I stayed in the system until I aged out.” He says it without emotion, like he’s recounting a fact. “I was almost adopted a few times.”
“What happened?” I ask, carefully.
Something moves through his expression.
“I remembered things,” he says.
“Remembered things?”
“I was an inquisitive child,” he says. “I noticed things, and I asked about them. I didn’t understand that some things weren’t my business.
” He takes a drink of water. “There was a foster mother—I was about eight—who had a man come to the house when her husband was away. I asked the husband about it when he came home. Not to cause problems. I just thought it was strange that this man came every day. When he asked, I told him in great detail about the other man’s face, his car, what he said.
I couldn’t not remember.” He repositions his silverware.
“Her husband filed for divorce, and I was moved to a different foster family.
“With another family, I overheard something the foster parents said to another child in the house. I asked about it at school because I didn’t understand why it was a secret. The foster parents were investigated.” He shifts in his chair. “I was moved again.”
“Silas—”
“I wasn’t trying to cause problems,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that tells me this is something he’s needed to say for a long time.
“I was just … I couldn’t help it. The things I saw and heard didn’t leave my mind.
They were just there. And I was a child and didn’t understand that some things you keep to yourself. ”
The server arrives with the food.
We pause while she sets everything down. The roasted beet with the goat cheese, the lamb that came from a farm three valleys over, and the bread that’s still warm. She asks if we need anything and we say no, so she leaves.
Silas picks up his fork. I echo his movement, and we begin to eat.
Then he says, “I have a photographic memory.”
I set down my fork.
“It’s a rare condition,” he says. “It was undiagnosed for a long time. I can remember everything I experience. Everything I see, hear, read. If I was present for it in any way, it’s stored. Permanently and in detail.” He stares down at his food.
What must it mean to carry the full weight of everything he’s experienced forever? Nothing lost, every moment of every day of thirty-five years permanently accessible? My heart breaks all over again at the enormity of Silas’s burden.
“Eventually, I learned to keep things to myself,” he says.
“I learned which things to say and which things to hold. But by then I’d been moved enough times that the pattern was established.
No one wanted to keep me.” He says it without self-pity, which is somehow worse.
“When I aged out of the system, I got a job. Several jobs. I worked and saved and studied at the library after work because I knew that when I finally got to college, I wanted to be able to focus. I didn’t want to be working two jobs and studying. I wanted to just … learn.”
“How long did it take?”
“Five years,” he says. “I got there at twenty-two.”
I’ve known Silas as a person for a long time, but I feel like this gives me a new perspective of who he really is.
“That’s when I met Rowan,” he says. “He was in one of my classes. He decided we were going to be friends before I’d agreed to it, which is very Rowan.
” A small smile. “I thought he was a sweet kid. I didn’t have many other friends, so I didn’t mind.
But then I realized Rowan was different. He’s a genuinely good person.”
“He is.”
“I thought I was protecting him,” Silas says.
“I told myself I was there to make sure no one took advantage of him. He was young and trusting, and I was older … but it was the other way around. Rowan saved me. By deciding I was worth being friends with. By just showing up with annoying consistency.” He looks at me.
“He’s the first person who ever did that. ”
I reach across the table and put my hand over his.
He drops his gaze to our hands.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “I remember the first time Rowan mentioned you.” I gently squeeze Silas’s hand.
“He called me and said, ‘Dad, I met someone. He’s older than me and he’s kind of intense, but I think he needs a friend, and I’m going to be his friend.
’ He said it like it was already decided. ”
Silas laughs. “That’s Rowan.”
“He was always helping someone. Every phase of his life, there was someone he’d decide needed him.” I pause. “It’s no wonder he ended up at the FBI. His fear of blood stopped him going into medicine; otherwise, he’d be a general practitioner.”
“A doctor? Really?”
“He fainted in ninth-grade biology during the frog dissection. The teacher called me at work.”
Silas laughs again, and I think about a twenty-two-year-old man who spent five years working and studying in libraries to get himself to college and an eighteen-year-old boy who decided that man needed a friend and didn’t give him a choice about it.
My son.
I want tonight to be a fun night, so I change the conversation to the topic of the festival and ask Silas how his stint at the baked goods stand went earlier. He tells me about the struggle to stop himself from eating everything, but he loved all the nice people he met.
After dinner, we head to the Ridgeline. We’ve barely made it past the door when Chris appears.
“Silas,” he says with his usual level of energy. “We need to talk about the competition.”
“What’s up?”
Chris leans in. “Three of today’s entries have been disqualified,” he says, his voice slightly lowered.
“Why?” I ask.
“The judging panel discovered that two of the entries had been … artificially enhanced.”
“What?”
“Structurally modified,” Chris says. “Someone had used a mold during the growing process. To achieve the specific shape.”
“I take it that’s not allowed,” Silas says.
Chris shakes his head.
“But isn’t the competition a new addition? How would they know?”
He shrugs, like that’s an irrelevant point.
“They cheated. The Knot Today panel was not pleased. Margaret—she’s the one with the clipboard—said, and I’m quoting directly, ‘I have seen enough of the real thing in my eighty-three years to know the difference between genuine and constructed, and I will not have my professional judgment insulted.’”
Silas and I share a look, and it’s clear we’re both struggling to keep it together, but Chris is on a roll.
“Anyway,” he says, clapping Silas on the shoulder. “May the best vegetable win. Sir Squash-a-nova is a genuine contender.” He heads back to where Hux is waiting for him with a drink in each hand.
We make our way to the bar. “What do you want to drink?” I ask Silas.
“Soda is good. I definitely don’t want to drink alcohol tonight. This vacation is one long, indulgent feast, and I’m not sure my body is built for it.”
I catch Dante’s eye, hold up two fingers, and point to the soda, and he nods and starts pouring.
“I think your body is perfectly fine.”
“Ditto, Mr. Reeves. Or is it Dr. Reeves? Oohh, doctor. Please tell me you’re a doctor. We could have so much fun role-playing that.”
I shake my head and hand him the soda Dante places on the bar. I am definitely not entertaining that conversation in a venue filled with Pine Ridge inhabitants.
From where we’re standing, I can see Tess and Clayton at a table near the window, Kai and Atlas on the other side of the bar, Chris holding court near the display room entrance, and the Knot Today folks visible through the open door, already positioned for the evening’s judging.
I check every face in sight for the mysterious man from last night, but he’s not among them. I don’t know if that’s reassuring.
Silas moves off to chat with Tess, and Dale is on his way over, so I stay where I am. He’s out of uniform tonight.
“Still working on what you brought me,” he says quietly.
“The attorney inquiry is moving slowly. They’re not cooperative, which in itself is telling.
But I want you to know that my guys are keeping an eye on things.
On you and your guest.” He glances toward Silas.
“You’re not as alone in this as it might feel. ”
“Thank you, Dale.”
He nods and moves back to where his wife has joined the conversation with Tess and Silas.
I stand with my soda and think about the photograph in the file at home, the man across the street last night, and the last warning on the back of a photograph I haven’t told Silas about yet.
I should tell him, but I can’t bring myself to do it, and I don’t even know why.
When I finally join the group, Silas puts his empty glass on the table and turns to me. “Dance with me.”
I laugh. “I haven’t danced in—”
“Probably a hundred years,” Silas says. “Come on.”
We start with distance between us. The eyes of Pine Ridge—more specifically Tess—are on us. We dance with the space between us that the music allows, considering the floor is packed with people. We’re just two more people dancing, and it’s fine.
And then it isn’t fine. Because gradually the physics of a crowded dance floor push us closer. A step here, a turn there, the crowd pressing in, and then Silas’s hand is at my waist and I have mine at his shoulder and we’re just here.
He looks relaxed and happy.
I think about him helping at the festival stand this morning.
At the pumpkin weigh-in yesterday, taking photographs for Rowan.
I think about him in the lab in the white coat with the sleeves rolled up, asking Priya good questions.
I think about him in the vegetable patch in the late summer sun.
I think about how completely he has become part of this place in a few weeks.
And then I think something I haven’t let myself think since I was eighteen years old and thought I had it all figured out.
I’m in love with him.
I’m in love with Silas.
The realization lands heavy on my chest, followed immediately by the stab of the particular cruelty of timing. He’s leaving in a week.