Chapter 50
Rowan’s mom’s house was quiet after everyone finally left.
Micah had delivered the news about Vince’s arrest two hours earlier. The LA detectives had moved fast once the local police transmitted Lauren’s statement and the contents of the hard drive.
Ramirez had called Rowan directly. Wes had watched her face while she listened, watched the careful composure she’d been holding since she’d almost been killed finally loosen at the edges.
It wasn’t over. There would be statements and hearings and the long grinding machinery of a case like this as it worked its way toward something that looked like justice. But Vince Furlough wasn’t untouchable anymore.
That was enough for tonight.
Caleb, Naomi, and Grace had gone back to Refuge Cove. Ben had been found in the back of the car the two hired hands had driven. Lauren had been taken to give a formal statement.
Now it was just Wes and Rowan and Remington.
He found her in the backyard.
She stood at the edge of the woods where an old live oak spread wide and low over the grass, its branches reaching in every direction. The last of the daylight caught the underside of the leaves and turned them gold.
She didn’t hear him coming. Or maybe she did and didn’t turn anyway.
He stopped beside her. So did Remington.
Neither spoke a moment.
“I used to climb this tree,” Rowan finally said. “I could get up to the third branch before my mom noticed I was gone.”
“Third branch.” Wes looked up through the canopy. “I’m impressed.”
“You should be. It was harder than it looked.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Sarah always told on me.”
The mention of her sister landed gently between them. It wasn’t exactly grief. It was more like tenderness.
Wes looked at the trunk.
There, just above eye level, half obscured by bark that had grown and shifted over the years were two sets of initials inside a lopsided heart.
W.B. + R.K.
He reached up and ran his thumb across the letters. “I remember doing this.”
Rowan looked at the carving. “I remember you doing it too. I was terrified you were going to cut yourself with that pocketknife.”
“I almost did.” His lips twitched with a smile.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I was seventeen. I was trying to impress you.”
She laughed—a real one, quiet and unguarded. It was the kind that had been rare this week.
Wes looked at her. “The first time I kissed you . . .”
“Was under this tree,” she finished.
He smiled. “I almost didn’t do it. I must have talked myself into it and out of it four times.”
Rowan blinked. “You were nervous?”
“I was terrified.”
“I had no idea.” She shook her head slowly. “I thought you were the most confident person I’d ever met.”
“I was confident about everything except you.” He looked back at the initials. “That was always the thing about you, Rowan. You were the one thing I could never quite get steady footing around.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I remember the kiss differently.”
“How do you remember it?”
Her gaze moved up through the branches before coming back to him. “I remember thinking that nothing in my life had ever felt that certain before.” She paused. “And then being terrified of how certain it felt.”
Wes held her gaze. “So you ran.”
“Eventually.” Her voice dropped. “Not that night. That night I just stood here and tried to memorize everything.”
The evening went still around them. Somewhere in the distance a bird moved through the tree line, and the oak shifted slightly overhead, and everything else was quiet.
“I need to tell you something,” Rowan whispered.
“Okay.”
She turned toward him fully. The fading light caught the tiredness in her face and the thing underneath the tiredness that had been there since she’d come home—the part of her that had been trying to find its way back to something real.
“Leaving you was a mistake,” she said. “Not leaving Virginia. Not going to Hollywood. Leaving you.”
He said nothing.
She held his gaze without flinching. “I told myself I was choosing my career. But I think I was just scared of how much you meant to me. I’ve spent ten years trying to build a life that would feel as certain as standing under this tree felt when I was with you.
” Her voice thinned slightly. “Nothing ever came close.”
Wes looked at her a long moment before slowly exhaling. “There’s never been anyone like you.” The words came out quieter than he intended, rougher. “Not once. Not even close. I tried. I want you to know that. I didn’t spend ten years waiting around. I genuinely tried to move on.”
“I know.”
“But you were always—” He stopped and looked at the initials again. “You were always just there. In the back of everything.”
Rowan’s eyes were bright now. She blinked once and looked away briefly before coming back.
“I don’t know what this looks like,” she said, pointing between herself and him. “Practically speaking. You’re in Baltimore. I’m—I don’t even know where I am right now.” A breath of a laugh. “My life in LA is a disaster.”
“We don’t have to figure that out tonight.”
“No.” She looked up at him. “We don’t.”
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, his hand resting against her cheek. “Tonight, we’re just here.”
She leaned into his hand the smallest amount. “Wes?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop talking.”
He smiled.
Then he kissed her.
Rowan had forgotten what kissing Wes felt like.
Not the fact of it—she’d carried the memory of kissing Wes Bennett for ten years. She’d thought about it more than she’d ever admitted to anyone, including herself.
But the actual feeling of it.
That she’d forgotten.
The kiss was gentle at first—unhurried, the way Wes did everything, giving her time to change her mind if she wanted to.
She didn’t want to.
She leaned into it instead, her hand finding the front of his jacket.
As the kiss deepened, something that had been wound tight inside her chest for longer than she could honestly account for finally, finally released.
When they separated, neither of them moved very far.
Wes’s forehead came to rest against hers, and they stood like that beneath the old oak with the evening going dark around them and the initials carved into the bark just above their heads.
W.B. + R.K.
A seventeen-year-old boy with a pocketknife and sweating palms, apparently.
She smiled at the thought.
“What?” Wes murmured.
“You were nervous.” She pulled back just enough to look at him. “This whole time I thought that first kiss was effortless for you.”
“Nothing about you has ever been effortless.”
She tilted her head. “Is that a complaint?”
“No.” His thumb moved briefly along her jaw. “It’s the opposite of a complaint.”
She looked at him in the fading light—at the steadiness she’d been leaning on since she’d come back, at the patience he’d offered without being asked, at the man who’d driven through mountain roads and burst into her mom’s old house.
She’d spent ten years looking for something bigger and better than what she’d left behind.
All along, it had been right here waiting for her.
“I meant what I said,” she murmured. “About leaving being a mistake.”
“I know you did.”
“I just want to make sure you heard it.”
Something wound through his expression. “I heard it, Rowan.”
She nodded once and looked up through the oak branches at the sky going dark above them. Stars were beginning to appear at the edges—faint at first, then brighter as the last of the light faded.
There were things they hadn’t resolved. Real things.
She had a career in pieces three thousand miles away and a legal process just beginning and a life she’d need to figure out how to put back together or walk away from entirely.
Wes had a company in Baltimore and a dog and a life that didn’t currently include her in any practical sense.
None of that was small.
But none of it felt impossible either.
Not here. Not under this tree. Not with his hand still warm against her face and the carved initials above them like something that had simply been waiting all this time for them to come back and find it.
“We have things to figure out,” she said.
“We do.”
“It won’t be simple.”
“No.” He gazed at her. “But I’ve never been interested in simple.”
She smiled—a real one, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than performance and deeper than relief. “Neither have I.”
Rowan leaned into Wes’s side and looked up at the stars appearing one by one in the darkening sky.
She didn’t reach for her phone.
She didn’t check for headlines.
She just stood there beneath the live oak with the man she should never have left and let herself be exactly where she was.
For the first time in a very long time, that was enough.