Page 113 of Bend Toward the Sun
Come back to Rowan. Now.
“Oh, T.J. Why?” Rowan moaned.
“Be mad at me,” Temperance said. “But you’re not losing him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Rowan
It took a week for Harry to reply to Temperance’s text. His response had simply been:
I can’t.
He’d run, and he meant to stay gone.
Rowan didn’t choose Austin. She didn’t choose Montreal, either. She stayed in the valley throughout the rest of July, hoping Harry would return. Once, she thought she’d seen him from the corner of her eye, and her pulse did double-time. When she turned, it was just Will taking lemonade to Gia as she pulled thistles from her lavender bed.
In mid-August, Rowan started teaching biology as an adjunct professor at one of the universities in the city. Temperance welcomed her back on her couch for a while, but she planned to find a place of her own soon. Maybe she’d commute from Linden. She needed to be somewhere green.
She said goodbye to the Brady family on a rainy day that Harry would have hated. It was as difficult as she’d feared it would be. Ace and Grey both cried, though they perked up when she left her small collection of succulents to their stewardship. Gia made her a batch of chocolate coconut cookies, doublewrapped in portions of six and sealed in a large plasticware container, so she could freeze some and make them last longer. Duncan didn’t show up at her send-off. Instead, he stood at the top of the hill in front of the equipment garage and waved until she was out of sight. Rowan didn’t blame him for avoiding the goodbye. It sucked.
It didn’t take her long to reintegrate into the safe realm of academia. The facilities were fantastic, and her new coworkers were interesting in the earnest, earthy way natural sciences faculty always were—but her mind felt underutilized. Teaching was fun, but for her it was a stale comparison to dirt-dusted skin and muscles hot with delicious fatigue, with butterflies and birds and earthworms for colleagues.
Temperance’s hours were long, so Rowan rarely saw her in the evenings. The solitude she’d prized for the past decade now felt ominous and oppressive.
Like any metamorphosis, life in Vesper Valley had often been uncomfortable. But she’d emerged transformed, and there was no going back.
Eventually, she tried to contact Harry. For weeks, she sent texts and called. He never answered. Everything she knew about his new life, she knew secondhand via Temperance, but those details were brief and obviously carefully curated. He was back at the practice his friend Sinclair had founded. In the meager spare time he had, he was training for a half-marathon. The most heartening tidbit Temperance had relayed was that he was living with a friend rather than getting a place of his own. That, to Rowan, signaled he hadn’t fully recommitted to a life in Los Angeles, and she clung to the possibility like a honeybee on the summer’s last sunflower.
Anytime Temperance tried to bring Rowan up in conversation, he abruptly disengaged. He never asked for news abouther. Not even a generic inquiry into how she was doing, and it stung.
Soon, Rowan stopped trying to contact Harry herself. Grief sat like a stone on her chest, keeping her lungs from fully inflating. Some days, the ache made it hard to stand up straight.
The meager well of information she had via Temperance also dried up by the first of September. T.J. was quietly sympathetic and strangely apologetic, as though it was somehow her fault Harry didn’t want to give her anything to pass along. It made Rowan feel even more sad. More ashamed.
She really was never going to see Harry Brady again.
Then, on September sixth, she got a text from Arden:
Someone we both love will be home for Dad’s birthday. See you soon?
TWO EVENINGS LATER,Rowan showed up at the Brady house. Arden answered the door and pulled her into a tight, quick hug. “I knew you’d come. This is going to be fun.”
“Is he here?” Rowan asked. A forceful little jet of panic leaked through her, like air rushing from a pinpricked balloon.
“No, he can’t get here until tomorrow. You can breathe.”
It was cool and rainy. The den blazed with lovely warmth from the fireplace. Gia was curled up on a plush rocker with a book, and Maren scowled at a knitting project in her lap. Duncan sat with Mercy, Patrick, and Nate at a table topped by an elaborate board game. Will paced the room with the newest Brady, baby Leo.
Rowan leaned into the molding around the entryway, silent. Someday, Harry would be the head of his own family, bouncing his grandchild around a cozy room like this, with his lifetimepartner by his side. She wanted it to be her. Tears burned like acid in the corners of her eyes.
“You going to come in, Rosie?” Mercy asked without looking up from the game. After Grey began calling her Rosie earlier in the summer, everyone started to, and it made her heart feel ten sizes too big for her chest. “We have room for one more over here.”
Rowan wrung her hands. “No thanks. I’m really tired. Long day.”
Gia peered at her over reading glasses. “Welcome home, love.”
Home.