Page 97 of Bend Toward the Sun

“Cloud tide,” she whispered.

“Hmm?” Harry murmured.

The words she really wanted to say to him were elusive—it would have been easier to grasp a handful of the vapor swirling around their legs. She squinted into the fog, tamping down a flicker of frustration. “I don’t really have the vocabulary for the kinds of things you need to hear me say.”

He reached down and hooked a single finger around her palm. Their hands slid together like two halves of a puzzle box. “I told you months ago, I don’t need you tosayanything—”

Gently, Rowan said, “Stop talking, Harry. This is me trying.”

“Okay.”

A pearl of shame existed deep inside her, buried and smoothed by years of avoidance. Now it ached to be expelled, but she hesitated, balking at the impulse to give him the kind of access to her she’d never be able to take back. Once you cracked open an oyster, it didn’t shut again.

She began slowly. “I grew up on the coast with my grandma Edie and my mother, Sybil, you know that much. Cloud tide is what Edie always called the banks of fog coming off the Atlantic.”

Harry’s hand tightened around hers.Tell me more.

“When I was little, Edie told me my dad was a deep-sea fisherman. She always said the cloud tide made it unsafe for him to navigate into shore, and as a child, that seemed a perfectly logical reason why he was never around. She made up all these fantastical stories of his adventures and heroism, but she told me to never talk to Sybil about him. Edie didn’t want her to worry,she’d say. I believed every one of those stories. I’d sneak down to the water sometimes, looking for the ship lights offshore. Wishing he would sail through the fog and take me with him.”

Rowan turned to face the lake. Harry gently dug his thumb into the fleshy part of her palm, massaging away the ache from yesterday’s vineyard work. She closed her eyes and made a small sound of pleasure.

“After Edie died, I asked Sybil about him. I was twelve. Thought I could handle whatever she’d tell me.” Rowan was silent for a moment before she could continue. “Sybillaughed. Told me she wasn’t surewhomy father was. Could’ve been any of several men, she said. It wasn’t something she was upset or embarrassed about. It just—was.”

Harry’s touch eased to a caress.

“I was used to Sybil’s insensitivity. It didn’t really matter by then who my father was. What hurt the most was—Edie’s stories had all been lies. I was so mad at her, Harry. It took me a year to realize she’d simply been trying to protect my little heart. Eventually, I had the thought—if Sybil didn’t know who my father was, maybe there was a chance hecouldbe all those things Edie told me he was. From then on, every time I saw the cloud tide, I felt her. It became like—like a symbol of the way she shielded me in my loneliness. It felt like hope.”

When she faltered, Harry’s hand tightened on hers, an accord between nerve endings.I’m here. You’re not alone.

“Until I came here, I hadn’t seen fog like this since I was a kid. I hadn’t felt—” Her voice wavered, and her belly roiled like she was on one of Edie’s imaginary ships. “Your family—” she floundered, “Harry, I—”

She couldn’t say the words.

“Hey.” Harry released her hand so he could cup her face. His expression was serene. Buoyant. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say the words for me to hear them.”

He kissed her hard and fast, then abruptly released her, bending down to slip off his shoes. Then he shucked his shirt over his head and tossed it to the ground.

“Let’s go,” he said, dropping his shorts and his boxers to the grass.

“What?” Rowan sputtered.

“I said, let’sgo.” Harry raced toward the lake.

The sun over the tree line had burned away some of the mist on the vineyard slope above. Rowan felt her confidence dissolving along with it. Fog still swirled on the surface of Lake Vesper.

“Someone will see us,” she yelled after him.

“Let them,” he shouted back. His bare ass disappeared into the mist.

Rowan crouched to gather his things, still warm from his body. Once again, Harry had rescued her from her inability to articulate her emotions, and that made her want to say the words even more.

“I love you, Harry.”

She didn’t believe in fate. But the foundation of a life did move into place, piece by piece, without a person realizing it until they were much later standing on the solid form of it. Her foundation would change again later today when she boarded a plane for Texas. Only now, that foundation felt shifty and unstable, the way sand rushes out from underfoot when you stand in the ocean surf.

Her life was on an unanticipated trajectory now, and her true north was no longer where—or what—it used to be.

In the distance, a splash, as Harry cannonballed into the lake.