YARA I don’t promise Nola anything.
Yesterday afternoon, in the garden, her fingers dug into my wrist and her eyes went wild enough to frighten me, and I meant to.
Promise me you’ll stay away from him.
But by the time she let go and walked back toward the house, something harder had settled into me instead, a cold, quiet resolve.
Nineteen years of being handled instead of told the truth.
I’m done accepting warnings from people who won’t explain themselves.
I’m tired of flinching at shadows other people refuse to name.
So the next afternoon, when I find Dean alone on the back porch, I ask him to come with me before I’ve fully decided to.
“Where?” he asks, his voice low and curious, setting down whatever paper he’d been pretending to read.
“Somewhere nobody else goes.” “What are we running from?” he presses, careful beneath the question, like he already suspects the answer involves more than just needing air.
“Nothing.” It isn’t true, not entirely.
I’ve spent two days now carrying claw marks and a mother’s wild-eyed warning, and some reckless part of me wants to see, up close, whether the man causing all of it deserves any of it.
“I just want to show you something.” He studies me a moment, like he’s deciding whether to push.
He doesn’t.
He just follows, and something about the ease of it, the way he trusts me without needing a reason, loosens a knot I didn’t know I was carrying.
I take him down past the stables, past the tree line where the manicured part of the property gives way to something wilder, until we reach the bend in the Ogeechee where the water slows and goes glassy and quiet.
I’ve never brought anyone here.
Not Rhett, not Caroline back when Caroline still spoke to me, not a single soul in nineteen years.
It’s the one place on this whole estate that’s only ever been mine, the one corner of my life nobody else has touched or claimed or ruined.
“This is my place,” I tell him, and something about saying it out loud feels like handing him something fragile, like I’ve cracked open a rib and shown him what’s underneath.
Dean looks around at the water, the overhanging cypress, the quiet, and something in his face eases, the same way it eased that first night in his study with Beau, like he’s found a room that doesn’t ask him to perform.
For a moment he just breathes, and I watch the tension I hadn’t fully noticed drain slowly out of his shoulders.
Then, without a word, he walks straight into the river.
Fully clothed.
Boots and all, wading in up to his knees like the water’s an old friend he hasn’t seen in years.
I stand on the bank staring at him, half horrified, half something else entirely, something warm and unguarded that I don’t have time to examine.
“What are you doing?” I ask, my voice caught somewhere between alarm and disbelief.
“Standing in a river,” he answers, glancing back at me, something boyish surfacing in his face that I haven’t seen before, none of the careful weight he usually carries.
“Best way I know to actually be somewhere.” “You’re going to ruin your boots,” I warn, my arms crossing on instinct.
“They’ve survived worse,” he says, unbothered.
He wades out a little further, arms spread slightly for balance against the current, and the sheer, absurd picture of him, a grown man standing waist-deep in the Ogeechee in his good clothes, startles a laugh out of me before I can stop it.
A real one.
The kind that comes from somewhere low in my chest and takes my whole face with it, nothing careful or performed in it at all, the kind of laugh I haven’t let myself have in this family in longer than I can remember.
It surprises me almost as much as it seems to surprise him, this sound rising up out of some buried, younger version of myself.
Dean goes very still in the water.
“Do that again,” he says, quiet and urgent, like the words cost him something.
“Do what?” I ask.
“Laugh like nobody’s watching you,” he says, plain and certain.
I go quiet.
Something about the way he says it makes my chest ache in a way I don’t have a name for, a soft, unfamiliar pressure right beneath my sternum.
He wades back toward the bank, closer now, close enough that when he stops, there’s only the width of the shallow water between us, his boots submerged, my feet still dry on the grass above him.
Neither of us moves for a long moment.
The current keeps sliding past his legs, patient and indifferent, while everything in me feels anything but patient.
Then his hand comes up, slow, and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, gentle, like he’s testing whether I’ll let him.
I don’t pull away.
I tilt my face up instead, some old instinct taking over where my better judgment should be, and he leans in, close enough now that I can feel the warmth coming off him even through the cool evening air, close enough that his mouth is an inch from mine, maybe less, and every part of me is leaning toward whatever’s about to happen, wanting it with a certainty that frightens me.
My pulse pounds hard enough that I wonder if he can feel it in the space between us.
A bird screams somewhere in the cypress overhead, sudden and sharp, too close, too timed, like it went off the instant our mouths came within an inch of each other and not a heartbeat before.
We both flinch back at once, the moment shattering as fast as it built.
Dean steps back, one hand dragging through his wet hair, his breath ragged.
“Sorry.
I shouldn’t have…” “Don’t,” I say, faster than I mean to.
“Don’t apologize.” He looks at me, and neither of us says anything else, because there’s nothing left to say that wouldn’t undo whatever just happened between us.
I glance up at the cypress, at the empty branch the bird cried out from and then abandoned, and some part of me wonders whether it screamed because we startled it, or because something startled it first, something that didn’t want to be interrupted any more than we did.
Something has changed regardless, something I can feel in the air between our bodies even standing several feet apart now.
It’s a wire, taut and humming, the kind of distance that only exists between two things that want, badly, to touch.
We walk back to the estate mostly in silence, Dean’s boots squelching with every step, both of us careful not to look at each other too long or too often.
I steal glances anyway, quick ones, cataloguing the wet fabric clinging to his forearms, the flush still faint along his throat.
I’m the one who stops first, near the bend where we stood, glancing back at the riverbank one more time before the tree line swallows the view of it entirely.
That’s when I see them.
Wildflowers, small and white, bloom in a loose cluster right where Dean stood in the shallow water, right where his thumb traced my jaw and his mouth hovered an inch from mine.
Nothing like them grows anywhere else along this stretch of bank.
Nothing like them should be blooming this far past their season, and yet there they are, fresh and open, as if the ground itself had been waiting for exactly this moment to answer back.
I stare at them a long moment, my pulse still not fully settled from the river.
My skin prickles, the hair along my arms lifting despite the warm evening air, and some old, wordless instinct that’s been waking up slowly for weeks now understands with absolute certainty that those flowers have nothing to do with the season at all.
I press my palm flat against my sternum, as if I can hold the feeling still long enough to name it, and for the first time in nineteen years, I wonder if this land has been watching me as closely as I’ve always watched it.