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I’d made pot roast. It was her favorite. I’d started it at noon, after Deb’s car disappeared down the drive, because I’d needed something to do with my hands.

“I think it went really well,” Hazel said, sitting down in her chair by the woodstove. “Don’t you? She loved the bins. She said my armature notes were the most thorough she’d seen from an intern. Shepherd, she said thorough. Dr. Mills doesn’t hand out thorough.”

“She liked your work.”

“She did.” She smiled down at her plate. “She really did.”

I set the bread on the table and sat down across from her. I waited.

“What else did she say?” I asked.

“About me?” Hazel picked up her fork. “Oh, just evaluation stuff. Hours, goals, what I want to focus on next semester. Normal stuff.”

I gave her every chance to tell me. I asked her what she wanted to focus on next semester, and she talked about light and scale and how she’d started thinking about color differently since she’d been here. I asked her if Deb had mentioned anything about after graduation. Hazel’s fork paused for half a second over her plate.

“A little,” she said. Then she smiled at me and changed the subject to Walt.

She didn’t tell me about Sedona. She talked about Walt’s tractor and Harper’s new pumpkin bread and how the big pumpkin was finally done. She laughed, the firelight was warm on her face, and she said nothing at all.

Either she’d already decided to go, and she was trying to find a gentle way to tell me. Or she’d decided not to go, and she was giving it up for this. For a barn and a pumpkin and a man fifteen years older than her who’d been hiding on a mountain since she was in high school.

I didn’t know which was worse. I knew which one I couldn’t live with.

I’d watched someone walk out on me to go do serious work somewhere else. I’d heard what she thought of the work I’d chosen. And I’d spent a lot of years telling myself I’d been the one who was right, staying small, staying here.

But Hazel wasn’t small. Deb had said it this morning. Kessler had seen it from two thousand miles away. She was standing at the start of the whole wide world, with everything still open in front of her.

I’d already made my choices. Every one of them had brought me here, to this cabin, to a quiet I’d built so carefully that nobody could get in.

She deserved somebody whose road went the same direction as hers. Somebody starting out when she was. Not a man who was as set in his ways as he was.

“Shepherd?” She’d stopped eating. “Are you okay? You’ve been quiet.”

“Tired,” I said. “Long day.”

“Okay.” She smiled, a little uncertain. “Me too.”

When we finished, she got up to stack the plates the way she always did. I took them from her.

“You should sleep down at your place tonight,” I said. “Early start tomorrow. We’ve got the gourds to load.”

She stood very still by the sink.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Sure.”

She smiled and said the pot roast was the best she’d ever had. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. She found her jacket and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek before saying good night.

I watched her flashlight bob down the hill in the dark.

I waited until she was settled in for the night and had turned off her light. Then I headed to the barn myself. I didn’t turn on the work lights. I went to the back wall in the dark and pulled the tarp off the project I’d been working on. For her.

Chapter Eleven

Hazel

“That one goes in the back.”

“I know where it goes,” I said.