“Well, what?” She glanced up at the overhead light and squeezed her hands together.
“Well, this?” He waved his hand in front of them.
She followed his gesture and looked out over the valley below them, the hills speckled with lights from the little town, then up to the mountain peaks reaching into the black night, barely silhouettes defined by faint moonlit streaks of snow at their tips, and then up further to the stars filling the sky. So many stars.
“Snow will be coming,” he said. “It might be a while before we get another clear sky like this one. Are you warm enough?”
She nodded. He’d made sure she’d grabbed her coat before they left.
“I can turn the car back on if you need the heater. I don’t usually keep it running for myself.”
“I’m fine. This is an incredible view. Is that Cashmere over there?”
He nodded and pointed. “You can see how the Wenatchee River winds through, lights on either side. There’s the highway, of course.”
She nodded. A highway with hardly any traffic. “Can we see your place from here?”
“No. It’s around that way.” He waved to the east.
“Oh, right.”
He remained quiet.
“So who was the girl you brought up here?” she asked, trying to make conversation and keep it light.
He drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. “Caylin. A girl from Wenatchee. I met her while I was home from college my junior year.”
Riley recognized the name as the girl from the newspaper article. So much for keeping it light. “Was she . . . important to you?” Too late, she calculated in her head that they might have been together a few years.
“She was my fiancée.”
“Oh.” Great. She’d stumbled into his personal space. Again. “I’m sorry. Was this a special place for the two of you? You didn’t have to bring me—”
“No, this wasn’t special. I brought her up here soon after I found it.” He shrugged.
“She didn’t like it?”
“Oh, she liked it, I guess. She didn’t look at the view much.” He scrunched his nose at her and smiled.
Riley laughed, and after a moment, Mark joined her. That alone made her insides uncoil and relax.
“So, can I ask what happened? You didn’t get married. I mean, I’m assuming you didn’t. What do I know? Did you? Get married?” She quieted, wishing she’d done so sooner. Why did she always feel like she said the wrong thing around this man?
He quieted, too. “No. We were planning on getting married that fall, the year of the fires. She wanted a wedding in Anacortes, on the waterfront. The weather had been unusually sunny for the coast.” He shrugged. “Anyway, one day, months after the fires, after a pretty intense physical therapy session, I woke up to find my dad waiting for me. He had her engagement ring. She hadn’t been to see me for a while already. I knew it was hard for her.”
“Hard for her?” Riley raised her brow.
He reached for the steering wheel, gripping it hard. “It was hard. For everyone. Especially in the beginning.”
“But, you’re not . . . it’s not—” How could she say, “Your scars aren’t that bad?” Even in her head that sounded wrong. She tried again. “I’m sure you’d come so far, in such a short time. Seems pretty heartless for her to just give up like that.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it? She had you, and then she gave you up. Like when someone catches a trout but doesn’t want to touch it afterward. Like they’d rather have their seared tuna on a fancy plate than touch the scaly, rudimentary thing they’d worked so hard for.”
It took her a split second, and the baffled look on his face, to hear her own words.
He rubbed his chin. “Well, when you put it that way.” He glanced at her, his brow raised.
She dropped her face in her hands. “Oh, wow. I’m sorry. I— Why do you even talk to me?” She breathed out slowly through her fingers. “You’re not scaly like a fish.”
He laughed lightly. “What am I scaly like?”
She lifted her face and looked at him through the hair that had fallen over her eyes. “Nothing. You’re not scaly like anything. I wasn’t even talking about you, I was talking about—”
She watched his smile fade, then they both quieted again. She pushed back her hair and sunk into her seat. She hadn’t been talking about him at all.
He looked back out at the view. “She was afraid.”
“You must’ve been afraid. Did you back out?”
“Geez, Riley, you weren’t there.”
“No, but I’ve been there,” she muttered. He stayed quiet, and she didn’t blame him. A few minutes passed. “I’m sorry. You must have loved her a lot.”
His brow furrowed. “I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me.” His hand relaxed on the steering wheel, and he slouched back in the seat. “But when somebody leaves you like that, you learn not to love them anymore.” He glanced at her, and she heard his words echo in her head.
“You were angry.”
He nodded.
She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward, resting her arms on the dash, looking up at the stars, feeling her own scars. “‘You learn not to love them anymore.’ Sounds so easy.” She turned to him with a bleak smile.
“You?”
She nodded. “You don’t want to hear it.”
“Try me.”
“Oh, let’s just say I allowed myself to trust, to hope.”
“And?”
“Disaster.”
“Working with your dad in California?” he asked.
She laughed bitterly and turned back to the stars. “He was part of it, but no.” Even after all this time, emotions welled inside her like a tide she couldn’t chart.
His silence made her keep talking. “When I was little, we made a family nativity set. The kind you’re supposed to glaze and fire in a kiln. But we just used acrylic paint. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen when it was done.” She laughed at herself. “I barely remember what it
