The new tension he felt in her shoulders was definitely not in his imagination. “Now is all anyone ever has,” he said, shifting his thumbs lower. Her sweat-slicked skin was soft to the touch, and under that softness was the tense rigidness of anger.

“Said the philosophical landscape architect.”

“I took my share of philosophy classes back in the day.”

She was quiet for a beat before asking, “You ever realize that you don’t know someone as well as you thought you did?”

“Every damn day.”

“I’m serious,” she said dryly.

“So am I. Mags, you’re talking to the man who walked in on his father and stepmom watercoloring some damn duck by video tutorial last weekend.”

“Watercoloring a duck?”

Clearly she didn’t appreciate just how out of character this was for his biology teacher dad and financial planner stepmom. Their hobbies—as far as he’d known—were limited to drinking good wine while watching documentaries about how fucked the earth was. “Trust me,” he promised her. “You’ll understand when you meet them.”

“That’s another thing. How is anyone supposed to trust anyone else if they don’t actually know them? If they just keep on surprising you every time you manage to get comfortable?”

They were digging down to the root issue, and Silas was more than happy to get a little dirty in the process.

“You don’t have to know every single thing about a person to know you can trust them,” he countered.

When his thumbs moved between her shoulder blades, she let out a little moan that had his blood stirring.

“But they can still let you down. They trick you into relying on them, and then just when you get used to the way things are, they change the rules.”

“That’s people for you,” he said. “How long were you and Dean married?”

He felt her tense again before she turned to face him. Genuine surprise was written all over her pretty, sad face. “How the hell did you know that?”

He gave her a shrug, palms up. “I’m a pretty observant, intelligent, good-looking guy. Y’all have a kind of intimacy. Like a language that only you two speak. From the outside, it looks like it runs deeper than just ‘friends from college.’”

She watched him. “And you’re asking me about Dean because you know he’s the one I’m pissed at,” she surmised.

“You’re not mad at Dean,” he countered, stepping up onto a sizable boulder that had tried to take a chunk out of the brush mower. He shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun and drank in the view.

“Oh goodie. We’ve arrived at the part where you tell me not only what the problem is, but you flex your muscles and offer to fix it for me.”