He’d not seen Lily since the harvest. Since he’d watched her head down the drive on that bicycle of hers. Another fork of lightning split the sky and his thoughts simultaneously. He should have kissed her. He was right not to have. Back and forth he went between the two. He tried to tell himself that nothing had changed. But Henry knew he was lying to himself.

The harvest had changed everything. Because this time it felt strangely as if he’d planted his own memories. Not ones heavy with the burden of parental dissatisfaction, or teenage angst. No, these were his own adult memories. An investment in a future that he was about to sell. And those seeds had been plunged deep into his heart and were already unfurling, growing within him, binding him to this place with green ivy-like vines. Seeds he couldn’t help but feel that Lily had given him. On purpose. As if she wanted him to be bound to this place like she was. Like his father had been.

He knew it was an irrational thought, just as heated and unfounded as his sudden anger with her. No, it wasn’t anger as such, but something a little bit more like resentment. Because in spite of everything he wanted – to get out, to never come back – he was beginning to … what? he asked himself as he ran a hand through a thick head of hair already tufting in places from earlier manhandling. Was he beginning to want something different?

It had been easier when he’d told himself that the town hated him. That they all whispered behind their hands and his back and blamed him just as they should for the accident that devastated the community and cost Claudia her life. But the harvest had made him see that it wasn’t how they saw him, or at least not only how they saw him. And slowly the reasons for him leaving were beginning to drop away, and the ones making him want to stay were increasing in number.

And Lily … she was always at the top of that list. Lily who worked too hard for other people, Lily who the whole town seemed to adore, Lily who would drop everything at a moment’s notice to help someone else, Lily who was so beautiful, so kind, so unwavering. He felt as if she had cast a spell over him. Making him want things he shouldn’t. Making him want to do better, be better.

But he just couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see how he could have what he wanted and her at the same time. Not without irrevocably taking something from her. Whether it be the estate, or her home here in Hawke’s Cove. Either one was the price of being with him, and he wasn’t enough of a bastard not to know that, nor to ask her to make that choice.