Oh, she’d noticed, all right. She knew it down to her bones. Unlike him, however, she didn’t see it as a character flaw. Sure, Wallace’s stubborn refusal to change so much as a board in that farmhouse was nothing short of perverse, and she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be an eight-year-old Harrison, scared and hurt and abandoned by his mother, but Wallace had done an admirable job with what he’d been given.

Just look at the evidence—it was standing in front of her, glowering and grim and glorious. It was a six-foot bear of a man who’d fought incredibly hard for everything he had. Sure, the walls around his heart were so thick they were impenetrable by all but a tiny scrap of a puppy who’d managed to wriggle her way in, but he hadn’t been wrong to put those walls up.

That heart had been worth protecting.

“Your dad did look happy,” she said, extending a hand toward Harrison.

He didn’t take it. Although Bubbles had found her foothold, Sophie’s path was not as easy.

“I know it’s hard to see it from where you’re standing, but things change. People change. Maybe she’s different. Maybe she came back to make amends.”

“That’s not how it works,” Harrison said. He crossed his arms, making it impossible for her to break through. “She shattered that man, Sophie. Smashed him to pieces. And now she’s just playing around with the shards.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe she—”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t want the house. You said it yourself. Too many bad memories. And she doesn’t want me either. If I hadn’t walked through the door and found her there, how many days would have gone by before I found out? How many weeks?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but Harrison interrupted by pushing himself from the barn door until he loomed over her.

When he spoke, however, his voice was gentle. His gaze was even more so.

“I know what you want from me,” he said. “I know what you want to hear. You want me to say that somewhere, deep inside, I still care about her. That I believe in forgiveness and second chances. That if my dad is capable of reversing twenty-two years of heartbreak and is willing to open his heart to the possibility of love, then I should be too.”

Sophie nodded. For once, she was the one who couldn’t find the words. That was exactly what she wanted. The Harrison Parks who’d showed her that attic space—who’d fallen to his knees in front of her and refused to get up until he’d tasted the deepest parts of her—that was a man she could love.

That was a man she did love.