"So," Ethan said, "why are you here? Really?"
Victoria glanced toward the vehicle. "Because my father made me promise I would meet you. He has influence over a proposed expansion involving my company, and he's using it in a way he apparently considers charming. I told him it was unacceptable. He told me I couldn't judge someone I hadn't met."
"And you drove all the way out here to prove him wrong?"
"More or less."
"Congratulations," Ethan said. "You met me. Tell him I have plenty of problems already, and he doesn't need to invent another one."
It should have ended there. In later years, each of them would remember how close it came to ending there. Victoria could have returned to the SUV, made a call from the back seat, and left Cedar Ridge behind as nothing more than an embarrassing stop on a difficult business day. Ethan could have gone back to the hinge, fetched Lily from the school bus, and never learned what Victoria Hayes looked like when she laughed without thinking first.
But the gate shifted under his hand. Its bottom rail dropped, the rusty hinge finally surrendered, and the whole thing fell into the mud with an enormous, hollow clatter. A hen on the other side flapped toward the orchard in alarm. Ethan closed his eyes for a second.
"Is it supposed to do that?" Victoria asked.
"No," he answered. "And that's about how my week has been going."
She looked down at the gate. "Can I help?"
"In that suit?"
"I have two hands."
"And shoes that are about to discover what forty years of cow manure does to expensive leather."
"Then I suppose they'll learn something." She slipped off her jacket, folded it over the fence, and reached for the loose end before he could stop her. He had to tell her where to hold it, and she had to adjust twice before the weight balanced between them. By the time they wrestled the gate back onto its supports, there was mud on one of her cuffs and a crooked line of dust across her sleeve.
Ethan looked at her in disbelief. "Do you always do this much work at meetings?"
"Usually I pay people who wear better shoes." She smiled then, suddenly and fully, and for an instant the woman from the magazine disappeared. There was just a stranger standing in the sunlight with dirt on her hands.
The school bus hissed to a stop at the end of the drive. A little girl in a purple backpack ran toward the farmhouse, then stopped when she saw the SUV. She had Ethan's dark curls, her mother's wide brown eyes, and the confident stride of somebody who expected the world to be interesting. Ethan lifted his hand.
"Lily! Walk, please. We've been over this."
Lily slowed to the quickest possible version of walking. "Dad, is that a movie star?"