DION RETURNS

He came back the following weekend.

She knew before she heard the engine — some shift in the air, a premonition, that low warmth arriving ahead of him like a calling card.

He pulled up at the gate and cut the engine and sat there for a moment looking at the house the way he had the first time. Taking it in. The ancient tree spreading over the roofline. The fountains audible even from the road. The garden growing in its own particular direction, unbothered by anyone's opinion of it.

She was at the kitchen window when he arrived, both hands around her mug, the forest doing its morning thing with the light.

She didn't move immediately.

Let him sit with it for a moment.

Then she went to the door.

He had brought things. Not a organised basket or a considered selection — more like he had emptied his pockets in the direction of the idea. Bread from the market. A jar of something. A loose bunch of flowers that looked like he had pulled them from somewhere on the way rather than bought them.

"You didn't have to bring anything," she said.

"I know," he said, handing them over anyway.

Inside, the house received him differently than it received her mother. Not the deep exhale of something familiar. Something more alert. A recalibration, the way the trees moved when the wind changed direction.

She noticed.

Said nothing.

He moved through the kitchen with the ease of someone who was good at making himself at home before being invited to. Not rude — just unconsciously certain that space would accommodate him. She watched him clock things without appearing to. The sketchbook on the bench. The drawings pinned above it. His pastel sketch of her shoulders beside her own work.

He looked at that last one for a moment.

Looked at her.

Said nothing.

The boys arrived like weather.

Wilder hit the kitchen at full speed, assessed the visitor with the shameless scrutiny of someone who had not yet learned to pretend otherwise, and announced: "You came back."

"I did," he said.

"Why?"

"Wilder," Evie said.

"Because your mum rides better than me," he said.

Wilder considered this seriously. "She drops things sometimes," he said. "In the kitchen. Not on the bike though."

"Good to know," he said.

Thorne appeared in the doorway, quieter, watching. He had his mother's way of taking things in before deciding what to do with them. He looked at the man in their kitchen for a long moment, then went to stand beside Evie and leaned against her without a word.

She put her hand on his head without looking down.

The morning moved the way good mornings do — without agenda, without performance. Coffee. The boys loud and then suddenly elsewhere. Brix appearing and disappearing. The light through the old tree moving across the floor in its slow daily circuit.

He sat at the kitchen bench and drew while she worked.

Not her this time. Just whatever his hand found — quick loose sketches, cartoons almost, the kind that looked like thinking out loud. He tore one off and slid it across the bench without comment.

Wilder. Captured in four lines. The exact quality of him — the forward lean, the chin out, already in motion toward the next thing.

She looked at it for a long moment.

"You see people," she said.

He glanced up. Something moved behind his eyes — that familiar flicker, the expression of someone deciding how much to receive.

"Sometimes," he said. And looked back down.

She should have paid attention to the sometimes.

She pinned the sketch of Wilder above the bench when he wasn't looking.

Later, at the door, leaving, he paused.

"Same time next week?" she said.

He looked at her with that almost-smile, the eyebrow, the particular quality of someone who had not quite decided whether to stay in orbit but hadn't yet found a reason to leave it.

"Yeah," he said.

The Ducati fired up.

The forest swallowed the sound of it.

She stood at the door for a moment in the quiet.

The house settled.

The fountains trickled.

And on the bench, beside her sketchbook, the loose bunch of flowers leaned in their jar — already slightly wilted, pulled from somewhere on the way and windblown on the bike, exactly as beautiful for that.

She already knew she'd keep them too long.