Page 74 of The Hitman’s Final Job

Silas:

I’ll dress to impress.

TWENTY-THREE

VAUGHN

Harvest and Root’s location at the edge of town makes its windows the perfect frame for the sun setting over the mountains. In a few short months, the green view will be replaced with white, but for now it couldn’t be a more perfect time to bring Silas out.

He picks up the menu and leafs through the pages.

“The menu changes most days,” I tell him. “It depends on what the local farms can supply. Almost nothing on that menu came from more than fifty miles away.”

He looks up. “Almost nothing?”

“There are things you can’t grow easily in Colorado.”

“That makes sense. This is extraordinary. Roasted beet from Clayton’s farm. They actually say where the produce comes from.”

“Yes. It also promotes local businesses. ‘If you like the beets, then you might want to buy some from Clayton at the Saturday farmers market’—that sort of thing.”

The server comes and takes our orders. When she’s gone, Silas leans back in his chair and gazes around the restaurant. Today it’s full. I managed to get a table because they had a cancellation, which feels like a minor miracle during a festival week.

“Do you come here often?” he asks.

“Once a month with my team. It’s become a tradition. We come here and eat together and talk about things that aren’t work,” I say. “Or try to. We usually end up talking about work anyway, but the intention is there.”

“Always here?”

“Most of the time. This place is special because what we do in the lab is about this. About food that comes from where you are, that’s grown in healthy soil, that reaches people without traveling halfway around the world first. When we eat here, it reminds us why the research matters. Not the publications or the conferences or the grant applications. This. A meal made from things that grew nearby.”

Silas is quiet for a moment.

“What you do is really important,” he finally says, his voice even and direct. “I want you to know that I’m really proud of you.”

I’ve received professional recognition, peer reviews, and conference feedback. Rowan has said he’s proud of me in that warm but slightly awkward way only a child can manage. But I’ve never had someone say I’m really proud of you how a lover would. I don’t know what to do with it.

“Thank you,” I say, which is inadequate but all I have.

He holds my gaze for a moment, then picks up his water glass and looks out the window.

“Can I ask you something?” I say, after a while.

He turns back to me. “Of course.”

“How did you end up with Rowan at college? I never asked because I didn’t want to pry, or more accurately, I didn’t want to get that close. To knowing you. But I always wondered. Rowan wasn’t even nineteen when you met. You were older.”

Silas sets down his water glass.

“I was twenty-two,” he says. “I started late.”

“Why?”

He’s quiet for a moment, like he’s considering not how much to share but what to share.

“I grew up in foster care,” he says.

My heart breaks for him.