Chapter 13: What Tenderness Looks Like at Several Centuries' Remove

He was waiting at the gate.

Not at the lighthouse gate — she had checked, almost involuntarily, as she descended from the headland, scanning the dark below the way she had learned to scan for anomalies in the street. Not there. But at the iron gate at the far edge of the coastal path, the rusted one that opened onto the lane leading back into Ashveil proper, the one she always had to lift slightly to work the latch — he was standing beside it with his hands at his sides and his collar turned up against the wind, and he looked, for a fraction of a second that she would think about later, like someone who had been standing there for considerably longer than he would admit to.

"I didn't know you were coming," Maren said.