The Vows We Never Said

Chapter One

Nora Vance had a rule about first site visits: never fall in love with a garden before you know what the client is actually willing to pay for.

She was breaking it before she'd even parked the truck.

The drive to Ravensworth Hollow wound off the main coast road and disappeared under a canopy of old oaks, the kind that had been there long enough to stop caring what century it was. Six years of overgrowth had swallowed most of the original landscaping. She could see that even from the car, even through gaps in the trees, in the way ivy had gone feral over what used to be a retaining wall and in the way the whole property had the particular, specific wildness of somewhere nobody had loved on purpose in a long time.

Good, she thought. Neglect is easy. Neglect just needs someone willing to show up.

She'd taken the job the way she took most jobs lately: fast and without asking too many questions she didn't need answered. A referral from Priya at the historical society, a contract that paid nearly double her usual rate, and a start date that worked around the two other estates she had going this summer. The client's name on the paperwork had been a law firm, not a person, Whitfield & Associates, handling the "Castellan-Whitfield engagement event." and Nora, elbow-deep in three other budgets, hadn't thought to ask why a law firm was booking the flowers.

She thought about it now.

The gates were open. The drive curved past a boxwood maze so overgrown it had lost its shape entirely just a green tangle where geometry used to be and something in Nora's chest did a slow, unpleasant drop because she knew that maze. She'd known it when the hedges were four feet tall instead of eight, when you could still see over the top of them if you stood on your toes, when a fifteen-year-old boy who thought he was too old to play hide-and-seek had absolutely still played hide-and-seek, right here, until it got too dark to see.

She stopped the truck in the middle of the drive.

The house came into view the way memory does all at once, uninvited. Gray stone, a widow's walk, and ivy climbing one whole wing like it was trying to pull the building back into the ground. Ravensworth Hollow. She hadn't said that name out loud in six years. She hadn't needed to. It had just been his house, the place she used to sneak into through the kitchen garden because the front gate had a camera and his father liked to know things.

This isn't possible, she thought, with the specific, useless clarity of someone standing in a driveway that very much proved otherwise.

She still had her hand on the truck door, still hadn't decided whether to put it in reverse and pretend this had never happened when the front door opened.

He hadn't changed the way she'd half hoped he would; he hadn't gone soft or strange or easy to stop thinking about. If anything, he looked more like himself than he had at twenty-three, like six years had sanded away whatever hadn't actually belonged to him in the first place. Dark hair a little too long, sleeves rolled to the forearm out of habit rather than heat, and that same unhurried way of moving, like the world would simply wait for him to catch up to it.

Theo Castellan stopped on the top step like he'd walked into a wall.

"Nora."

Not a question. Just her name, in a voice she hadn't heard in six years, landing in the driveway between them like something dropped from a great height.

She should say something professional. She had, in fact, a whole opening pitch prepared for exactly this kind of first meeting—a line about vision, about honoring the bones of an existing landscape, about timelines and budgets and the specific kind of confidence that got her hired twice by the same clients. She had said some version of that pitch probably two hundred times.

What came out instead was "You're the client."

"I didn't." He stopped. Started over, and she watched him do it, watched him visibly reach for the version of himself that ran board meetings for a living. The venue coordinator handled the vendor contracts. I didn't see the name."

"Right." Nora's hand was still on the truck door. She was aware, distantly, of how it must look: her frozen half in and half out of a work truck with her company's logo on the door and him frozen on the steps of a house she used to know better than her own. "Well. This is I; I should probably

"Don't." He came down one step, then stopped himself, like he'd caught his own hand reaching for something it didn't have permission to touch. "Please. Just give me a minute before you decide whatever you're about to decide."

Nora looked past him, at the house, at the maze gone wild, at the corner of the property where she could see it even from here; even six years on a garden bed sat exactly where they'd left it, half-dug, half-planned, a rusted trowel probably still buried somewhere under all that green.

Unfinished. Everything here was still, impossibly, unfinished.

"Theo." She made herself say his name too, because if he got to, she did. "What exactly am I designing a garden for?"

Something moved behind his eyes, not surprise, exactly. Something closer to dread.

"My engagement party," he said. "It's in eight weeks."

Nora heard herself laugh, once, short and disbelieving, the kind of sound that comes out when your body reacts faster than your judgment can catch up to stop it.

"Of course it is," she said.

And that was when the front door opened again, and a woman stepped out behind him pale blonde hair catching the morning light like it had been arranged to, ice-blue eyes taking in the scene on the driveway with a warmth so immediate and so perfectly calibrated that Nora's first thought, before she could stop herself, was that's not a real smile. I've designed enough weddings to know a rehearsed one when I see it.

"You must be the landscape architect," the woman said, coming down the steps with her hand already extended, diamonds catching the light along with everything else about her. "I've heard so much. I'm Camille."

Nora looked at that outstretched hand. At Theo, still frozen on the step behind her, watching Nora with an expression she hadn't earned the right to read anymore.

She shook Camille's hand.

"Nora Vance," she said. "I'll need to see the whole property before I can give you a design plan."

"Wonderful." Camille's smile didn't move. "Theo can show you around personally. He knows this place better than anyone."

Nora looked at him.

You have no idea, she thought, how true that is.

"Great," she said out loud and picked up her clipboard and followed the man who'd once promised to marry her into the garden they'd never finished building.