Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
CLARA
The back room of the Crooked Spine bookstore looked like a cozy witch’s cottage.
Mismatched candles lined every flat surface.
Teacups and saucers were scattered on end tables.
There were books stacked in leaning towers, a basket in the middle of the room overflowing with yarn, and a cluster of women already half settled into armchairs and mismatched dining chairs, all of them with needles flashing in their hands like this was some kind of secret coven.
Which, maybe, it kind of was.
“Clara!” Mom waved me in with the bossy warmth of a woman who had run a household full of rowdy kids and never really stopped. “You’re late.”
“You’re early,” Kit countered, one leg slung over the arm of her chair, purple yarn tangling around her wrist. “Time is fake. Look at this thing, Mom. I’m knitting sin.”
The thing in question was her eggplant.
Not a tasteful, abstract interpretation of one. A very large, aggressively anatomical knitted eggplant.
A laugh sputtered between my lips. “Oh my god.”
Mom groaned. “Katherine Elizabeth Darling, can you please make something that does not make me question my parenting choices?”
“It’s to adorn my smutty bookshelf,” Kit said, unbothered. “I’m providing joy and art. Also, the pattern called for worsted weight. I only had bulky. Now it’s . . . delightfully large.”
Selene’s mouth curved as she lifted her own knitting, the picture of calm competence in black leggings and a cardigan the color of moss. Her stitches were even and perfect as a row of soldiers. “That is not bulky. That is a weapon.”
“It’s bigger than my forearm,” Elodie said from the corner, where she was attempting something cable-knit and already making it look annoyingly easy. “I’m not sure there’s a real-life man who can live up to whatever you’re manifesting there.”
Kit’s eyes slid to me, wicked and sharp. “A girl can dream.”
Heat slammed into my face so fast I nearly choked on my own tongue.
Mom’s gaze sharpened. “Kit.”
“What?” Kit blinked innocently, but failed.
“Come on, Kit. Stop giving Mom a heart attack.” Elodie’s voice held the warning of an older sister who had seen this shit show before.
I busied myself while images flashed across my brain with no respect for my sanity—Wes in the snow, Wes under me, Wes’s mouth on mine, Wes’s hand on my neck. Wes in the kitchen, damp hair, clean jaw, a whole lot of him I had absolutely no business remembering in such vivid detail.
I focused hard on my tote bag and pulled out my knitting.
The lumpy, half-mangled scarf sagged between my needles like it knew it was a disappointment.
“I genuinely don’t know what this is going to be yet,” I said, dropping into the empty chair between Selene and Elodie. “Could be a scarf. Could be a cry for help.”
Helen, the unofficial leader of the Keepers, snorted. She leaned forward to get a better look, her tight gray curls pinned back, readers perched on the end of her nose. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she said kindly. “You only mangled . . . this first half.”
“Encouraging,” I muttered.
Wes’s voice slid into my head, low and annoyingly sure, from earlier that morning on the couch.
You’re strangling it.
My fingers flexed around the yarn, remembering the way he’d adjusted my grip.
I tried to remember I needed less of a death grip and more gentle guiding.
The thought of his big hands unexpectedly careful as they’d brushed mine sent a tingle down my spine.
He had sat there on his couch, glasses on, telling me his grandmother had taught him and Mary when they were kids, like it was nothing.
Like mentioning his sister wasn’t opening a door he usually kept bolted shut.
It was a simple thing. A soft thing. A piece of himself he’d handed over without making a big deal about it.
My chest did that quiet, traitorous ache.
“Your tension is wild,” Selene observed mildly, leaning over to eye my stitches. “I can see the trauma from here.”
“I’m working on it,” I grumbled. “Apparently I’m strangling it.”
Elodie’s brows rose. “Apparently?”
I cleared my throat. “Wes, uh . . . gave me some pointers.”
Four sets of eyes snapped to me, synchronized as a firing squad.
“Wes Vaughn taught you to knit?” Kit asked, delighted. “I thought his hobbies were brooding and avoiding sunlight.”
“He said his grandma taught him. And Mary,” I added, softer.
The mood shifted, just the tiniest degree. Mom’s knitting paused for half a second, the needles held in midair.
Selene’s smile gentled. “Wes Vaughn: fiber arts instructor,” she said, tipping her mug toward me. “That is not on my bingo card, but I am thrilled to be wrong.”
My cheeks warmed again. “He just . . . showed me how to loosen my grip. Guide the yarn. Apparently choking it isn’t the goal.”
“Choking is usually not the goal,” Kit said solemnly, then lifted the mutant eggplant with both hands and wiggling eyebrows. “Unless it is.”
A shocked sound escaped Mom as she put a hand to her forehead. “Katherine.”
“It’s a metaphor, Mom.”
“It is not and you know it.”
Laughter rolled through the circle, easy and bright, and some of the new-girl tightness in my shoulders eased.
I was still the latest addition, the one who had lied to them all for years about a picture-perfect engagement while she stayed away, the one who had shattered that illusion on their doorstep.
They had every reason to keep me on the outer edge.
Instead, they handed me tea and knitting and a seat in the circle like there had always been space saved.
Selene set her project in her lap and gave her needles a little tap against her mug. The sound cut through the low buzz of conversation. “All right, Keepers,” she said, a glint lighting her eyes. “I have news.”
A ripple went around the group. Kit sat up straighter, eggplant drooping over her knee. Elodie leaned in. Everyone’s attention sharpened.
Selene reached into the big canvas tote at her feet and pulled out a manila folder, the edges soft and worn like she’d been thumbing it all day.
“So,” she said, turning her gaze on me. “Remember when you joked that Alma Barker was hiding because she was knocked up?”
I winced, my eyes slicing toward Kit. “I, um. Vaguely.”
Kit grinned. “Some of us remember it fondly.”
“Well.” Selene slid a paper out and smoothed it on her knee. “Turns out your throwaway theory had legs. Or, I guess, a birth certificate.”
The room leaned closer in unison.
My pulse picked up.
“There was a gap in Alma’s paper trail,” Selene continued.
“We knew that already. She goes quiet here, then reappears a county over briefly, then suddenly she’s back in Star Harbor with an engagement announcement to William Lovell.
” She tapped the paper. “I started digging in the other county. Hospital records. Church logs. Midwives.”
Mom made an approving noise as she bumped against Cora’s arm. “That’s my girl.”
Selene smiled, quick and sharp, then sobered. “I found this. A birth record for an A. Barker. No first name spelled out, just the initial. No father listed. The date . . .” She glanced down again, then back up. “The date falls right in the middle of Alma’s missing timeline.”
The room went quiet.
I stared at the black-and-white copy as it made its way from hand to hand, my heart doing an odd, uneven rhythm in my chest. Name of mother: A. Barker. Occupation: domestic. Father: dash, dash, dash. A blank space where half a life should have been.
“Oh my,” Cora breathed when it reached her. “That poor girl.”
“So she really was pregnant,” Kit said softly. “She had a baby.”
“And then she comes back here, and there’s suddenly an engagement announcement with William Lovell,” Elodie murmured, eyes distant as she pieced it together. “No mention of a baby. No whisper. Just . . . respectability.”
“An engagement to save face,” Helen said quietly. “To make it all go away. As if it ever does.”
The Lady of the Dunes had always been a story to me. A shiver. A warning. A ghost that haunted the shoreline and, supposedly, cursed my brother with bad luck and inconveniences and hearts that never quite healed right.
Right now, sitting in a circle of women with yarn in my lap and the smell of bergamot in the air, Alma Barker felt less like a ghost and more like a nineteen-year-old who had been terrified and in love and then forced to choose between her child and her reputation.
Selene flipped to another photocopy—the old engagement announcement we had already seen, brittle and yellowed.
“Do we know what happened to the child?” Harriet asked, voice low.
Selene shook her head. “Not yet. I checked for adoption records under Barker and Lovell in this county and the next two. Nothing that matches. Which doesn’t mean the baby disappeared. Things went unrecorded all the time, especially if someone wanted them quiet.”
“Or if the baby went to the father’s family,” Mom added. “Out of town. Out of sight.”
The farmhand’s face flared in my mind—the one in the old photograph, the one who looked unnervingly like Hayes if you squinted. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same stubborn tilt to his mouth.
“Has anyone considered . . .” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The farmhand. The one who looks like Hayes. Could he be the father?”
Elodie let out a low whistle. “That would track for our luck. Our cursed ancestor knocked up a ghost.”
“She wasn’t a ghost yet,” Kit cut in, though her lips were pressed tight. “Maybe they were in love.”
“The point is,” Selene said, eyes back on the papers, “Alma had more at stake than anyone bothered to write down. She wasn’t just a girl.
She was a mother. She had something huge to lose.
That changes the way we look at her story.
She wasn’t some vengeful sea witch or morose lover haunting a town for fun.
She was someone who had her story taken away and rewritten by the men around her. ”
The words settled heavy and sure.
My fingers tightened around my needles, the yarn cutting into the soft flesh of my palm.
I thought of Alma, pregnant belly, sent away to another county so nobody would see.
I thought of her labor recorded on a single sheet of paper, no father listed, then her return with a ring and a smile that probably didn’t reach her eyes.
A hidden pregnancy. A rushed engagement. A baby whose name no one bothered to say out loud in any of the records.
No wonder Alma couldn’t rest. She had never gotten to tell her own story. It had been written over her in ink and whispers.
My own broken engagement slid into that space, uninvited.
Greg’s fingers clenched around mine at the fancy restaurants, the way his eyes would subtly slide over me as he looked for something better in the room.
The way I had lied to everyone here for so long about how happy we were.
I thought I was doing the best thing for the both of us.
Wes’s mouth on mine flickered across my mind, hot and immediate. His hand on my cheek. His groan in my throat. The way I had kept that kiss secret, too, tucking it into the same place in my chest where all the other unspoken things lived.
Secrets had weight. They clung. They warped the shape of a life.
I looked down at the uneven row of stitches between my fingers and exhaled slowly.
“Poor Alma,” I murmured. “Everyone else got to decide who she was.”
Selene’s gaze met mine over her knitting, sharp and knowing. “Not if we have anything to say about it,” she said.
The yarn slid a little easier through my fingers on the next stitch.
In an attempt to lighten the suddenly sullen mood, Kit bounced her knee, the giant eggplant wobbling obscenely in her lap. “Speaking of the living,” she said, eyes cutting to me, “what are you doing tonight?”
I blinked. “Uh . . . knitting and staring at my ceiling?”
Mom clucked her tongue as her head shook. “Absolutely not. You are too young and too pretty to sit in that miserable house every night like a recluse.”
“It’s not miserable,” I protested automatically, then thought of his dented couch and winced. “It’s . . . cozy adjacent.”
“Great,” Kit said. “You can tell yourself that after you come out to the Lantern tonight. Drinks, dancing, poor decisions.”
My stomach did a weird little flip. “The Lady’s Lantern?”
“Is there another bar in Star Harbor?” she deadpanned. “Come on, city girl. You can wear something slutty. I’ll even let you borrow my good lip gloss. We’ll shake off this depressing mood.”
Mom took a sip of her tea, eyes twinkling over the rim. “You should go, Clara. Get out. Let yourself have some fun.”
Heat crept up my neck, stupid and telling. “I’ll think about it,” I said, which in Darling translation was already a yes.
Kit grinned like she knew it. “Perfect. I’ll pick you up at eight.”