Chapter 11
WELLS
The parlor ceiling looks a bit crustier from the top of a ladder. The plaster rosette around the light fixture has a hairline crack that spiders toward the molding. I make a note to patch it, then work the old porcelain socket loose a quarter turn at a time.
Dust drifts down and freckles my reading glasses. I take them off with the back of my wrist, which is a mistake, because the gauze drags, and my hand complains. The small bit of plum salve knit the worst of it, but I’ll need one proper jar more if I want to close it clean and stop the scarring.
“Hold still,” I tell the house. “I’m trying to keep you from electrocuting us.”
From the chair beneath me, fabric creaks. Elsie’s folded herself into Elspeth’s old recliner with a book that looks too serious for a Tuesday. Her legs are tucked under a blanket, one the inn coughed up this morning that matches nothing in the room.
Robin’s-egg blue. Brighter than it has any right to be in a room full of muted florals, faded lace, and wood worn smooth.
She turns a page. “Do you always talk to the house like that?”
“Sometimes. It listens when you explain yourself.” I scratch the back of my neck. “At least, it used to.”
“Does it? Or do you just like to hear the sound of your own voice?”
“Both things can be true, sugarplum.”
“I really hate it when you call me that.”
I grin, more to myself than at her. I like that she hates it.
I like that I can press her buttons without making her cry, that I can get a spark out of her in a way that doesn’t sting.
It feels like give-and-take. Something real.
Not polite small talk or thinly veiled land-mine conversations, but a rhythm that keeps you present. Keeps you honest.
“That’s a good piece of information to tuck into my back pocket.”
“Shh,” she grumbles.
I twist the socket again. The bulb sticks, then gives, then grits like it has an opinion. My palm flares, and I try my damnedest to ignore it. Elsie’s book makes a soft thwip when she closes it halfway.
“This is ridiculous,” she says. “Just let me help you.”
“You wrangled the boiler with me until supper,” I remind her. “You’ve done more than enough already.”
“But that was yesterday.”
“You were rubbing your shoulder all morning. You have dark circles under your eyes, and you’re crankier than you have been since you got here. Usefulness isn’t a sport you win by collapsing first.”
“I know that in theory.”
“Try it in practice.”
She shifts again, blanket settling, springs complaining like old knees. She taps the book against her thigh. It’s an old romance novel, judging by the cover art of a hero with his shirt half torn open. But even that doesn’t seem to capture her interest.
“In my world,” she says, “rest is what comes after you failed to push through. It’s the red mark on the page.”
“In my world,” I say, “rest’s how you keep your hands. And your balance. And your temper.”
I know it because I have to. Pain’s a constant; there’s no cure, no clean slate, only management. I take the medicine and the achehoney when I need to. I take the breaks when my joints demand it. Push too far, and I’m benched for days, magic or not.
“Learn the rhythm early, Hart. It saves you a lot of broken things later.”
She goes quiet. She doesn’t like it, but she lets the chair hold her. I reach for the replacement bulb in my back pocket, and of course, it’s rolled to the far side of the top step where my fingers can’t safely reach it.
I mutter a word I shouldn’t use in a parlor and shift my weight to come down a rung.
The ladder shivers. That’s my fault. My boot scuffs. Also, my fault.
Then something small and unhurried happens. The bulb rolls back toward me, like someone tilted the floor a fraction. It bumps to a stop against the toe of my boot. I hook it with two fingers and bring it to the socket.
“Show-off,” I tell the house.
Elsie pretends to read, eyes glued to the page like she’s auditioning for the part of Someone Who Doesn’t Care. I don’t buy it for a second.
I thread the bulb in, wipe plaster dust on my sleeve, and climb down. The ladder lands solidly. Lemon oil, wool, faint old-house warmth. It’s ten in the morning, and even the house seems to be waiting for what’s coming next.
Elsie’s got her chin propped on her fist. “I should be grateful I’m allowed the time to relax, but God, this is boring.”
“You’re just restless,” I say.
“I’d rather not be this way.”
“What way? A pain in my ass?”
“No,” she mutters. “Overworked and brittle. A person whose whole personality is—was—her calendar. After the sale goes through, I’m going to truly rest for a while. I mean it.”
My jaw goes tight. She had to go and bring up the sale.
“Must be nice,” I say to the ceiling.
She lowers her book a fraction. “You have a problem with me wanting to rest?”
“I have a problem with you talking about selling the place like it’s a done deal.”
She tilts her head. “It is a done deal.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Wells.”
“Elsie.”
We’d called a temporary truce, at least while we’re living under the same roof. More for my sake than hers, because I can’t stand to hear her talk about selling this place for a second longer than I have to.
And because I worry the house might listen in, might take her words as truth. It must be different than it was when she was a kid, but the house is quick to bruise now. Quicker to show it, too. One careless thought, one offhand comment, and you can feel it in the walls for days.
She watches me watch the crack on the rosette, and something folds in her shoulders like a bird tucking its wings. I hate that I see it happen, and I hate even more that I’m the reason. Despite our sparring, I can’t seem to stop noticing all the softest edges of her.
“Do you want to grab me the small flathead?” I ask, deflecting, which is the politest form of retreat I know. “It’s in the lounge pantry. Second shelf. Tin with the green lid.”
She blinks. “I can do that.”
“Take your time. No ladders. No heroics.”
She throws the blanket aside and stands, hair sliding over one shoulder where the braid’s given up. “I can handle a drawer, Wells.”
“Good. Watch your step on the thresh—”
She disappears into the hall. Her steps are quick, and I count them without meaning to. It’s a habit from a long time ago, when counting filled the space between worry and the things you could control with your hands.
Would Elspeth catch her foot on the stairs again? Would it be the last time I heard her moving through these rooms?
Six steps. Another three. A door hinge sighs upstairs.
I lean the ladder against the bookcase and pull the old chain on the lamp to test the new bulb. It glows, and the room shifts toward warm. I straighten the framed map of the county while I wait because it’s been crooked for months.
Then a scream tears through the house.
It isn’t long or theatrical. It’s sharp and small and made from something strangely terrible. The kind of sound that puts claws under your ribs.
The new bulb swings. I’m already moving. My boots forget the floor. The ladder skin-bites my knuckles as I pass. I clip my shoulder on the doorframe and barely feel it. When I make it to the second floor, the hallway narrows. The pantry door’s half-open like an elbow, and I shove my way through.
“Elsie.” I say her name like a demand. My heart’s outrun me and is waiting here with its fists up.
I scan low, frantic. Feet. Legs. Then high. Hand. Head.
She’s on the floor against the cupboards, folded in on herself, not hurt. Laughing and crying like a person who can’t decide which makes more sense. Her book’s on the tiles. Her hand’s buried in fur.
A long, orange tabby stretches under her fingers and blinks at me with slow disdain.
“Hemingway,” I say. “Fuck.”
I haven’t said his name out loud in weeks. He’s been hiding God knows where, and I haven’t bothered to track him down. He’d rather vanish into the walls than let me think I own a piece of him.
Elsie looks up at me with wet lashes, one hand still buried in the cat’s fur. Her voice breaks on the edges as she says, “He’s not dead.”
“Not last I checked.”
“He was already old when I left,” she whispers, staring at him like he might vanish if she blinks. “How is he still here?”
I crouch down, hand braced on my good knee. Hemingway stretches and flicks his tail, unbothered as ever. “He’s a cat. He does what he wants. Curls up in the shed all winter, suns himself on the porch come spring. Far as I can tell, the years don’t stick to him.”
She shakes her head slowly, fingers combing through his coat. “I thought—” Her breath hitches. “I thought I’d never see him again.”
For a moment, the pantry feels too small for what’s pressed into it: the smell of old cedar, the weight of her disbelief, my heartbeat still refusing to calm. I realize my hands are fists. I’m still waiting, I think, for a real emergency.
She laughs once, short and shaky, and buries her face in the cat’s side. Hemingway purrs steadily. He’s been waiting for this reunion far longer than she has.
“Jesus, Wells,” she mutters into the fur. “You scared me half to death, bursting in here.”
“Me?” I lean back on my heels. “You screamed bloody fuckin’ murder.”
“Because my dead cat just walked out of a cupboard.”
“Correction,” I say, standing and brushing my palms against my jeans. “Your immortal cat. There’s a difference.”
I don’t know if it’s him or the magic in the house that holds on to what it loves. That refuses to let go of the things that belong to it. If that were the case, surely Elspeth would have lived forever, too, and every Hart would be eternal.
But that’s not the way of things.
Her smile wobbles. She cradles Hemingway against her chest. I watch her, and the knot in my stomach doesn’t untie so much as shift into something else. Relief. Wariness. Something else I don’t want to name.
“Why didn’t you welcome me home?” she whispers to the cat. “I missed you.”
Hemingway blinks at her. She nuzzles his nose.
I force myself to turn back toward the parlor, but the echo of her scream won’t leave my ribs. It’s branded there, a reminder of how fast I moved before I even knew if she was hurt. A reminder of how much I’m starting to care.
No. I don’t care about her, specifically. It’s the trauma of watching Elspeth fade and being helpless to stop it. It’s the thought of someone getting hurt under my roof, under my watch, and not being able to do a damn thing.
Elsie gathers Hemingway into her arms. She carries him back down the stairs with small, uneven steps. I trail after her, watching the sway of her braid, the way her cheek presses against orange fur.
In the parlor, she sinks into the recliner again. The cat curls immediately across her lap, purring loudly enough to rattle the springs. I climb the ladder, put my hands back on the fixture. It’s to keep busy.
Unfortunately, my heart is still a step behind.
For a moment, it’s Elspeth I see there. Elspeth with a quilt across her knees, with a cat tucked under her palm, with a storybook open in her lap. My chest pinches. The room used to glow with her presence, and losing her left a hollow that no amount of patchwork could mend.
But Elsie isn’t Elspeth Sr.
She’s sharp where her grandmother was soft, restless where Elspeth was patient. She doesn’t fit into the silence; she scrapes against it, unsettles the dust and the memories both. And yet—watching her with the cat, so undeniably herself, it hurts in a different way.
I told myself not to be baited. Not to bait her. We need to keep the peace inside these walls, at least until the meetings can decide the rest.
Outside of this house, I’ll fight her with everything I’ve got, make her hate the idea of the sale, drag her through every argument about what this inn means to the town. That’s my duty, to Elspeth, and to Blue Willow.
But here? Watching her thumb circle Hemingway’s ear, watching the tension bleed out of her shoulders, I don’t want her to hurt. I want her to see things the way I do.
The inn is special. This town is alive in a way most places aren’t. Selling shouldn’t be an option, and the thought of her letting it go makes something in me snarl.
If she could see it—really see it—maybe we wouldn’t have anything to battle over at all. Maybe we’d be fighting for the same thing.