Chapter 16 Wells
WELLS
I’m slouched in the second-floor alcove—two chairs under the dormer, a faded runner, a stubby table that always lists to the left. It’s where guests used to sit with their tea and gossip.
Now, it’s past midnight, hours since the committee cleared out, and I’m wrestling a roll of gauze, swearing under my breath, fumbling the edge and losing it again.
“Stay,” I tell the bandage, which is not how fucking bandages work.
The edge immediately curls, sticky side out, like a dog showing me its belly. A fresh jar of plum salve Isla set aside for me sits open on the table. Beside it, a bottle of Mirabelle’s mulled plum wine sweats politely.
It must be embarrassed, I think, to be in the room while I lose a fight with medical tape.
I hear the stair tread above me complain—hers—and then the soft click of a door shutting. I string off another few inches, jaw tight. The tape answers by folding over.
“Is there a reason you’re muttering curse words to yourself?” Elsie asks from the last step of the staircase. “Or is it because you’re still angry with me?”
I look up. She’s barefoot, sweater sleeves shoved past her elbows, hair loose from a braid and falling in a tired wave over one shoulder. Her expression says she meant to stay in her room and her feet decided otherwise.
“This isn’t about you, for once,” I grumble, holding up my hand. The cut’s a thin red seam now, clean and stubborn. “It’s also not my fault they invented adhesive that hates people.”
She takes in the jar, the tape, the band of gauze tangled around my knuckles, and sighs.
“Move over.”
“Bossy,” I mutter, but I trade seats anyway, letting her have the chair under the light.
She drags the table closer with a knee and reaches for my wrist without asking. Her fingers are warm. My pulse does a dumb thing that has nothing to do with the healing process.
I should be mad at her, and I am. But I also sort of missed having her around, snark and all. The rhythm of it. The way her presence fills the corners without trying. I didn’t like the disappearing act, so sue me.
“Is that new?” she asks, nodding at the jar.
“Picked it up from Isla this afternoon.” I tap the label with my thumb. Winslow’s tidy handwriting. PLUM SALVE—CUTS. “Small batch. She says I should make it last, but you say I need to use more. Who should I listen to, Hart?”
She rolls her eyes. “Give me your hand.”
I do what she says. The old bandage unwinds under her touch, a hiss of fabric on skin. When fresh air hits the cut, it bites, bright and mean.
She winces and dips two fingers into the salve. They come up with a shine the color of a snapped dandelion stem, smelling of smoke and green and something like iron. The orchard translated into medicine. She touches the first bit to the edge of the cut.
It stings—reflex has me twitch—but her other hand tightens around my wrist and holds me steady. That’s somehow worse.
“Easy,” she murmurs. “This is why you don’t do things like this one-handed.”
I watch her work as she dabs, smooths, presses. The wound drinks it in. We both see it: the faint knit beginning at one end of the gash, as if an invisible thread is being drawn through me by a patient needle. The edges soften from angry to thoughtful. The line pales from garnet to rose.
“It never stops being a little wild,” I say.
“That I can be helpful or that the salve is magic?”
I laugh. “Yeah, all of it.”
She gives a reluctant smile before adding another thin stripe of salve. The knit travels, a zipper closing. I feel it as a pulse more than pain, a tug toward whole.
I never believed in fairy tales as a kid.
Magic was for storybooks, for other people’s lives.
When I showed up here as an adult, I thought the house—and Elspeth—were just peculiar and old.
Little by little, she let me in on the secrets.
First, the easy ones. Then, when she realized I was staying for good, the real ones.
The jam that never molded, no matter how long it sat. The recipe box that shuffled itself depending on what you needed—comfort, clarity, company. The guest ledger that turned up names before the doorbell rang.
And then the deeper things. How the inn listened when you spoke softly. How it learned your footsteps and seemed to trace them with lamplight. How the front door stuck for those Elspeth disliked (which were few and far between) but swung wide for those she admired.
And the thing is, it didn’t feel unbelievable. It didn’t feel cursed or strange. It felt inevitable. Right. But also quietly astonishing, the way only a small miracle can be when it slips into your life and stays there.
Elsie and I don’t speak for the long breath it takes to watch the last of the seam stitch together. The line settles into a pink, smooth ridge. I bet there won’t even be a scar. It’s that clean, that sure of itself.
She sits back, eyes finally lifting to mine. Our knees touch. She doesn’t move away, and neither do I. My wannabe nurse is back, and I’m grateful for it.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she answers.
Her thumb lingers at the heel of my palm. I could say something about boundaries. I could make another joke at her expense. Instead, I pull my hand back slowly, reach for the gauze that tried to ruin my evening, and let her take it from me.
I missed my bossy nurse, and I’ve learned my lesson. It’s better to keep her close than push her off with a sharp word. That’s the best way to monitor the situation, to keep my control. Not only when it comes to the house, but also my slow-blooming affection for her.
“Here,” she says, gentler now. “Let me wrap it.”
She anchors the first turn with a neat fold, then circles the bandage in even lines that make my handyman brain hum with relief. She tears the tape with her teeth—of course she does—and smooths the edge with her thumb.
Once she’s finished, she keeps her hand still on mine, and I sit there like a fool who’s forgotten how to move. It’s probably just the sudden proximity after a week of distance that has my nerves tangled. That, and the fact that she smells like cold air and cinnamon.
“Compensation,” I say as I lift the bottle of plum wine. “It’s mulled. Winslow insisted. Said I looked like a man who really fuckin’ needed it.”
“Rude.”
“True.” I tip the bottle toward the lamp, and the glass glows dark ruby. “Want to try some?”
“I . . . I’ve had it once before.”
“Illegal confession?”
She snorts. “Hardly. I had a sip just before my eighteenth birthday. Elspeth would’ve let me have more if I’d asked. She loved pretending to be scandalized and then handing me whatever I wanted.”
“Yeah? And you wanted a lot of things?”
“Actually, yes.”
I stand because it gives me something to do. The little cupboard at the end of the landing holds a pair of short tumblers and one ancient enamel mug with a chip in it. Blue rim, white body. I hold it up.
“Which one?”
“The mug,” she says, smiling properly now. “Obviously.”
I pour us both a finger or two of wine. It’s a little warm and spiced just right; the cloves hit first, then cinnamon, then that round plum flavor that always tastes like someone solved winter for ninety seconds.
I hand her the mug. Our fingers brush. There it is again—that foolish pulse.
She lifts the mug and takes a careful sip. The lamplight puts a little gold in the brown of her irises. Honey and cinnamon and all things soft. She swallows, shuts her eyes, and huffs a laugh at herself.
“I forgot,” she says. “How it tasted. How it feels like . . . warmth from the inside out.”
“Goes to your elbows first,” I say. “Then your knees. Then right behind your ribs.”
She points to my tumbler. “You forgot head. It definitely goes to my head.”
“That’s because your head’s a very busy place.”
She looks down into her drink, choosing to let me have that one, and I choose to be grateful. I take my own sip. The heat rides the spice; my shoulders let out a thick knot.
“You want to know something?” she asks, voice conversational like we’re on our second glass instead of our first. “Even as a child, I always thought of myself as selfish.”
“That right?”
I’ve called her the word a thousand times in my head. Selfish. Flighty. Unmoored. But now, hearing it from her, it curdles. My chest tightens. I’m not so sure I like the way it sounds anymore.
“My mom shipped me off whenever she could. Camp. Cousins. Here. I don’t think she meant it as cruelty.
I think she genuinely believed she wasn’t equipped.
I was . . . a lot. Loud where she wanted quiet, quiet where she wanted presence.
Routines, rules, textures. Those things matter to me.
They didn’t to her. So, the solution was to send me where I was easier. ”
I rub the pad of my thumb over the new bandage. “Easier for whom?”
“For her,” Elsie says. “And maybe for me, in some ways. Because I learned a lesson: with her, love was a reward for not being a burden. You make yourself small, neat, convenient, and you get your mother’s affection.”
Pressure keeps building behind my sternum. I take another drink to buy my mouth a second. “You weren’t small here, though?” I finally ask. “Were you?”
“No.” She smiles into the mug. “I was feral here, and Elspeth let me be. I could be stubborn and wild without reproach. I could line up the spoons from longest to shortest and leave them that way, and she’d work around it.
I could say no to certain sweaters, and she wouldn’t laugh.
She made the world a place I could live in. ”
“And yet,” I say, because I’m an idiot who can’t leave well enough alone, “you left.”
“I left because I built my entire life out of holding my breath until it was time to come back to Blue Willow. You can’t do that forever, can you? I had to know I could survive outside this place.”
I shake my head. The urge to argue—to point at the walls and the lamp and the way the house has been bending toward her since she arrived—rises like a tide. I watch it. I let it break and go out again.