Chapter Thirteen
Knocked Sideways
After four consecutive yawns, Bryce convinced me it was time to stop for the day. He hinted at dinner, but after hours of research, and what I’d discovered in the journal, I wanted to head home, take a long shower, and figure out how I was going to handle this new revelation.
Bryce hid his disappointment well, saying he’d call me tomorrow so we could discuss when we’d meet up again.
When I pulled into the driveway of my clinic, a familiar white sedan was waiting.
Aster.
Of course she was here. I’d been avoiding her calls. I wasn’t mad exactly. More like knocked sideways by her revelations about Max and Bryce. How it reframed what I’d believed about my life for the last seven years.
The day Max left, he sat me at the table in our kitchen and held my hands lovingly.
I was sure he was going to propose. Say we could move back to Harvest Moon and start a practice together.
Instead, he delivered a blow that knocked my entire world off its axis.
He admitted he’d been having doubts about us for a while.
That he wanted to see what else the world had to offer.
He really meant who else the world had to offer, but at least he had the decency not to say those words.
I’m not sure how long I disassociated after that.
Hours? Days? All I knew was that the person who was supposed to be my forever left me.
What did that say about me as a human? Sure, I could be closed off sometimes.
Belladonna had made me that way. But I still had a tender heart.
What I thought was a lot of love to give.
At the time it made me doubt my entire life, and now, well, I didn’t know what the hell to believe anymore.
Aster hopped out of her car, took determined steps toward me and threw her arms around my waist. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you never spoke to me again, but I had to repeat how truly sorry I am.
After what Mother put you through all those years, I wanted to be the one to make you happy, but I should have been one hundred percent sure before I said a word. ’
Mother.
Aster was the only one of us girls who called Belladonna that.
She’d seen her in a way Lia and I never could.
Both of us believed Belladonna should have stayed put in Harvest Moon.
Been a real parent to us. Aster thought Belladonna was a free spirit who’d lose her ‘effervescence’ if we tied her to our small town, even though Ast cried every time she took off.
I loved Aster, so I never argued about the responsibility that came with being a parent. How even though Clo tried to be a rock for us, what we really needed was the stability of our mother in our lives.
‘I get why you did it, but you have to give me time to process. What you told me about Max being my one true love. The way I believed it heart and soul. How it crushed me when he left. It messed with my head, and now…’ I let out a low breath, the weight of it all taking hold.
‘I have to figure out what to do with your newest revelation.’
Her twin dimples made an appearance. ‘You mean with the hot journalist?’
‘Yeah, I’m not having that conversation with you, especially right now.’
All right, he was too damn handsome for words, but half of me wondered if my attraction to him wasn’t just the fact that it’d been way too long since I’d been with a man.
I turned on my heel and unlocked the door to the clinic, refusing to let my mind wander to the cute way Bryce worried his full bottom lip when he narrowed in on a specific passage in a book.
The rhythmic beat of his pencil against the page like he was singing a song only he could hear.
How when he stretched, the edges of his T-shirt pulled up, revealing a line of hair that dipped into his waistband.
Aster, of course, wouldn’t let it go. ‘What does that mean? I know you were with him at the library today. Did you find something in the archives?’
‘How the hell do you know that?’
She gave a coy shrug. ‘You know this town. People talk.’
Before I could press her for more details, she had her phone out, her fingers flying across the keyboard.
‘Who are you texting?’
‘Lia. When you look like that’ – she swirled her fingers in front of my face – ‘it means you’ve discovered some kind of info that you’re going to try your damnedest to hide from us.’
I reached for her phone, but she turned her back and kept typing.
When she was done, she gave me a satisfied grin. ‘Her shift is over and she’s on her way.’
‘Why can I not get a moment’s peace in this freaking town?’
She followed me down the hall and up the back stairs to my place. After I threw open the door, I spun around to face her. ‘I’m jumping in the shower. Take Flora out and wait for Lia. You can grill me after I’ve had at least ten minutes’ peace standing under nearly scalding water.’
She huffed out a petulant ‘fine,’ and Flora scrambled out of my bedroom with her tail wagging quicker than a flag flapping in a summer storm.
‘Let’s go, girl,’ Aster called.
Once they were gone, I hurried down the hallway to my bedroom, stripped out of my clothes and jumped into the shower.
As the water relaxed the tension in my shoulders, I planned what I would tell my sisters.
There was no way in hell I could explain what I’d seen Clo do that night by the fire, but I could tell them about our family history.
Even make a joke about how Ambrosia wasn’t afraid to ‘burn it all down’.
Literally.
My thoughts returned to the archives. How I’d hidden the journal from Bryce.
It didn’t prove anything. It was gossip.
Rumor. But still, I could see all the ways he could spin it.
His story today about the secretary proved when he got a hold of the smallest detail, had any kind of intuition, he was willing to go to great lengths to find the truth.
I’d done my best today, not letting him see me spiral.
More than once he’d leaned in closer to me at the table.
That soft cedar scent of his lingering between us as he made notes about one-off pieces from personal blogs about the town’s supposed magical lore.
I quickly reminded him those angles were used to draw in tourists, making my point by referring to the local business names.
There were even a few mentions about how we hosted an annual trick-or-treating event on the weekend before Halloween.
The way our Veggie Fest at the end of summer drew people to town from as far away as Switzerland and Brazil.
When my skin started to go pruney, I left the shower, dried off, and put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. Before I opened my bedroom door, I pulled in a full breath, preparing for the interrogation squad, AKA my sisters.
A fire crackled in the hearth, warding off the early evening chill.
Flora was already snoozing next to Aster on the couch.
Lia sat beside her scrolling through her phone.
My sisters were my twin hearts. The two people I was sure I’d never be able to live without.
I mothered them. Scolded them. Cried when they hurt.
Laughed with joy when they soared. The years I’d been away from them in Fort Collins had been almost unbearable.
I tried now not to let worry color my face.
‘You’re out of beer,’ Lia barked.
‘Hello, sunshine. Good to see you too.’
I ignored the way she glowered and pulled down a bottle of red wine from a kitchen cabinet, grabbed three glasses and joined them on the couch.
Once I had the screw-top cap off, I poured each of us a generous glass.
We sat in silence, the snap and pop of the dry wood filling the air.
Shockingly, Lia was the first one to speak. ‘Stop stalling and tell us how bad it is.’
I kicked my feet out onto the live-edge coffee table I’d bought from a carpenter in Ouray.
‘It’s going to be fine. The archives don’t really say much.’
Lia pressed her lips thin like she didn’t believe me.
Out of all of us, she was the least trusting.
That may have had something to do with the fact that Belladonna lost her during a camping trip she insisted they take when Lia was eight.
Thank goodness even back then, Lia was in tune with the woods.
She was able to follow her old footprints all the way out to the main road leading into town.
When the sheriff brought her back to Clo’s, I was sure our grandmother’s head was going to explode.
Belladonna didn’t show up for hours. When she did, she claimed she knew where Lia was the whole time. That she was testing her outdoor survival skills. In that moment, I was sure my head might pop too.
After that incident, Lia refused to acknowledge Belladonna on any of her visits. To this day, she couldn’t look at our mother without a hint of disgust.
‘How far did you go back?’ Aster asked.
‘To the town’s incorporation.’
‘And…’ Lia prodded.
‘One of the earliest residents was a man named Jeremiah. He had a fiancée, Ambrosia. Clo’s great-great-grandmother.’
Aster’s eyes lit up. ‘The one in the picture from the house? What was she like?’
I took a big drink before pushing out my rehearsed story. ‘From the little written about her, she seemed determined. Smart. That photo of her and her mother, in front of their apothecary was probably from the late 1800s.’
‘Interesting,’ Lia said, like her interest was piqued. ‘Any weird incidents or stories?’
‘Not anything that alluded to magic outright.’
I wasn’t lying. I was protecting them.
‘I suppose if there had been, they would’ve burned her at the closest stake,’ Lia muttered.
‘Hanged,’ Aster said quietly into her glass.
Lia gave her the side-eye. ‘What are you saying?’
‘They never burned witches at the stake in the US. They hanged them instead.’
‘Well, hell, that’s comforting.’
Aster went on, ignoring Lia. ‘The last recorded hanging was in 1692. Ambrosia lived almost two hundred years later.’
‘The point is that all Bryce found today was meandering facts about how Harvest Moon came to be. How the town grew because of the mining and farming opportunities.’
The look of relief in my sisters’ eyes was enough to tell me I’d chosen the right thing to do. They already had enough on their plates, and I was okay with shouldering all the worry for them. It was my job as their big sister.
‘I’ve read a few of Bryce’s articles,’ Aster said in between sips of wine. ‘The guy is thorough. Determined. Not sure he’s going to write some puff piece about Harvest Moon just because he didn’t find anything in the archives.’
‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see,’ I said.
‘Really, Dani?’ Lia said with a snip. ‘I’m already getting questions from guys at the station, and Aster’s having more issues too.’
‘Lee Lee!’ Aster snapped. ‘You promised you wouldn’t say a word.’
I sat up quickly. ‘Are you having more weirdos come into the shop? We can get the sheriff on it, you know.’
Aster waved off my concern. ‘I’m just getting more calls about matchmaking than flower orders. But, as usual, Lia is overreacting.’
‘Overreacting? When your business starts to turn into a sideshow, when losers crowd the shop, pushing out real customers, you might change your mind.’
Aster set her wine glass down with a thud. ‘What would you know about running a business? You practically live at the fire station, and when you’re not there you’re off hiding on the trails.’
Their furious, unyielding stares warned things could go apocalyptic at any moment. Guilt twisted in my stomach. How could I be upset with them keeping stuff from me, when I was hiding things, too?
‘Stop,’ I said in the voice I only used when I was tired of listening to them bicker.
‘This is what Bryce wants. To set us all off so we make a mistake, do or say something wrong so he can twist it into content. We have to stick together, which means letting me handle this. Proving to him there’s absolutely nothing supernatural here. ’
‘You think you can convince him, even with people like Mo and the rest of the shop owners whispering in his ear?’ Lia snickered. ‘They want this, Dani. To convince readers this town is mysterious, filled with magic, so they’ll come and visit.’
‘You let me handle Mo and the rest of the town,’ I said.
Lia crossed her arms over her chest. Aster stared straight at the fire. Her sweet face was now taut with tension.
We’d been here before. Cornered. Worried about the next thing that might try and split us apart.
The summer I was sixteen, Lia was thirteen and Aster was ten, Clo fell on the stairs, breaking her hip.
The accident required surgery and a two-week stay in a rehab facility.
Our grandfather passed the year before, and no one could find Belladonna, because the last cell number she’d given Clo didn’t work.
Colorado Child and Family Services got involved.
Talked about putting us in foster care. I went to Judge Greene and begged him to let me take care of my sisters until Clo was released from the hospital.
I was already making their lunches, picking them up from school, reading them stories at night before bed.
The judge wasn’t swayed by my arguments, telling me I was too young to care for the girls full time.
He gently ushered me out of his office at the courthouse.
I sat on the faded yellow linoleum floor for hours, refusing when his staff offered both food and water.
When the judge found me at the end of the day, he agreed he and Eric would move into the house.
Act as our temporary guardians until Clo was ready to come home.
‘You’ve both built good lives here.’ I put an arm around Lia’s shoulder. Smiled at Aster. ‘This man coming to town will not change a thing. I’ll make sure of it.’
It was a promise I’d made repeatedly to them, but this time I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to shield my sisters from what came next.
In the library today, Bryce had shown me he was a determined and committed journalist, and I worried it wouldn’t matter what, or who, he’d have to sacrifice to get a story that would put him back in the game.