Chapter Sixty-Three. Daye
Daye
Daye could feel it.
It started small. A snagged thread. A plucking sensation teasing at the edges of her attention, there and gone.
But it grew louder as the days passed. An itch that stopped itching the moment she tried to find it.
A tug, like a caught strand of hair, already fluttering loose by the time she turned her head.
A constant low thrum in the back of her mind, Wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Something’s not right.” Rory had barely closed the gate behind him when Daye was by his side, hands fidgeting in agitation.
She had been waiting by the gate since noon—four, five hours—despite knowing Rory wouldn’t get there for hours still.
But it had been two weeks since he was last here.
And what, when he left, was a sensation too slight to mention had grown to encompass everything.
An unseen snare, taunting her just out of reach, always just beyond the edges of her vision.
“Are you okay? What happened?” His hands moved across her body—shoulders, arms, waist. As if to make sure all her pieces were in their correct place.
“I don’t know.” She broke away from him, too agitated to stay still. “Rory, something is wrong. I should be halfway through the transition to summer by now. But … but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels wrong. Like … like something caught. Or stuck. Or …” She was tripping over the words.
“Hey, wow, slow down.” He reached for her again. “Okay.” He guided her to sit on the front steps. “Can you start again, from the top? What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Not hurt.” She swallowed. “I’ve been losing sense of time.
I see the sun rising and falling each day, and I count the days, and somehow it doesn’t add up.
How can it still be spring? The calendar in the kitchen says it’s June 22.
Summer is supposed to be starting. But where are the foxgloves?
Why are the bluebells still in bloom? And I feel …
wrong. Snagged.” Her hands shaped the words as she uttered them, a nervous habit she hadn’t had for months now.
“Oh.” Rory sat back, a slight blush on his cheeks.
“Oh?” Daye echoed. “Do you know what is happening? Why I’m feeling like this?”
Rory avoided her eyes the way he did when he was feeling guilty. “Do you remember, in May, when I came home for four weeks?”
Daye nodded.
“Do you remember that I tried to talk to you about a solution?”
Another nod, sharper this time. “Yes. And I said I didn’t want one anymore.”
“You said you didn’t want one for your voice anymore. This is not for that. It’s more like … an insurance plan. A failsafe.”
Daye had to turn the words in her head, taking them apart and putting them back together before they made sense. “Wait. You did this?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his hands. “I’m sorry it scared you. I was waiting to see if it’d actually work before I told you about it, but I guess you noticed it faster than I thought you would.”
He seemed so earnest. Like he didn’t see anything wrong in what he had just said.
“So you did this. Whatever this is.”
“Yes. And I’m so sorry it worried you. It’s my fault. I should have realized that it would affect your transition.”
“What. Is. This?” Daye asked. Slowly. Carefully. Placing each word between them.
“Well, it’s a bit hard to explain. But, basically, I grounded this area in spring. A little like a greenhouse.”
“What do you mean, ‘grounded’?”
“It means that everything within the boundary of our land—the forest, the meadow, the lake, down to the fields over there”—he gestured—“will stay in spring.”
“Stay? For how long?”
“Forever, hopefully. Or until I remove it.”
Daye sat back, stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“You kept changing the subject every time I brought it up. I didn’t think it was worth pushing until I knew if it worked. I meant to tell you about it this weekend.”
In the bushes by the gate, a sparrow was chirping to its mate about nesting materials. Daye inhaled a lungful of bloom-sweet air that shouldn’t have been that sweet this late in the season. Only she guessed now it would stay this sweet. Forever.
“So I kept saying I didn’t want any more solutions and changed the subject when you pushed. And your answer was to go ahead and do it anyway? Without telling me?”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
Another deep breath, cloyingly sweet now. “Ask me first? Listen when I said I didn’t want another solution? You promised last time. You promised not to do things without telling me.”
“I tried to tell you!”
“Did you? Did you at any point say, ‘I’m planning to keep this area in spring forever, what do you think?’ You promised, Rory.”
“I knew something like this would happen,” he muttered to himself.
“So you knew I would be upset about it.”
“Come on, that’s not fair. You were the one who kept avoiding talking about it.”
“And so you went ahead and did it anyway.”
Rory didn’t answer. They sat in silence for a minute.
Daye kept feeling like the ground should be falling beneath her.
She should be shocked, upset, surprised.
But all she could conjure was a small, bitter anger that sat like an unripe fruit in her mouth.
In the bushes a few feet away, a thrush was singing a warning.
“Rory, please remove it.”
“What?” He startled, like the option had never occurred to him.
“You said it would last until you removed it. So, remove it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to. Because I don’t want it. Because you promised it would be my choice.”
“Please, Daye, don’t ask it out of spite.”
“It’s not out of spite. I don’t want to stay in spring forever.”
“Please, Daye. I’m sorry.”
“So remove it.”
“No.” A full stop. It was so unexpected that it made her pause.
“Why?” she asked.
“I need it.”
“Why? Why do you need this?”
“I can’t stand being so afraid all the time. I can’t.”
“Afraid of what?” Daye’s hands slashed in the air between them, echoing her words. “There’s already a solution. It’s working. Why do you need another one?”
“I just do. Please.”
“You’re forcing me and everything that lives on this land into a perpetual spring, and your only reason is that you ‘just need it’?” Her tone was becoming harsher and harsher, like tree bark. “That’s not a good enough reason, Rory.”
Daye made to get up. Rory stopped her with a hand.
“Please, can you just give it a chance?” He looked into her eyes.
Whatever he saw in them made him pause. He swallowed.
Licked his lips. Swallowed again. His next words were phrased too carefully to be an accident.
“Please, I really want you to give it a shot. It would mean a lot to me. Give it a chance for me, okay?”
Daye closed her eyes. Now the ground was falling beneath her, away, away, away.
“Okay.” The word was carved out of her, leaving jagged edges as it came out. A gap where once there wasn’t one. All at once, Daye felt exposed. Exposed, and very, very cold.
“Unless,” he tacked on hurriedly. “Unless this feels like … that autumn? Two years ago? When the experiment …” He shuddered. Reached for her hand. “If it’s anything like that, even a little, please—you need to tell me.”
“No,” she heard herself say. “It’s not like that autumn.” The words floated away from her like dandelion seeds, and she could do nothing to snatch them back.
“So let’s give it a try, just for a little while. A season or two? We could talk about it again when I come back from the fall program.”
And that was that.