How To (Mirror Garden #1)

Chapter One

The Woodhouse Estate

The willow tree hanging over the pool deck shifted, a few of the branches shook, their leaves falling around him like snow.

Roman glanced up. His mother reported that she’d seen raccoons in the trees last week and he’d been paranoid ever since.

Nothing.

He reached for his sandwich and went back to his book. Stupid summer reading requirement. And he didn’t even like Where the Red Fern Grows. He’d seen the movie and it didn’t end well.

It was also hard to focus because Miley and Alyssa were over.

They’d texted and asked if he was busy. He was supposed to be finishing the reading—school started in one week and he was on page fifteen—but he’d never been able to say no to pretty girls before.

Plus, it’s not as if he couldn’t read and hang out.

“Roman! Put that dumb book down and teach us how to be lifeguards!” Miley called.

“I have to finish it,” he replied, mouthful of sandwich. “My mum will kill me.”

“We’ll help you write the report. We finished it already,” Alyssa offered. “Just tell your mom you’re done.”

Roman smiled to himself. Exactly what he’d wanted.

“I couldn’t do that to you both. It’s not—”

The tree shook again.

Roman turned to look at it once more. Raccoons had good noses. What if they’d homed in on his brie and caramelized onion sandwich? His mum had warned him about rabies.

“Do you guys see anything in the tree?” he asked nervously.

“What?” Alyssa called. “No.”

“What is it?” Miley asked. “Do you see something?”

“No…” he replied, rubbing his chin, still nervous. He turned back and moved the sandwich further away.

“Listen, ladies, I can’t just steal your work. I’ve been lazy this summer.”

“Oh, please!” Miley said, waving her hand. “It’s just a dumb book anyway. None of us will remember it in a year.”

Roman sighed. “If you insist…”

“We do,” Alyssa called.

He set the book down and stood up.

“Well, that’s that, I guess. Lifeguard Roman on duty.”

Alyssa and Miley laughed, but their laughter died quickly.

“Roman…” Miley said, looking scared. “I just saw something in the tree.”

Roman whirled around. “You did? What was it? A raccoon?”

“No. Much bigger. Look—there it is! It’s got something on its head!”

Roman saw it now. Yes, much too big to be a raccoon. It looked like a person… wearing ostrich feathers on their head.

“Hey!” Roman shouted, grabbing the stray baseball sitting on the pool deck. “Get out of here!”

Miley and Alyssa were screaming, trying to swim to the other side of the pool but were mostly swallowing water and choking.

“I’ll throw this!” Roman threatened.

The person in the tree had frozen, as if that would work.

Roman had no idea who it was, but he knew people were always trying to get onto their property for various reasons.

In a blind panic, Roman chucked the baseball at the intruder in the tree. His aim had never been fantastic, but at least it was something.

In their haste to get out of harm’s way, the unidentified figure lost their footing, fell backward out of the tree, and landed on the ground with a terrific thud.

Roman quickly grabbed the pool skimmer and ran over to see who it was. Miley and Alyssa were a few steps behind.

The second he got close enough, he covered his mouth.

The pool skimmer sagged in his other hand.

Miley and Alyssa were dead silent.

There, lying on the ground, wheezing and coughing, was Flora.

She’d had the wind knocked out of her from the fall and was covered in dirt. She was also wearing a muddy patterned dress that needed to be hemmed, huge hiking boots, and a purple long sleeve in the dead of summer.

Had she been spying on them from the tree?

Before Roman could say or do anything, snorts and coughs came from behind him. Alyssa and Miley were laughing so hard they were doubled over.

Flora finally stood, her dress torn, her face bright red, streaked with dirt, and crumpling into tears.

“What a weirdo!” Alyssa cried, laughing.

“Her hair!” Miley said, grabbing her stomach.

A tear slipped down Flora’s face now. She glanced at Roman for a second, and then without another word, she ran off.

Roman watched as she tripped over her dress while running back toward the garage. He was startled but not surprised.

Flora Fairchild.

The chauffeur’s daughter.

The strangest girl he’d ever met. It seemed only natural that she’d taken to hiding in (and falling out of) trees.

Little did he know, this wouldn’t be the last time.

The Woodhouse Estate, sprawling across the foothills of Mount Tamalpais above the San Francisco Bay, was exactly the sort of place where a girl like Flora could disappear into the trees for hours without anyone finding her.

The Woodhouse family had come to America from Edinburgh, Scotland when Mr. Woodhouse made his fortune during one of the many tech booms. His wife, Clara, originally from London, and his two boys, Finn and Roman, with their strange hybrid English-Scottish accents, had been settled in the Bay Area before they could utter a word of disapproval.

But there wasn’t much to disapprove of.

Outside of being uprooted, their new life was pretty much perfect for all intents and purposes.

They’d been painfully average before Mr. Woodhouse struck gold in the tech market. They knew the struggle of being poor and had only come into money after years of trying to make ends meet.

They had money now, though. Perhaps too much money.

Despite this, they weren’t the sort of rich people who became so detached from reality that they were odious to their friends and neighbors.

Mrs. Woodhouse still frequented the grocery store, though she did think thirteen dollars for olives was a “perfectly reasonable price” and often asked why they didn’t carry Domaine de la Romanée-Conti as though it were as common as bottled water.

The Woodhouses also donated generously to charity and were not constantly in the tabloids over some misadventure. Finn had even opened a wildlife rescue and anti-poaching initiative in Africa, just because he thought it was the right thing to do.

They were ridiculously rich though. The Bugatti, Aston Martin, Maybach sort of rich. So rich, that their days of stretching food thin and sewing up holes in socks had been long forgotten, replaced instead with summers along the Italian Riviera.

Their home, almost a castle, sprawled across the foothills of Mount Tamalpais.

They had three pools and a series of hot springs that came with the property.

Workers moved about the grounds constantly—boatmen attending the fleet of sailboats, gardeners rushing about with the gust of every stiff wind, a tree surgeon on retainer.

There were indoor and outdoor tennis courts, a six-car garage, and a roundabout for valeting guests outside the first driveway…

to the second driveway, of course. Party planners and event coordinators arrived nearly every week.

Not to mention a head chef, sous chef, and pastry chef.

And above the garage in a small studio apartment lived their chauffeur, imported from England with them many years ago—along with a Bentley—by the name of Robert Fairchild.

And his daughter, Flora Althea Fairchild.

Flora remembered nothing of England—she had barely been two when they moved—and even less of her mother, who had left them before her first birthday. She only ever knew the Woodhouse Estate and the happenings of the house.

She was twenty-three now and finished with college, but she had never left the comfort of her father’s studio, even while in school.

She had commuted back and forth to UC Berkeley every day, returning home every night to sit near the fire while her father read from his stacks and stacks of books, and she studied.

Their studio above the garage was spacious enough with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living area, kitchen, and fort-like second story connected by a loft ladder.

This loft was occupied by Flora alone and always had been.

The flat itself was buried beneath books.

Flora’s room was a museum of pressed flowers and glass bottles painted different colors to catch the light from the window. Bunches of roses hung from the ceiling, and the walls were covered with scraps of paper from poetry books and photos that Flora had taken with her mother’s old camera.

Robert Fairchild—who went by Fairchild and nothing else—was Mr. chauffeur up until the day Mr. Woodhouse died suddenly from a heart attack. He assumed he was out of a job, but the very next day, Mrs. Woodhouse and Finn appeared, as if nothing had changed. But that was the Woodhouses for you.

Nothing stopped them from the business. Not even death.

Fairchild was well taken care of by the Woodhouses and had never thought of changing his profession because it gave him more time to read, which is all he really wanted to do.

Every night he would come back from his driving, sit in his leather armchair, drink a cup of tea, and read a book.

Never striving for more.

Flora, on the other hand, was not the same as her father.

Where Fairchild loved his books and nothing else, Flora was in love with several things, not just one—

Number One: Nature.

She spent all her free time roaming the hills owned by the Woodhouses and documenting flowers, bugs, and animals in a leather-bound journal that was exploding with oddities.

Number Two: Writing and Reading.

Much like her father. However, unlike her father, Flora preferred Austen to Tolstoy and Camus.

Number Three: Drawing, Painting, and Photography.

She loved to paint with her watercolor set, and she took her nature photography seriously.

However, there was a fourth hobby, and it was the fourth on the list of Flora Fairchild’s Daily Activities that gave everyone pause.

Number Four: Watching Roman Woodhouse.

The youngest son of the Woodhouse Dynasty.

Her crush had developed in childhood. Growing up on the same estate as him allowed one of her hobbies to become him, and it wasted much of her precious time.

Ever since she was younger, she’d idolized Roman and spent hours thinking of ways he might finally notice her.