Chapter 7
CORA
“I told Muir the relationship isn’t real,” Rex says.
I set my mug down.
“When?” I say.
“Last night.”
“Last night.” I look at the lake. I look at it carefully, the way you look at something when you are deciding what to feel about a piece of news. The lake looks back at me with its usual expression: patient and noncommittal and entirely unhelpful. “You told him. Without asking me.”
“Yes.”
“Rex.”
“Cora.”
“I specifically—we had a plan. The plan was—the whole point was that—” I stop. I pick up my mug. I put it down again. “Why?”
Rex turns his coffee cup slowly in his hands, choosing words. “Because even when he thought you’d moved on, that you were happy, that you were with someone.” A pause. “He stayed in town anyway. He took the job anyway.”
I am quiet.
“And then,” Rex says, still in that even, careful register, “I watched him work for two weeks, and I watched him not say anything about it, not push anything, not use any of it. And I thought—” He stops.
Starts again. “And I know it costs you something to work beside him and pretend you don’t love him.
To pretend his presence isn’t physically hurting you. ”
The fury arrives right on schedule. It is clean and satisfying; it has a clear target and a reasonable basis and comes with its own momentum. I am grateful for it because fury is something I know how to do.
“You had no right,” I say, and my voice is level, which is the version of anger I use when I mean it most. “That was my information to manage. My situation. You didn’t—”
“I know,” he says. Not defensive. Just acknowledging the fact of it.
“I put you in this position because I trusted you to—”
“I know.”
“And now he knows, which means the whole—the structure of the thing is—”
“I know,” Rex says again, quietly, and the quality of the repetition makes me stop. He is not flinching and he is not arguing and he is not explaining himself further.
He is just sitting with what he did and giving me the full space of my reaction, which is either the most infuriating thing or the most decent thing about him and right now I cannot tell which.
“For what it’s worth,” Rex says, picking up his coffee, “I threatened to tear him apart and sleep soundly afterward if he hurt you again.”
I stare at him. Then I laugh—a real laugh, sharp and surprised—before I catch myself and remember I’m supposed to still be angry.
“That’s not helping your case,” I say, but there’s no heat in it.
“Wasn’t trying to help my case,” Rex says mildly. “Just wanted you to know the threat was comprehensive.”
I stand up. I walk to the porch railing. I put both hands on it and look at the lake.
The fury is real. And underneath it, in the small honest space below every defense I have constructed over four years of not thinking about this, is something else.
It lasts approximately six seconds before I recognize it for what it is, and another four seconds after that before I hate myself for recognizing it, and approximately zero seconds before I understand that Rex knows exactly what I am feeling right now, because Rex always knows, and has been sitting quietly on my porch waiting for me to get here.
Relief.
I am relieved.
I did not want to be lying to Muir Callaghan about having moved on. I have been lying to myself about having moved on, which is a different and substantially more embarrassing project, but I did not want to be adding the other lie on top of it.
The one where Rex and I are a real thing and Muir is a non-issue and nothing about his return to Harmony Glen costs me anything. The lie was for the Bennett sisters and Mr. Calloway and the town’s interested attention. I had not wanted it aimed at him.
I hate this. I hate that I can feel this relief and know what it means and not be able to deny what it means.
“Don’t say anything,” I tell Rex.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Your face is saying things.”
“My face is doing nothing.”
I turn around and look at his face, which is, infuriatingly, doing nothing. It is entirely neutral, giving me nothing to push against.
“I’m going to Liana’s,” I say. “I want to restock some specialty items for the Snack Hut.”
Rex picks up his coffee. “Okay.”
“This conversation isn’t finished.”
“I know.”
“I’m still angry at you.”
“I know that too.”
I grab my keys from the hook inside the door and go, and the fury accompanies me down the path, past the waterfront, past the crystal shop and the hardware store, all the way across town and up the gentle hill to the other side of Harmony Glen where Liana lives.
It is a rambling property especially now that Roarke, her mate, has joined their properties together.
A white house with a wide porch, an enormous vegetable garden that has long since exceeded what any two people could eat, fruit trees, raised beds, a chicken run of ambitious proportions, and the general atmosphere of a place where a person has looked at a piece of land and said: everything I need is possible here.
I hear the chickens before I see anything else. And then, over the sound of the chickens, I hear a large animal herding smaller animals. A low rhythmic sound, somewhere between a purr and a rumble, with an authoritative edge that the chickens clearly respect.
I come around the side of the house and stop.
Nugget is moving six chickens from the garden beds back toward the run with the focused, unhurried efficiency of a working dog who has done this a hundred times and has strong opinions about the correct way to do it.
He is the size of a pony, deep bluish bronze in this morning light, with wings folded flat against his back and a tail that he uses as a kind of rudder for his turning radius.
He is crouching low on his haunches and using a very border collie-esque herding technique to move the chickens in the direction he wants without startling them.
One of the chickens breaks left. Nugget extends one wing—just slightly, the minimum necessary—and the chicken reconsiders.
“Good boy,” says Liana, from the garden gate, and Nugget makes a self-satisfied sound that is not quite a growl and not quite a chirp and is entirely too pleased with itself.
She’s framed in the gate opening—five-foot-eight and curvy, her light brown skin sun-warmed, her black hair braided and wrapped into a bun at the back of her head.
The Dragon Mom T-shirt is faded soft, stretched comfortably across her frame, and her cut-off shorts are the kind that say I have a garden and I work in it.
She turns when she hears me on the path and reads my face in the three seconds it takes her to push the gate open.
“Come in,” she says. “I made arroz caldo this morning.”
This is what I mean about Liana. She doesn’t require an explanation. She doesn’t ask leading questions or arrange her expression into careful sympathy or offer interpretations of my situation that I haven’t requested.
She just moves me into her kitchen—warm, cluttered in the good way, every surface doing useful work—and puts a bowl of arroz caldo in front of me and sets a plate of ube pandesal beside it and goes back to whatever she was doing before I arrived, which appears to involve sorting dried herbs into labeled jars with the focused energy of someone who finds this genuinely satisfying.
The arroz caldo is perfect. That is not an exaggeration. She makes it with ginger and fish sauce and calamansi and it tastes like being taken care of, which is precisely what it is meant to taste like, and I eat half the bowl before I have formed a single coherent thought.
“Roarke’s at the clinic all day,” she mentions, not turning from her herbs. “So it’s just us and Nugget.”
From outside comes a sound of continued chicken management, serene and competent.
“Rex told Muir we’re not actually together,” I say, into my arroz caldo.
Liana sorts chamomile from calendula. “How do you feel about that?”
“Furious.”
“And?”
“That’s the whole of it. Purely furious.”
“Mm,” she says.
“Don’t,” I say. “I came here to be angry in peace, not to be mm-ed at.”
“You came here,” Liana says, with the serenity of a woman who has a dragon-border-collie and a lion-man veterinarian and a garden full of things she grew herself and has nothing left to prove to anyone that she can in fact be a homesteading queen, “because you needed somewhere to put the feeling while you figured out what it actually is.” She slides the pandesal plate an inch closer to me.
“Eat the bread. And there’s cheese,” she adds as if I hadn’t clocked it already.
I eat the bread and the cheese.
The kitchen smells like ginger and pandan and the dried herbs in their jars and something sweet from the oven that I haven’t investigated yet.
Nugget makes a sound outside that is apparently his version of all chickens accounted for, and Liana says “good boy” through the window without looking up, and the ordinary domestic texture of all of it loosens a knot below my collarbone that I had not been aware was pulled tight.
“The pandesal,” I say, after a moment. “It’s different from last week.”
“Added more pandan. Roarke said the last batch was good but wanted more green. He’s wrong, but I tried it anyway.” She holds up a jar of something for inspection. “He’s usually wrong about the ratio and right about the feeling. It’s very annoying. Marriage is full of this.”
I think, involuntarily, about what it would be like to have someone who is usually wrong about the ratio and right about the feeling. I put this thought back where it came from.
“The selkie,” Liana says, in the same tone she’d use to say the chamomile.
“Is working for me,” I say. “Professionally.”
“Mm,” she says again, and this time I let it stand because arguing with it requires more energy than I currently have.