Chapter 15
“Are you a peppermint-hot-chocolate person, or straight up?”
“Peppermint, with marshmallow foam, please.”
“My order exactly,” Liam says. “Mind holding the leash?”
“Happy to,” I reply, which is not entirely true.
I’m still wary of Mary Piggins, though it’s hard to hold a grudge because she’s wearing another festive Christmas sweater adorned with snowball pompoms. Holding tightly to the leash, I have anxious visions of her getting loose.
Bolting, maybe chasing a poor soul with a box of sugar cookies, before making it to the main road.
Harmony Hills is a sleepy place much of the year, but during the holiday season, tourists descend, taking Sunday drives to see the lights, to pick up gingerbread-house-making supplies at the Cookie Cottage, which became semi-famous after a glowing write-up years ago in a national travel magazine.
“Please behave, Mary,” I whisper, as Liam orders our hot chocolate. She wags her tail like a happy-go-lucky dog would. “You know, you have really pretty eyelashes.”
As though understanding my compliment, her tail wags round and around, and she presses her head into my leg. I pat at her awkwardly, then scratch behind her ear the way Liam did.
“Don’t make me regret this,” I say, forcing my shoulders down. Relax, Elizabeth. She’s a cute potbellied pig in a holiday sweater—she’s harmless. Mary’s hair is bristly, but she’s warm and soft against my leg, letting out little contented grunts.
“You’ve done it now,” Liam says. He hands me one of the take-out cups, then sits beside me on the bench.
I thank him, the warmth of the cup lovely against my cold hand. “And what have I done?”
He doesn’t reply, simply smiles as he sips the hot chocolate. A ring of marshmallow foam clings to his five-o’clock-shadowed upper lip. However, my question is answered a moment later when Mary suddenly flops to the sidewalk. She lies on her side, frighteningly still.
“Is she okay?” My muscles tense up; I’m out of my depth. If a person collapsed, I’d know exactly what to do. But a potbellied pig? My medical skills are useless.
“She’s fine. That’s how she asks for a belly rub.” Liam leans back and crosses one leg over his other knee. Compared to me, he’s fully relaxed.
I glance down at Mary and her soft pink stomach, mottled with large brown spots and fine hair. “A belly rub?”
He takes another sip of hot chocolate, then, “Feel free to ignore the request. Teaching her that she can’t always get what she wants is part of her training—if we can call it that. Sometimes it feels like she’s training me.”
I laugh, because I don’t know if all potbellied pigs are like Mary, but she certainly seems determined to get her way.
“There’s a reason the term pigheaded has pig in it,” Liam adds.
“How do you deny her when she wags her tail like that?” I give her belly a little tap. “This is why I’ve never had a pet. They would be the boss of me.”
“If Mary could talk, she would tell you she’s the boss of everyone .”
We laugh, then fall into an easy silence. But it’s too quiet, and soon my thoughts threaten to overwhelm me. My mind flips between last year’s memories and this year’s realities, like a compass searching for its bearings. I need a distraction, and quick. “So what brought you to Harmony Hills?”
“Hmm. Do you want the short or long answer?” he replies.
“Whichever one you want to give.” I point to my cup of hot chocolate, still mostly full. “I have this much time before my family notices I’m not back with the bread. To be clear, it’s the bread they’ll be worried about—not me. We’re a family of carb lovers.”
“Also a carb lover.” Liam holds up his hand and smiles, which warms me faster than the hot chocolate has. If I am in some sort of coma-induced dream, this isn’t the worst way to spend my time.
“I was in tech, and I built and then sold an app. Jaclyn, my girlfriend at the time, wanted us to leave Toronto—she was really into this cottagecore thing, and when she visited Harmony Hills with me, she fell in love with the vibe.” He puts air quotes around the word vibe .
Jaclyn. That must be his ex? The one who gets married in a year’s time and Liam finds out via an unfortunate Christmas card delivery. How can I know this? I shouldn’t know this.
I need to stay in the present, which may actually be the past. Good grief . “Harmony Hills definitely is a vibe,” I reply, hoping I sound more steady than I feel.
“Like nowhere else I’ve been,” Liam says.
“We bought a little hobby farm just outside of town, and started an animal sanctuary. Jaclyn’s an animal lover—she was a communications director for the Humane Society before we moved.
Anyway, the sanctuary is mostly for farm animals, though we did rescue two emus and an alpaca, and a dog named George.
Oh, and Frida, a senior bearded dragon, who is a wise old soul.
Jaclyn wasn’t a huge fan of reptiles, but I can’t imagine life without Frida. ”
There’s a slight hint of something in his tone, but I can’t tell if it’s regret, or sadness, or maybe even relief? He referred to Jaclyn as a “girlfriend at the time,” which reinforces my assumption it’s his now-married ex.
The sanctuary part helps explain why Miss Elsie wanted Liam to take Mary Piggins. But I can’t say this, so instead say, “The sanctuary must be so much work.”
“It’s busy and chaotic and definitely time-consuming, but I love it more than I thought I would. It was supposedly Jaclyn’s dream, but I’m the one who’s still here.”
Again, there’s something in his voice I can’t pin down. Regardless, I understand what it’s like to have dreams that get upended, and to feel a longing for new beginnings. Also? Breakups suck.
“And then Pops was looking for something to keep him busy, and he’s an excellent baker, so we opened the boulangerie.” He shakes his head, but he’s smiling now.
“That’s a bakery, right?”
“Yep. Jaclyn thought bakery was too old-fashioned sounding, though, and a ‘boulangerie’ is a bakery that specializes in bread, which is what we do. Anyway, now Pops and I run it together.”
“Oh! So you own Slice of Life?” I remember Mom telling me when I was home last Christmas ( this Christmas?) about a “nice young couple—Mr. Cutler’s grandson and his girlfriend” who opened a bakery earlier that year.
I didn’t even know Mr. Cutler had a grandson, let alone one so…
impressive and good-looking and, quite frankly, from what I’ve seen so far, pretty darn close to the whole package.
“Your granddad is Mr. Cutler?” Liam nods. “He taught me high-school mathematics—best teacher I ever had, hands down.”
“Doesn’t surprise me one bit,” he says, smiling at the compliment. “Pops retired years ago, but I think he spends more hours in the bakery than he did at the school when he was teaching full time.”
“Okay, let me get this straight.” I lean back against the bench, now shoulder to shoulder with Liam. I turn towards him and enumerate with my fingers. “You were in tech and sold an app. You have a hobby farm and animal sanctuary. And you also run a bakery? Sorry, a boulangerie .”
My French accent is terrible, and it sounds like I have a mouth full of marbles. “In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, I do not speak French well. Amelia’s the gifted one in that department in my family.”
“Trust me, I get it—the rolling r is my downfall.”
We smile at each other, our faces mere inches apart. Close enough I could just…
“The bakery has one deep, dark secret, though,” Liam says, breaking eye contact to stare straight ahead. I abruptly shift my body back to centre, wondering how obvious the deep blush in my cheeks is.
“Oh yeah?” I focus on my hot chocolate cup, twisting the cardboard sleeve around.
Sipping the spicy-sweet beverage, which is delightful, is making me homesick—even though I’m in Harmony Hills.
With some trepidation I wonder what he’s about to confess.
Liam appears so serious, his jaw tight, no smile on his face, not looking my way.
“I opened a bread bakery but… I don’t bake. Actually, scratch that. I can’t bake.” He tries to hold on to a grim expression, but the corner of his mouth twitches as a smile threatens to break through. It seems Liam Young doesn’t have much of a poker face.
“Oh, wow,” I reply, keeping my own expression solemn.
“Yup. Everything I touch is inedible. I’m more of a ‘dough destroyer’—my granddad actually had a T-shirt made for me.”
I’m partway through sipping my hot chocolate when he says this, and it goes down the wrong way. There are a few moments of dramatic coughing, and Liam taps at my back. “Sorry—didn’t mean to make you choke.”
I wave a hand around as if to say “Don’t worry about it!,” but the movement makes me cough harder.
“I don’t have your medical skills, but I am prepared to do the Heimlich, if necessary,” he says.
My throat feels raw, but I’m finally able to speak. “Dough destroyer, huh?” I clear my throat. “That’s not the best when you, say, run a bakery.”
“I know,” Liam says, chuckling. “Pops, he’s the genius behind Slice of Life. I couldn’t do it without him.”
His cheeks are rosy from the cold air, only adding to his attractiveness. I can’t stop staring at him. But then he sighs, and there’s a shift in energy. Less jovial, more thoughtful.
“Jaclyn and I broke up not long after the bakery opened, and she went back to the city. Turns out Harmony Hills wasn’t her dream after all.”
“I’m really sorry,” I reply. “That’s tough.”
“Yeah, it is. Or was, I guess. Sometimes I wonder what I could have done differently, if I could go back in time and change things,” he says. “Truthfully? That relationship should never have gone as far as it did. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say.”
I nod, any reply I might make stuck in my throat because I’m having a truly unhinged thought. Is there any way Liam knows what’s going on with me? Is this some sort of clue that maybe I’m not alone with this time-travel thing?