Chapter 22 komorebi
komorebi
Root rot had decimated an entire portion of the Wildflower Garden.
Luckily it was near the wall where the mysterious leak was so it wasn’t particularly noticeable from the path, but I still felt bad every time I pulled out a violet or an iris and the roots just sloughed off.
This was one of the few parts of gardening that I didn’t like—failure, especially when it came from something out of my control. Surprise cold snaps. Flooding. Mites.
The soggy ground squelched under my muddy shoes as I bent to pull up another flower, and another.
At least pulling up dead flowers was a stress relief.
I kept kicking myself for the letter I sent to Cyrus where I signed my own name.
I’d been in such a rush to put it in the envelope, it must have just been a force of habit.
Whenever I thought about it, I remembered the way Rus planted his hand in the clovers between us, the way he leaned in, the way his eyes settled on my mouth.
I must have been mistaken. I had to be.
“I don’t envy you,” said a familiar voice from the path.
I glanced back to find Oliver, having returned from wherever he always disappeared to. Today he wore a dark T-shirt, jeans, and those same dirty white sneakers. His hair was a messy mop of blond that he kept raking back with his fingers to keep it out of his eyes.
I sat back on my heels and said, “Would you want to help?”
He scrunched his nose and held up his hands. “With these city hands?”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s a way to fix that.”
“Working? Gross.”
“I was going to say gloves.”
“Ah.”
I pulled up two more waterlogged flowers.
“You know,” he went on, putting his hands in his pockets, “maybe the water’s coming from the other side of the wall.”
“No, Eula said there wasn’t anything over there.”
His brows furrowed. “Of course not. She doesn’t want to think about the greenhouse.”
I dropped the limp flowers and stood. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me she hasn’t told you about it.”
“I mean—I know about the greenhouse.” I abandoned my kneeling pad and hand shovel and moved back through the garden to the path, taking out my phone.
I pulled up a map of the garden and zoomed in on where we were.
“I just didn’t think it was so close to the other gardens, especially since it was the only thing that caught fire. See? It’s not here.”
He met me at the edge of the path and leaned over to look at the map.
“Yeah, that was one of the weird things. I think you can see a little of the charred wall at the back of the Willow Grove, but that’s it.
The greenhouse was here,” he added, taking two long fingers and magnifying the map to show me.
On the map, it was simply a space of green, and if he hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have thought twice.
After all, Eula had said nothing was there. Though I remembered the tightness in her voice when she said it. Recognized deep in my bones the avoidance it signified.
“The water’s coming from there,” I murmured, surer than ever.
Henry’s greenhouse.
Cyrus had said that the secret garden had something to do with him. It seemed impossible, but what if the leak was supposed to lead me there?
“Thank you, Oliver, this is perfect,” I said as I looked up from my phone and into his soft brown eyes.
He was so close, I could count the specks of gold in them.
His eyelashes were long, and there was a beauty mark just below his left eye.
Harriett would have scoffed and said that it couldn’t possibly be real and then fixated on it for months.
She would have written poetry about it, like she had with Sanchez’s cowlick.
I wished she could’ve met Oliver. That I could’ve asked her what she thought about him, and if my chest just felt full and strange whenever he looked at me because I was infatuated with the attention or if I was really falling. She knew what love felt like. She opined about it.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever known.
“You’re surprising,” he murmured. “You care a lot about this place for someone only here for the summer.”
“I like being thorough.”
“Even if you won’t be here to see the results?”
“That’s always the gamble with a garden.”
“Do you care so much about every garden you tend?”
No, but he didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know how meaningful Lilymoor was to me.
That it could trick me into thinking, for a moment, that Harrie was still here.
Because for a split second I sometimes saw her out of the corner of my eye, and I could pretend that she was just around the next bend waiting for me.
A ghost made of memories. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave quite yet.
“I just like doing a good job,” I said instead, dropping my gaze as I put my phone back into the front of my coveralls. His silence told me that he didn’t quite believe me, but before he could push it I asked, “Is there a way to get to the greenhouse?”
His eyebrows jerked up. “Now?”
I nodded. “Please?”
“The path was walled up years ago,” he replied thoughtfully, “but I used to sneak in over by the roses. We might still be able to?”
“Show me?”
He hesitated.
“Or I can just scale the wall,” I went on. “You know I have no qualms doing that—”
“Fine, I’ll show you, but on one condition.”
I eyed him. “What?”
“You, and me,” he said, pointing to us both in turn. “Dinner.”
I began to make up an excuse, but the words caught in my throat because …
I wanted to have dinner with him, as strange as that felt.
I wanted to go back into his car, and I wanted to try that scene again where he stared at my mouth and instead of running away, I leaned into him.
I wanted to know how that scene played out.
And I was very scared that I did.
Sophie Drear didn’t take chances. She didn’t agree to dinners with gorgeous men who also happened to be her employer’s nephew. It was a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
He should know that, too.
And yet—
“You have a deal,” I said, and the grin that curled across his mouth was wickedly charming.
“Perfect,” he said in a voice that was very much a rumble in his chest. A thrill shivered down my spine.
Then he flourished his hands toward the Rose Court and led the way.
Roses had overtaken much of the garden, climbing across trellises and lattice, and so when he motioned to a portion of the outer wall, I was a bit surprised he knew exactly where to look.
“Through here,” he said, getting down on his knees, and motioned beneath.
“There’s a hole in the wall, and you have to crawl through.
See?” he said, and when I knelt, too, I did see a glimmer of sunlight on the other side.
I had a feeling this was how Damnit seemed to spring on us unawares.
She cut through the Hedges back there, and then to the Rose Court.
“Though I think I might be a bit too big now.”
He might have been, but I wasn’t. So on my hands and knees, I went through the tunnellike opening to the other side.
“Wait!” he called. “What about me?”
“You said you were too big!”
He gave a frustrated grunt and then followed after me. He was a little too big for the hole, but with a bit of wiggling, and after snagging himself on a few thorns, I helped pull him through the other side. He hissed in pain as he inspected a cut on his arm.
“I think I shall die,” he announced.
“Okay, but I’m not pulling your body back through the hole,” I replied, and he wilted.
“You’re mean.”
“Oh yes,” I deadpanned, “very.”
Because I was the poster child for a bleeding heart. I saved dying plants from roadside trash, and fed possums in parking lots, and decided to help a thundercloud of a man escape a secret garden.
If anything, I was gullible and naive.
But I admitted to myself that I was also, in this case, smart. Because as it turned out, I had done geometry correctly and Eula’s updated map was indeed wrong.
Very wrong.
The space back here was large, a corner of plot backed against the Reservoir and the Rose Court.
Skimmers raced across the surface of the water cluttered with duckweed, and a lone frog croaked somewhere in the reedy grass on the other side.
The space was overrun with weeds and brambles and wildflowers, reclaiming the bones of where a greenhouse still stood.
I could imagine how lovely it had been as I picked my way toward its skeleton.
There were broken pots and jabs of burnt lattice, glass crackling beneath my feet as I crept inside.
The large trees creaked in the gentle breeze coming off the cliffs, sunlight playing through the leaves, looking like stained glass.
If the garden that Rus was stuck in looked like a thought half-finished, this looked like a thought you wanted to bury.
Oliver had become very quiet the closer we came to the greenhouse, and he’d yet to actually set foot inside. His mouth was drawn tight, eyes narrow as he looked around at the burnt foundation. The sun caught in his dirty-blond hair, glimmering in strings of gold as he carded his fingers through it.
I asked, glancing back at him, “Is everything all right?”
He motioned to the area. “I just . . . haven’t been back here since . . . you know.”
“At all?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry I brought you back here—”
“I wanted to bring you. Besides, the past can’t hurt us, right? It can only haunt us. Though I think it haunts Rus a bit more than it does me.”
I went out on a limb and said, “You were best friends.”
He tried to deny it, but in the end he just shoved his hands into his pockets and forced out, “Yeah. We were. And you know how best friends are.”
More than he knew. “They’re awful.”
“The worst. They know you more intimately than your situationship and they bully you like a sibling? Talk about rude,” he lamented, though by the look on his face he didn’t mean it. He seemed . . . wistful about it, honestly.
I asked, “What happened between you two?”