Chapter Eight
Piper opens the door to the guest room, Maggie just one step behind her. The walls are a muted sage color with off-white crown
moldings. It has polished wood floors and two full-sized beds with crisp white linens and patchwork quilts. Ornate frames
containing sepia-toned prints of historical New Hope decorate the walls. A sideboard table features an antique porcelain teapot
and a copper clock.
Piper doesn’t understand why the bachelor party triggered her mother so badly. Personally, she thinks the guys add to the
festive atmosphere. She couldn’t help but notice one is about her age and looks like the actor Austin Butler. The world is
full of attractive men.
“Well, this is more what I’d expected,” Maggie says, and Piper is relieved. Back on track for a good weekend. Maggie walks
into the bathroom and calls out, “Oh, Piper. Come in here—there’s a clawfoot tub!”
“In a sec,” she says, flopping onto one of the beds. She didn’t sleep enough last night.
She woke up at two in the morning thinking about Gretchen, about what happened at the Betsy Toledo show. And about Ethan and
the disappearing engagement ring.
The irony is that she has this whole weekend with her mother, someone she usually talks to about everything, and she can’t talk to her about this.
If she admits to Maggie that she’s fretting about an engagement ring, she knows what her mother will say: You’re too young, you should be focused on your career, now’s the time .
. . live it up. The subtext of all of this being, Don’t make the mistakes I made.
“Have you had time to look at the workshop itinerary?” Maggie asks, sitting on her bed with a hank of burgundy yarn that she
starts winding around her knees. Her mother always insists on hand-winding instead of investing in a yarn spinner. She told
Piper that the act of winding it before knitting a project creates a sense of intimacy with the yarn that she finds integral
to the whole process.
“Not yet.”
“We have a welcome tea in an hour and then an all-day yarn market. I signed us up for Know Your Yarn, a lacework class, and
Beginner’s Brioche. I texted you a link. They have the instructors’ bios listed, too.”
Piper picks up her phone, sends Ethan a check-in text telling him they made it and that the inn is “super cute” and that she’ll
talk to him later.
“Hey, why does this name sound familiar?” Maggie says, squinting at her phone screen.
“What name?”
“This instructor. Hannah Elise.”
“Wait,” Piper says, pulling up the retreat on her own phone and scrolling through it. “Hannah Elise is teaching here?”
“That’s what it says. Do we know her?”
Hannah Elise is a crochet designer whose edgy knitwear made her famous on TikTok. Her pieces are intricate and bold, with
cutouts placed strategically to accentuate curves and bright color-blocking that made even the simplest pieces stand out.
“From TikTok,” Piper says. “@HaloHannahKnits. I’ve sent you her videos.”
“Oh, right. I like her stuff.”
“I can’t believe she’s here,” Piper says. She never imagined she’d have to go to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to meet Hannah Elise
from Brooklyn. She follows the link to the classes she’s teaching. It appears she’s mostly doing crochet workshops, not knitting.
“Let’s learn crochet,” Piper says.
Maggie looks up from her winding. “We only have a few days here. I think we should focus on the advanced knitting workshops.”
Their first disagreement of the weekend. Piper is eager to meet Hannah Elise, but she’ll try to do things Maggie’s way for
the next few days. Judging from her overreaction to the bachelor party, her mother needs some R the Cavanaughs are his late wife’s family. And Nancy has been gone twelve years.
“Good morning, Aidan. Welcome,” Max Yarrow says from behind the front desk.
He hands over his credit card. Beside him, Cole flips through a printed itinerary.
“Seriously, Dad,” he says, holding up the sheet of paper. “What’s all this stuff we’re scheduled to do?”
“Wilderness training,” his father says. “I told you the theme’s bushcraft.”
“When you said theme, I thought you meant for drinking games. Or commemorative T-shirts.”
“It will be fun.”
Cole looks dubious.
“I’m twenty-four years old. I’ve made it this far without knowing how to build my own firepit.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” a voice booms behind them. It’s Barclay, his father-in-law. Barclay Cavanaugh has a deep
voice, ragged from years of nicotine and yelling from the sidelines of football games, and it gives every statement he utters
a certain gravitas. In his seventies, Barclay still has a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and, today, a mustache. Nancy
once told him that all her friends in high school had crushes on him.
“Hi, Grandpa. No offense,” Cole says.
Back when Cole was a child, Aidan was praised for making so much effort to keep Cole close to the family on his mother’s side.
But now, friends seem to raise an eyebrow at his continued determination to be a part of the Cavanaugh clan. “What do you
call your former father-in-law?” one of his buddies asked last week when he mentioned the bachelor party weekend. Aidan told
him, “He’ll still my father-in-law. I call him Dad.” The thought of the conversation still irks him.
“These are things boys used to learn just in the regular course of growing up. We didn’t have a fancy name for it,” Barclay says, holding up his bushcraft itinerary.
He walks over to Aidan and gives him a half hug, half back-slap. “We’re doing beer and bratwurst in the restaurant in an hour.
I was there during Oktoberfest, and trust me, you don’t want to miss it.”
Cole consults his phone.
“Do we have time for beer and bratwurst? This itinerary says we have to get to fort building.”
“I think we can fit in a few beers first,” Barclay says. “It’s a bachelor party, not basic training. Am I right?” He shadowboxes
Cole’s arm.
“You got it, Grandpa,” Cole says.
Across the room, a group of women sit on couches chatting, a few of them furiously working knitting needles. Barclay lets
out a low whistle. “Who invited the ladies? I told your grandmother this is strictly a boys’ weekend.” He gives Cole a wink,
but Cole seems not to hear a word of it. He’s staring at the group of knitters like he’s seen a ghost.
“Everything okay?” Aidan says.
“I need to make a phone call,” says Cole. And then he rushes back outside.
Shopping for yarn has the same effect on Maggie as browsing fresh fruit at the Yorkville farmer’s market. She wants to devour
everything in sight.
Belinda’s pop-up yarn market is held in a large first-floor space.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the river.
The windows are dressed with sheer linen drapes to let in all the natural light.
The furniture is a mix of rustic and contemporary: polished wood tables and upholstered armchairs, velvet sofas, and a grand stone fireplace complete with an antique iron grate.
And everywhere, tables are piled high with yarn.
There’s yarn in bins, skeins clipped to metal frames and prewound balls of yarn in lined baskets. Small, delicate bundles
of cashmere are nestled side by side on a table along with a display of fluffy mohair. Beside it is a basket of hand-dyed
merino wool.
“Mom, look,” Piper says, pointing out a pile of Quince Laurel is slight and fair with a heart-shaped face framed by stick-straight,
wheat-colored hair just skimming her shoulders. Kalli is tall, with long dark curls and eyes so brown they appear black.
“The selection of yarns here is amazing,” Laurel says. She has hazel-gray eyes with nearly invisible lashes.
“Thank you.” Belinda smiles. “We used to have a yarn shop in town, and I’d take all my knitters on a field trip the first
day of every retreat. But it closed a few years ago, and so I started this little tradition instead.”
Maggie comments that she especially likes the brushed yarn selection.
“You know, I used to favor mohair in this category,” Belinda says. “But lately, I’ve been impressed by the softness of alpaca
and alpaca blends.”
A woman comes barreling toward them, waving her hands. “Belinda, I forgot to register for Know Your Yarn,” she says.
She’s a whirlwind of energy, mid-fifties, curvaceous and busty with dyed red hair and dressed in a flowy caftan and a chunky
beaded necklace.
“Sheila, you know that won’t be a problem,” Maggie says. “Sheila, meet Maggie, Kalli, and Laurel. Ladies, Sheila Bevins is
a retreat regular.”
“I’ve been coming since the very first one,” Sheila says.
“Summer of 1999. That’s right. Never missed a retreat, never will.
” Sheila beams at Belinda, then turns to Maggie and Kalli.
“Belinda’s classes are the best, and I’ll tell you why: One, she always has a clear agenda, and two, she doesn’t waste time.
Oh, and three, she teaches technique. Not everyone does. You’d be surprised.”
“That’s lovely of you to say, Sheila,” Belinda says, before she excuses herself to help one of the other retreat attendees,
who wants to pay for a bundle of cashmere.
When she’s gone, Sheila says to them, “I’m hosting a yarn swap in my room later. It’s a retreat tradition. I’m in Edgar Allan
Poe.”
“Oh, thank you. I’ll check with my daughter.”
Maggie looks around the room. Where did Piper go?
Piper spots Hannah Elise, aka @HaloHannahKnits, across the room talking to two other twentysomething women. Hannah Elise is easy to spot, with distinctive
strawberry-blond corkscrew curls that fall halfway down her back and hooded, pale blue eyes. She has fair, faintly freckled
skin. Her nose is pierced with a tiny gold hoop. She’s dressed in a crochet tank with a divine matching ankle-length jacket
paired with faded wide-leg jeans.
It feels strange to just walk up and introduce herself. And before Piper can decide how to approach her, Hannah Elise notices
her and waves her over.
“You look so familiar,” she says with a smile. “I’m Hannah Elise—one of the instructors this weekend.” It’s strange to hear
her voice in person instead of through a video on her phone. Here, her Brooklyn accent is more pronounced.
“I know you from TikTok,” Piper says. Now that she thinks about it, she hasn’t seen Hannah Elise’s posts for a while.
Her feed is now overly crowded with fashion accounts she follows for networking.
She makes a mental note to unfollow some of them so she can see more posts that actually bring her joy—especially considering what happened this week.
The last thing she wants to think about now is the fashion industry.
Hannah Elise introduces the two women standing with her, Lexi Takahashi and Dove Sullivan. They’re both artists from Philadelphia.
“This weekend is our honeymoon,” Dove announces, then gazes lovingly at Lexi. Dove is medium height, sinewy, with fair skin
and short brown hair marked with a premature streak of gray.
Piper feels Hannah Elise looking at her intently.
“Now I know why I recognize you,” she says.
Piper can tell, just from the tone of her voice, that Hannah Elise has seen the video of her falling on the runway. But she
doesn’t elaborate, and Piper is grateful. Dove and Lexi seem to have missed the comment entirely.
“You know I hate that term, honeymoon,” Lexi says. Lexi is shorter and broader than Dove, with delicate facial features and
black hair feathered like Joan Jett’s circa the 1980s. “So patriarchal.”
“Congratulations,” Piper says. “When did you get married?”
“Monday,” they say in unison. Then Lexi adds, “We went to City Hall. Kept things simple.”
“But we’re going to have a real ceremony at some point,” Dove says.
“That was a real ceremony,” Lexi corrects gently.
“You know what I mean.”
Dove reaches for Lexi’s hand, and Piper notices their matching platinum bands. She wills herself not to think about rings.
She’s not about to let the fact that her boyfriend might be having second thoughts about their future ruin her weekend.