Chapter 25 #2
Hattie nodded. “Yep. At first, Kipp didn’t want to tell me, and it’s still a big secret, so don’t say anything to anyone.
” I made a show of zipping my mouth shut and throwing away the key.
It had been months of them keeping this secret, and they’d said nothing.
“Apparently, he flew back East after he got information on me.” When I opened my mouth, she held up a hand.
“Kipp had a stranger at his place. I didn’t begrudge him doing a little digging into my background, but the person he asked was at Redhawk.
I’m not sure if he asked Rhodes directly,” she tipped her head toward the porch.
“But when he went over everything and saw that Jane’s case wasn’t solved and that Nolan was the only link, he went there and somehow got Nolan to confess to Jane’s murder and show the cops where he’d buried her. ” Hattie was silent for a minute.
“I can never thank him enough for that. Actually being able to bury her and getting justice was a big deal. It’s letting me move forward with a clean conscience.”
My mind reeled as I looked over at Rhodes. I could only imagine how he’d gotten Nolan Cannon to confess after all those years, and I would bet it involved pain.
“Wow, I had no idea.” That was all I could come up with. “That was nice of him.” He was friends with my brother, but it seemed like a risky favor, not to mention a criminal act to go beat someone up on a hunch. I checked in with my moral compass. Did I sleep with a criminal?
“What we’re saying is that we like him.” Lila nudged me with her shoulder. “He’d be good for you.”
“Hmm. Solid recommendation.” I winked at her. “I’ll take it under consideration.”
"Wade's trusted him for years," Lila added. "East too."
"Kipp likes him,” Hattie chipped in.
"Kipp likes everyone,” I noted. That wasn’t true.
Kipp wasn’t exactly a social creature. He faked it well.
He thrived in situations like this, but put him somewhere in town?
Well, he hated that. Although I wasn’t sure why I was bothering to protest, I looked over at Rhodes, where he stood, all hot and commanding, with my brothers.
"Kipp tolerates everyone," Hattie corrected. "He likes very few people. Ask me. I live with him." She paused. "He called him a solid guy on the way over. That's basically a marriage proposal from Kipp."
Opal came back with her fists full of small flat stones and a piece of bark that she'd apparently decided was load-bearing, dropping them beside Jessamina’s kingdom with the satisfied exhale of a person who had just solved a significant logistical problem.
"Sage," she said, without looking up from her sorting, "do faeries like these purple flowers?”
"They love them,” I said. “That’s lavender. The bees like it too. It’ll help your fairy house be a home of love and peace."
She considered this, then carefully tucked one of the lavender sprigs along the entrance to Jessamina’s middle house.
"Good." She sat back on her heels and regarded her work with the critical eye of an artist assessing a nearly finished canvas. "I'm going to build another one for Princess Dewdrop. She’s going to be friends with Princess Jessamina forever and ever. Do you think she’ll stay with Jessamina?”
“She’d be crazy not to.”
She nodded as if this settled something, and went back to her kingdom, and Hattie's shoulder pressed into mine with the silent, specific language of a friend communicating.
I watched Maggie come out of the kitchen onto the porch with a tray in her hands.
Her hair had turned gray, but she was still a beautiful woman.
We’d all been urging her to date, but she’d laughed it off, telling us she was enjoying her time with her girlfriends and hobbies.
The worst was right after Levi had died.
We were sure she wouldn’t be able to pull through.
She was so heartbroken, but it had been seven years now, and time had started to wear down some of the sharp edges of grief.
I still saw her sometimes staring into space, and I knew she was thinking of him. She’d called him the love of her life.
“Tea for you girls. Dinner will be ready soon. Chamomile.” She pressed a mug into my hands without asking, and the warmth of it moved up my fingers and into the place behind my sternum where the day had been sitting, cold and unprocessed.
Maggie watched the lawn and Opal. Spread out before her, the grounds of this place were beautiful.
It was hard to say it wasn’t the prettiest spot in the state right now with the grass and the greenhouse glass going amber in the fading light.
Maggie watched it with the expression she had when she was being quiet on purpose, the one that meant she was thinking things over.
I had spent enough years in the radius of that particular silence to know that it was better to wait her out.
"Rhodes called me this afternoon. He wanted to let me know you were all right so I wouldn’t have to wait for news.
” She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching Opal, who had recruited Hattie and Lila into the project and was directing them to place a ceremonial stone, with the patient authority of someone accustomed to collaborators who needed instruction.
I didn't say anything, but I took her hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it. My brothers would have let her know, but it was still nice that he’d taken the time to do it himself.
“I’m worried for you.” Maggie’s mouth pinched.
“The boys will handle it. Rhodes will help.” She nodded, soothing a hand over my hair, but didn’t say anything. They’d do their best, but we knew that things happened in life … accidents, crazy people. Every day should be hugged tight and savored.
"It's perfect," Lila was saying to Opal.
"Obviously," Opal agreed, and wiped her hands on her jeans in the exact way her father had done at the greenhouse, the same gesture, the same unconscious economy of motion. I felt it move through me like a tuning fork finding a frequency it already knew.
Rhodes crossed the lawn in the way he moved everywhere — measured, unhurried, his gaze doing its sweep before settling.
It touched on me just for a moment before he came to a stop a few feet from Opal's kingdom, looking down at it with an expression that went unguarded in the way it always did when it was just her, the unlocked version of him.
“Tell me about your house?” he asked with a quirk of his lips, crouching to Opal's level.
“This one is for Jessamina. She's a princess. That’s lavender." She pointed at each element with professional precision. "Sage said it helps with love.”
He looked up and found me over his daughter's head, and the look lasted exactly one beat longer than informational. "Smart," he said.
"I know," Opal said. “I’m building another one over here for Princess Dewdrop,” she sighed exasperatedly, “I have to get busy. Lots of work to do.”
“Of course.” He held up both hands. “Sorry to bother you.”
She hustled back to work, bossing Lila and Hattie around again, while Rhodes stood and moved toward the wall, stopping beside me with the ease of a man who had decided where he was going and saw no reason to make it complicated, close enough that his arm pressed against mine.
He looked out at the grounds the way I’d been looking at them, the oak trees and the last of the light turning copper at the property's edge.
“Maggie, I’m looking forward to dinner, but I think you and the others made enough food for the entire county. Nobody is going to starve, that’s for sure.”
“You haven’t seen how much food the Holts can eat yet,” she teased. “You better take care of my girl,” she said, pressing a brief, warm hand to his forearm as she passed.
Rhodes watched her retreating figure with an expression I recognized. It was the look people got the first time in the radius of everything Holt. "She's something," he said, quiet enough that it was just for me.
"She's everything," I said. “We are so lucky to have her.”
Opal had abandoned Jessamin’s kingdom in favor of chasing Hattie across the lawn, both of them shrieking about something that had devolved from faeries into a game with rules I couldn't follow from here.
Lila had drifted toward the greenhouse with her mug and her particular quality of being exactly present enough without crowding anyone.
It was just me and Rhodes on the wall with the last of the April light going gold and the sounds of my family filling the house behind us.
"Thanks,” I said. "For today. For coming. For—" It was an inadequate attempt, but the only one I had.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I know. I'm doing it anyway." He had dropped whatever he was doing to help me. Maybe he thought I was spoiled being around the Holt clan, but I wasn’t stupid. Not all men were like my brothers. A lot of them either weren’t good people or they were selfish. Rhodes was neither of those.
He looked at me with the grey eyes that I had privately thought a great deal about since the first time I'd been close enough to see the depth of them, and something in the look was careful and unhurried and very much not the look of a man who was thinking about professional arrangements or greenhouse plans.
"Dinner's in twenty minutes," Phiny's voice carried from the kitchen doorway, cheerful and deliberate and timed with what I could only describe as surgical precision. "Sage, Maggie says, wash your hands, you've been touching dirt."
"I'm always touching dirt," I called back.
"That's why she said it!"
Rhodes made a low sound in his chest that took me a moment to recognize as a laugh.
"Come on,” I said, standing from the wall and brushing the stone dust from the back of my jeans. “Mags made you dinner. The least you can do is eat it."
He stood, and for just a moment we were close as we had been in the office, and his hand lifted to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear with the same careful, deliberate touch he had used, as if he'd been waiting for another excuse and had found one.
“Jessamina’s kingdom is lopsided," he said, nonsensically.
"Don't tell Opal that."
"God, no."