21. Thornwood #3
Eli straightened before Bodie had cleared the threshold. He didn’t make a sound doing it. Callum’s knuckles went white on his mug. He was holding back from breaking the handle off, and you could see it in the angle of his wrist. Rowena didn’t turn from the stove.
Bodie didn’t come past the threshold. The dew of the morning was visible on his shoes. He didn’t look at the table. He looked at Rowena’s back.
“Rowena.”
Rowena set the spoon down on the spoon rest with a small, precise motion. She turned from the stove. She didn’t look at any of us. She walked past Bodie and out onto the back porch, and the screen door closed behind them, carefully, no slam.
Callum’s jaw locked.
Jasper’s face went blank in a way that wasn’t calm. I’d never seen Jasper’s face do that before, and it occurred to me that the lovable-puppy thing was a setting he chose, and far from the only setting he had.
Eli’s chair scraped back an inch like he’d started to stand and caught himself. His off-hand left his lap and came up to the table and stayed there.
I looked at all three of them, and none of it helped. Whatever they were each reading from the air around Bodie’s arrival, they were reading the same thing in the same way and they weren’t going to share with me. The bond didn’t tell me either.
That should have caught my attention, but I was too tired, too wrung out. I let it go.
Tara’s fingers tightened over mine.
***
I didn’t know how long Rowena was gone. Not long enough to be alarming.
Not short enough to be nothing. Long enough for Miss Delphine to set her book aside on the windowsill and fold her hands in her lap.
Then longer. Eli’s hand on the table began to tremble for real, and he didn’t bother hiding it.
As time continued to drag on, Tara switched which finger she had over the back of my hand twice.
When the screen door opened again, it opened slowly. Naturally. Whatever was coming back through it with Rowena, she was not letting any of it show in how she opened a door.
She came back through.
Her hand was flat on the counter the second she made it back to the stove, fingers spread wide, holding herself up. She wasn’t looking at the door. She wasn’t looking at any of us. She was looking at the witches.
“I would like to thank you,” she said.
Her mouth kept moving after that, but nothing came out.
I had never seen Rowena Voss fail to finish a sentence. You don’t forget the first time you see something like that.
Tara’s grandmother reached up and put her old hand on the back of the chair Rowena was standing behind. She didn’t touch Rowena. She didn’t have to. Tara’s grandmother was the only person I’d ever met who could communicate something complete and final through the back of a piece of furniture.
“We will go home now, Rowena.”
“Yes.”
“You will come see me when the weeks are quieter.”
“Yes.”
Miss Delphine spoke from the window. She had a voice like a teacher who had spent forty years not raising it. “You eat what is in front of you tonight, Rowena. You eat. You do not work in this kitchen until tomorrow.”
“I won’t,” Rowena said. “You need to get some rest, too.”
That was the closest thing to a smile any of the witches managed all morning. Miss Delphine’s mouth did a small, private thing at one corner and then went back to neutral.
Dex straightened off the back wall and held the door open.
Tara’s grandmother kissed the top of my head on her way past. The kiss was light and dry and almost undid me. Miss Delphine put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, without force, and let go.
Tara still hadn’t moved.
Her fingers were still over mine. Dex stood at the door with one hand on the frame, waiting. He didn’t push. He just stood there. I wasn’t sure if it was patience or wisdom, but he obviously wasn’t going to be the one to rush her.
She finally let go of my hand and stood up.
She came around the table to my chair. I stood with her.
My legs were not entirely steady, but they were not going to be the reason Tara didn’t get to hug me before she left.
Her arms went around my ribs. Careful at the side where the cracked one was.
I’d told Tara when she’d helped me up the stairs the night before, and there was much neither of us was likely to forget for the rest of our lives.
She held on.
I held on back.
We stood there in the kitchen with the witches in the doorway and Dex at the frame and the brothers at the table, and neither of us said anything.
Tara smelled like her favorite brand of shampoo and a little bit like Dex, which was new on her and which I was filing away in the back of my mind to tease her about the second I had the energy.
The word ‘stamina’ ping-ponged around in my head and I almost giggled.
“Sunday,” she said into my hair.
“Sunday.”
“If we’re not back by sundown, you can blame Dex.”
Dex tipped his head back against the doorframe and looked at his brothers across the kitchen like a man asking for backup. “You see the shit I put up with?”
There was a round of snorts and chuckles from the brothers that was just the kind of normalcy I had needed. And just like that, it felt like home again.
Hot tears slid down my face, and I finally let loose the flood.
“I’m gonna kick his ass,” Tara said into my hair. “I can kick all their asses.”
And then we were both laughing and crying, while four men watched quietly, perhaps not out of fear, but most certainly out of self-preservation.