Chapter 1
Josie
Here is a thing nobody tells you about grief: eventually, if you're lucky, you get bored of it.
Not bored of missing him. That never gets boring, that never gets easier, that just gets quieter, like a radio in another room you've learned to live around.
But bored of the performance of grief, the careful way you used to hold your face in public so nobody would worry, the practiced sad smile you gave the church ladies who patted your hand at the grocery store like you were a dog that might bite.
I was bored of that. Which meant, I'd decided somewhere around eighteen months in, that I was healing.
"You're humming," Harper said, from her side of the shop, not looking up from the register.
"I'm allowed to hum."
"You're humming and you slid Mrs. OFarrell an extra scone and didn't charge her for it."
"She has a hip replacement Thursday. It's a good-luck scone."
"Uh-huh." Harper glanced up, and there was something soft in it, something careful, the same careful all my friends still did around me sometimes, checking the weather before they said the next thing. "You've had a good week."
"I've had a good month," I said, and it startled me a little to say it out loud, like naming it might scare it off. "Is that allowed?"
"Josie." Harper set down the receipt tape. "You're allowed to have a good decade. Nobody's grading you."
Two years is a strange unit of time to measure a life by.
Not long enough that the world forgets. Long enough that you're supposed to have found some kind of shore.
I'd read all the books, the ones well-meaning people leave on your porch in the first six months and then, mercifully, stop leaving after month nine when they realize you're not going to read them in a way that fixes anything.
Grief comes in waves, they said. Grief isn't linear, they said.
All of it true, none of it useful, in the way that true things about drowning aren't useful to a person actually drowning.
What actually helped was smaller and stupider than any of the books.
It was flour under my nails at five a.m. It was the particular silence of the bakery before the ovens warmed up, when it was just me and the dark and the smell of yeast, a silence I'd once have found unbearable and now found almost holy.
It was Harper letting me run my little counter out of the corner of her flower shop two years ago when I couldn't stand to be in my own kitchen — because my kitchen was our kitchen, and every pan in it had a story with him in it — and it was that counter slowly, stubbornly, growing into something that was mine. Not ours. Mine.
I built a life out of small good days stacked on top of each other until they made a life-shaped thing. I wasn't going to apologize for it being sturdy.
"You've got the Hendersons' order," Harper said. "Cake for the retirement thing. And—" she checked the clipboard, then looked up with the specific, deliberately casual face she used when she was about to say something she thought I'd resist. "Warren called. Wanted to know if Friday's still good."
"Friday's still good."
"You say that like you're confirming a dentist appointment."
"I like Warren."
"You like Warren," Harper repeated, testing the sentence for weight and finding it, correctly, a little light.
"I do." I did. Warren Doss ran the feed store, had kind eyes and a low, unhurried voice, and had lost his wife to cancer four years back in a grief so different from mine — slow, expected, a long goodbye instead of a door slammed shut — that we'd found an odd, gentle companionship in comparing the shapes of our losses.
He made me laugh. He didn't make my chest ache with familiarity, didn't remind me of anyone, which I'd decided, cautiously, might be the point.
Maybe you weren't supposed to find lightning twice.
Maybe the second time around was supposed to be a warm room instead of a storm, and I was allowed to want the warm room.
"You don't light up when you say his name," Harper said. Not unkind. Just true.
"Not everybody has to be a bonfire, Harp."
"No," she agreed. "But you used to be one."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't try to find one.
I went back to piping buttercream roses onto a sheet cake that said CONGRATULATIONS ON FORTY YEARS OF NOT MURDERING EACH OTHER, which was Doreen Henderson's actual request, verbatim, and I loved this town for things like that, for the way it let its grief and its jokes live in the same room without apologizing for either.
"You know what I think," Harper said, coming to lean on the counter beside me, watching me work the piping bag with the particular focus I gave anything that needed steady hands.
"I think you've decided being a bonfire is dangerous.
I think you got burned once and now you're only interested in things that generate a nice, manageable amount of heat. "
"That's very poetic for a Tuesday."
"I contain multitudes." She reached over and stole a stray dab of buttercream off the edge of the piping tip, licking it off her thumb with the shameless efficiency of a woman who'd been doing it since we were both sixteen and sneaking frosting out of her mother's kitchen.
"I just want you happy, Jos. Whatever shape that takes.
I'm not trying to talk you out of Warren.
I like Warren. I just want to make sure you're choosing him because you want him, and not because he's safe. "
"Can't it be both?"
"Sure. As long as you're honest with yourself about which one's doing the heavy lifting."
I didn't have a good answer for that either, so I let it sit, the way you let most of Harper's uncomfortably accurate observations sit, and went back to the cake.
Forty years of roses, one for each year, and I found myself thinking, unbidden, about what our fortieth would have looked like, mine and Cormac's, if the world hadn't taken the choice away from both of us.
I let myself think it for exactly three seconds before I closed the door on it the way I'd trained myself to, gently, without slamming, because slamming just made the door louder next time.
The afternoon moved the way afternoons in the shop always moved — a steady current of regulars, the bell over the door ringing every few minutes, the particular music of small-town commerce that I'd come to love more than I ever expected to when Harper first offered me the corner counter out of pity two years ago.
It wasn't pity anymore. I knew that now.
It had become something else, something mine, built out of four a.m. mornings and burnt first batches and the slow, stubborn accumulation of a life that belonged entirely to me.
By five, the rush had thinned to nothing, and Harper packed up to collect her kids from school, leaving me the last hour to close alone, which had become my favorite part of the day without my quite realizing when that happened.
The quiet after the bell stopped ringing.
The particular gold color the light turned as it slanted low through the front windows.
The private, unwitnessed satisfaction of a day's work well done, counted out in the drawer and locked away for the night.
The day went the way good days go now — unremarkably.
That was the whole miracle of it. I used to measure my life in landmarks of pain: the funeral, the first Christmas, the first time I laughed and then felt guilty about it for a week.
Now I measured it in the ordinary. A cake decorated well.
A scone that came out of the oven exactly right.
A customer who told me it was the best thing they'd eaten all year and meant it.
By six I was closing up alone, Harper gone to pick up her kids, the shop quiet in the particular blue-gold way it got at that hour, spring light slanting low through the window and catching the flour dust like something out of a painting.
I liked closing alone. I liked the ritual of it — wiping down the counters, counting the drawer, flipping the sign, the small private ceremony of finishing a day well.
I was humming again. Something from the radio, I didn't even know what, just a tune stuck loose in my head, and I was thinking about nothing in particular — whether I had eggs at home, whether Warren would want to try the new place over in Millbrook Friday or if that felt like too much too fast — when someone knocked at the door.
I almost didn't hear it over the radio. Then I did, and I frowned at the clock, because we closed at six and it was six-oh-four, and townsfolk mostly knew better, except for the occasional tourist lost on their way to somewhere prettier.
I turned around, already forming the closed, sorry, come back tomorrow in my head, flour still on my hands, and I opened the door.
The world did something I don't have a word for.
It didn't stop, exactly. It's not that dramatic, not really, whatever the books say.
It's more like every sound in it went very far away all at once, like someone had put the whole evening underwater, and the only thing left in the silence was his face.
Cormac.