Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Eliot slept. That was the good news. It had been a somewhat fitful rest. He'd woken up at least twice in the night. But he'd spent more of the night asleep than awake. Eliot called that a win any morning.
The bad news, he woke up still in Valor.
Birds chirped outside the window. The sun was a delicate beam on his cheek. No sirens blared. No foul smell wafted from the trash overflowing outside. It was peaceful.
Eliot groaned and got out of bed.
The scent of honey and vanilla was still in the air.
The smell had done it. Whatever she'd been baking next door had followed him home last night.
It came through the wall and settled into his apartment like it owned the place.
He'd noticed it before he fell asleep and then he'd woken at two and it had still been there, faint but present.
The smell and underneath it Stevie Nicks, both of them together had apparently been sufficient to override whatever it was in his brain that usually kept him half-awake and watchful until the alarm went off.
He thought about her. Dalene and her freckled face. He'd had to catch himself a couple of times during their brief conversation. He'd wanted to reach out and trace the constellation on her face.
Eliot yanked the thought out of his head just as he'd yanked his hands behind his back before they could get away from him.
He wasn't here to touch, to star gaze, or anything like that.
He had a job to do so he could get back to the job he was meant for.
And if he had to cover a silly festival to get his spot back, he would do it.
Which was why he was going to the library.
The librarian at the front desk looked up when he came in. She had the alert expression of someone who read people the way he read weather — quick, quiet, no drama about it and a high chance of accuracy.
"Cloud Registry?" she asked.
"How did you know?"
"Small town." She pointed toward the back. "You'll want to head to the archives. Sign in first."
He signed in. He went back.
The registry was twelve volumes. Navy blue. Gold lettering on the spines, faded at different rates depending on how often each had been handled. He pulled the first one — 1962 — and opened it on the archive table and read the first entry in Vivienne Austen's handwriting.
Date: August 14, 1962 · Time: 3:47 PM
Location: East meadow, lower slope of the cloud-watching hill
Conditions: Partly cloudy. 84°F. High humidity. Southwest wind, light.
Formation: Single cumulus mass. Distinctly cardiac shape. Two symmetrical lobes tapering to a point. Held formation for eleven minutes before dissipating northwest.
Notable event: George Calloway proposed to Ruth Ellen Briggs on this hillside. She said yes.
— V. Austen
Date: August 13, 1978 · Time: 5:12 PM
Location: Cloud-watching hill, north slope
Conditions: Clear to partly cloudy. 79°F. Moderate humidity. Southwest wind, gentle.
Formation: Two cumulus formations merged briefly into a single cardiac shape. Asymmetrical but unmistakable. Held for eight minutes before separating and dissipating east.
Notable event: Margaret and Thomas Chen, married fourteen years, had not spoken in three weeks following a disagreement neither would name. They were seated six feet apart on the hill when the formation appeared. They were holding hands before it dissipated.
— V. Austen
Date: August 12, 1991 · Time: 4:28 PM
Location: East meadow, upper blanket row
Conditions: Partly cloudy. 71°F. High humidity. Southwest wind, steady.
Formation: Single cumulus. Classic cardiac shape, unusually defined. Held formation for fourteen minutes. Longest duration on record to date.
Notable event: Patricia Reyes attended alone. She met Anthony Wright who was visiting his aunt. The two planned a date for the weekend.
— V. Austen
Eliot sighed as he flipped through more pages.
There was data here. Meticulous data. But it was also fluffed up with the notable events that had nothing to do with the weather phenomenon.
He set about cross-referencing the relevant information in a notebook organized by season and atmospheric condition.
Two hours later, he had something that could be a weather broadcast segment.
The sightings clustered late summer into early autumn, always in the same week of August which was notable. Southwest wind flow. High humidity. A specific temperature differential between the surface and the upper levels. But this wasn't random. It was physics.
He heard footsteps coming towards him. The scent of vanilla hit him as the door to the Archives opened.
His nervous system jolted. Jolt was the wrong word.
It wasn't an electric shock at the thought of seeing her again.
It was more of an alertness, a moment of calm before the storm that was Dalene Austen came inside the room.
What would it be this time? A library heist where she had to steal a book for national security? Or she was looking for a clue for a treasure hunt? Eliot turned with anticipation only to be disappointed.
The woman in the doorway didn't have skin the color of café au lait. She was porcelain pale with blonde hair and not a single freckle across her nose. She did have a pastry bag with the Flour frames and canvas and the happy noise of people building something together.
At the far end, the broadcast stage was half-assembled.
Miles was somewhere in the middle of it looking at cable runs.
"Anything you need me to do?" Eliot asked. Eliot was the kind of talent that had started with a single camera that he'd have to mic and light. He was used to getting his hands dirty and being a team player.
"I'm good," said Miles. "Dalene needs someone on the ground to feed cable while she runs the lights up the pole. The volunteer who was doing it got pulled to the stage build."
Eliot looked at the eastern pole line. Dalene Austen was twelve feet up a ladder in jeans and a worn Valor Middle School sweatshirt, a coil of fairy lights over one shoulder, arguing with what appeared to be a recalcitrant carabiner clip.
She didn't hear him coming. She was too busy conducting a quiet, technical argument with the clip, which she was losing.
"The locking mechanism is counterclockwise," Eliot said, from the base of the ladder.
Dalene looked down. He registered the precise sequence of her expression — surprise, recalibration, the smallest possible adjustment toward neutral.
"I know how a carabiner works," she said.
"You're turning it the wrong way."
"I'm turning it the—" She looked at it. She turned it counterclockwise. It opened. "That was already loose."
"Clearly."
"Are you going to hold the ladder or just stand there mansplaining?"
Eliot took the ladder with both hands, one on each side rail, and felt the structure steady under his grip. Above him, Dalene clipped the first light strand into place.
"Feed me the next section."
He picked up the cable coil from the ground and began feeding slack upward.
She worked quickly; clipping, adjusting, checking tension.
The lights ran in a clean arc between the poles when she was done with each section.
He noticed that she'd calculated the catenary curve exactly right, which was not something most people thought about with string lights.
"So," she said, from above him, in the tone of someone who had been waiting to deploy something. "Festival weather ambassador. How are you settling into the role?"
"Admirably."
"Betty Ann says you were in the town hall archives for two hours."
He was about to ask how she knew, but then guessed the answer; small town. "I was doing research."
"For the festival."
"Yes."
"In the Cloud Registry specifically."
"It's a significant data set."
He heard the smile in her voice. "Sixty years of atmospheric observations and you're going to tell me you weren't interested."
"I said it was significant."
"What did you find?"
He considered not answering. But when had someone asked him about weather phenomenon out of interest? "Your last name is Austen with an E?"
"Yes, Vivienne was my grandmother."
"Her notes are meticulous. The sightings cluster, seasonally and meteorologically. If you had concurrent upper-level data — radiosonde records for this area, historical reanalysis — you could potentially model the conditions. Predict them."
"Probably, but no one here is interested in that. The townsfolk love the lore and the romance of it. You wouldn't believe how many couples found each other or proposed to each other or found out they were expecting after coming to the festival."
"You've been every year?" he asked.
"Since I was born."
"And you…?" He was about to ask her if she had found someone, but something stopped him.
"Would you pass me more cable?" Her voice had gone stilted. Gone was the wonder at the scientific data.
Eliot wished he'd bit his tongue. Instead he handed her more cable.
She reached for the final anchor point, stretching to her right to reach a bracket that was slightly further than comfortable. The ladder shifted fractionally under the change in weight distribution.
"Careful—" he started.
Dalene's foot slipped.
It happened in the slow-fast way that would play out in a romantic comedy movie.
Eliot registered the shift, the sound of her breath, the ladder moving.
His hands were off the rails and he was simply there.
For her. She came down the last four feet into his arms with the graceless, adrenaline-bright shock of someone who had not expected to need catching.
Eliot caught her. His hands found her waist. Her hands found his shoulders. The momentum carried her forward and then stopped, because he was there, and they were —
Close.
Very close.
Her freckles close. Her breath, coming quick from the adrenaline, warm against his mouth. Her eyes wide and dark in the fairy light. The meadow and the volunteers and the string lights and everything else simply failed to exist.
One second. Two. Three.
"Dalene. Hey — are you okay? I saw you fall."
The man came across the meadow at a pace that managed to be both casual and urgent. He was good-looking in an uncomplicated way. The kind of face that photographed well and gave nothing away. Then recognition dawned on Eliot. He'd met this man before. He'd met him last night.
Eliot set Dalene on her feet. He did this reluctantly. There was still a strong hint of vanilla on her skin. There was also lavender. It was probably the lavender that broke his hold.
The other man —what was it? Trident? He reached for Dalene's face. His thumb brushed her cheek. "You're okay," he said, low and certain, like a statement rather than a question.
Eliot watched Dalene's expression do something complicated. Shock. Discomfort. Something moved across her features like a current she was trying not to show on the surface.
She didn't lean in. She didn't step back. She simply went very still and let it happen, which told Eliot more than either of those responses would have.
Then the man turned. "What happened?"
Not thank you for catching her. Just the demand, aimed at Eliot, as though it was his fault.
Dalene blinked. Something shifted in her face — a door closing, a light coming back on. She stepped fractionally sideways, out of the man's reach. Towards Eliot.
"He caught me," she said. "I slipped on the ladder. Eliot was spotting, and he caught me."
The man's —Trixton? — expression adjusted. Minimally.
"Eliot." She looked at him, and her voice had steadied into something deliberate. "This is Tristan. He lives in the apartment across from us."
Tristan's head jerked at the word us.
"And—" Dalene turned, her chin lifted slightly, as she motioned to someone standing behind Tristan. "This is Tristan's fiancée; Brooke."
The woman had been there the whole time. Just as she'd been there last night, and no one had introduced her. Eliot hadn't looked at her until now. She was standing slightly apart with her arms folded and an expression that had started as a smile and not quite finished the job.
Tristan turned back to Dalene with the smile of a man resettling his footing. "You sure you're okay? That looked like a bad—"
"I'm fine." The warmth in Dalene's voice was assembled so fast Eliot would have missed the seams if he hadn't been watching for them. "Eliot had me. No damage done."
Tristan looked at Eliot again. A beat longer this time.
Eliot looked back. And then he did it, the thing he wanted to do since setting Dalene on her feet.
Eliot placed his hand at her low back, let it settle there, let it reassure her that she was steady on her own two feet.
All while assuring himself that no damage would come to this woman and the wrecking ball he sensed that was this man standing in front of them.