Chapter 88
The town announced itself before the sign did.
I’d told myself I’d forgotten that—or rather, I’d told myself so many times that I’d forgotten it that I’d stopped examining the difference.
The road into Driftwood Pointe had always made me feel like anything was possible—the air turned otherworldly, an atmospheric pressure that had nothing to do with weather.
I’d felt it at the county line: a faint warmth at the base of my sternum, a slow, spreading recognition, like the first note of a song you know from childhood, your body knows the words before your mind catches up.
I turned the radio up.
The October light didn’t help. That slant—warm and slightly elegiac, making everything look like the last good afternoon before something changes.
Inland, the sky had been flat and gray. Here it had gone amber, the maples along the highway burning gold against it.
The old people called it the Summer of All Saints, the warm days that came when the dead were being remembered, the year holding its heat a little too long.
Joy and nostalgia coexisted seamlessly, welling up until I had to shake my head to focus on the road.
I was thirty-one years old and I still thought about that every October without meaning to.
One week, maybe two. Assess the cottage, meet with the estate attorney, and take whatever photographs would help the listing. I’d once filed a fourteen-hundred-word piece on Lisbon from a hotel bathroom when I had food poisoning. I could manage two weeks in the town where I grew up.
I was twenty minutes out when I saw the sedan.
Old man, navy jacket too thin for the temperature, his hazards blinking an orange pulse in the afternoon light. He was attempting something with a tire iron his hands clearly weren’t going to finish. I drove past. A quarter mile. Then I pulled over.
This was the problem with walls. They were an imperfect infrastructure. There were always gaps.
The grief came through on the handshake—he offered it reflexively, old-fashioned courtesy, and I felt the shape of it as clearly as I felt the roughness of his palm.
Four months. Still surprised by the absence of her.
He didn’t say any of that. He talked about the jack and the spare and whether I thought the pressure looked right.
I talked about the jack and the spare.
I stayed twenty-five minutes. When I finally got back in the car, my hands were cold in the way they got cold when I’d been carrying someone else’s feelings. Borrowed cold. June had told me that, a long time ago. Running water as a barrier. If the feeling follows you across the bridge, it’s yours.
This one left at the bridge over Wren Creek.
Which meant I was in town.
The Calloway Cottage lane was exactly as narrow as I remembered, the maples had grown in from both sides until they met overhead, the October branches making a tunnel of turning leaves.
The light came through in pieces—gold and rust and a stubborn green—and I had driven this lane ten thousand times without once being unmoved by it, and I’d spent fourteen years telling myself I didn’t miss it, and I was not going to be undone by light through leaves in the first thirty seconds.
I parked behind the truck.
It was a working truck—paint worn at the door edges, toolboxes fitted perfectly to the bed.
Right. The caretaker. The attorney’s letter had mentioned a caretaker.
I sat in my car for a moment longer than necessary. The Wren Spring—I could hear it from here, the water running hard over rock somewhere up the hillside. Louder than it should have been, more urgent. The same spring that fed the creek I’d crossed coming in.
The spring is louder when it has something to say, June had said.
The cottage was exactly the same. That was what stopped me, halfway up the flagstone path—except the third stone, the one that had been uneven my whole childhood, the one I’d stepped over so many times my feet still braced for the dip, had been reset.
Level now, the gap repacked, the work recent.
I stood there a second with my weight already shifting for a step I no longer needed to take.
The window boxes still had herbs in them: lavender gone silver in the cool, rue and rosemary and something dark and trailing I couldn’t name from here.
The door still needed painting—not neglect, June had called it character, and I had believed her because I was seven and she was June.
Something moved in my chest. I pressed it down.
The porch held evidence of someone who knew what they were doing. Tools laid out with the efficiency of repeated use, not tidiness for its own sake. A mug on the rail, with steam rising faintly.
I touched the porch rail.
The wood hummed. A structural thing, deep in the grain. I filed it and went inside.
The mirrors were covered.
June had left them that way, all four of them—the hall mirror, the kitchen window-mirror she’d hung for light, the one in the sitting room with the gilt frame—draped with linen cloths, waiting. She had known. She had covered them herself, in her last weeks, knowing someone would come to find them.
I stood in the hall for a moment, looking at the shapes of them.
Then I went into the kitchen. The empty table, the breadbasket by the oven.
June was everywhere. The herbs hanging from the beams—lavender, thyme, and rosemary.
Seed packets lined up on the sill, labeled in her looping cursive: nasturtium, October sowing.
Calendula, plant where you’ll see them from the kitchen.
Scarlet runner, save half for Sylvie. The worn place on the floor in front of the stove where she had stood every morning for the entirety of my life.
She had raised me here. My mother had left me with June before I was two, and June had simply kept me, the way she kept everything—without fuss, without making me feel kept.
A window was cracked. October, and a window was cracked open.
Crack a window in October, she had said. The house needs to breathe with the year.
I went to close it. When I came back to the kitchen, it was open again.
I left it.
The rosemary was on the windowsill above the sink—not the dried bundles from the garden, but a small pot, roots still fresh, purchased recently.
Grocery store rosemary, the kind you find at the end of the season when the garden variety has gone woody.
It had turned slightly silver overnight. I knew what that meant.
I set my camera bag on the table. At some point—I didn’t remember deciding to—I’d set the table for two, the way June always had.
The second fork was still in my hand. I stood there looking at it.
I’d denied it every mile of the drive, every moment since I’d booked the flight, but I knew why I’d come.
Not for the cottage. Not for the estate.
I’d come to say goodbye to the one person who had always been there for me—and to find a way to forgive myself for being too afraid to come home while she was still alive to see it.
I put the fork in its place. I looked at it for a long moment—two plates, two forks, two glasses.
I must have done it automatically, moving through the kitchen while I wasn’t paying attention.
And then I felt him before I heard him. A warmth at the base of my sternum, low and steady, moving up toward the cottage from the garden side. My magic had him before my ears did. Something solid. Approaching.
I went back out to the porch.
He came around the side of the cottage and stopped at the foot of the steps when he saw me.
He was not what I’d constructed from the truck and the tools and the faintly warm mug.
I’d assembled, without realizing it, someone older—someone more obviously in the business of caretaking.
He was tall. His dark hair, slightly longer than was trendy, was pushed back from his forehead.
Gray eyes that found me and stayed there with a steadiness that was—not an assessment, exactly.
Something quieter than that, and harder to categorize.
He was carrying the old copper weathervane from the roof. A running fox, gone entirely green, which had been coming loose for as long as I could remember and had apparently finally surrendered to gravity.
“I didn’t hear your car,” he said.
“I parked behind your truck.”
“Jonah Beaumont.” He nodded, just a slight acknowledgment of the situation. “You’re Sylvie.”
Not you must be. Just you’re, with the quiet certainty of someone confirming something they already knew.
I had four hundred questions and zero interest in asking any of them.
He was all at once riveting and someone I wanted to avoid… I was uncomfortable and... nervous. Weird.
“She didn’t say you’d be here,” I said.
Something moved across his face—not quite amusement. “She didn’t say you’d come in person.”
He set the weathervane down carefully and stepped up onto the porch and I got my first real sense of him up close—woodsmoke and something mineral, outdoor-clean—and then his magic met mine and I had to work not to react.
It was like a hand placed flat against a wall.
Solid. Structural. Present in a way I wasn’t expecting, with no hostility in it at all, just—there.
I took a step back without meaning to and my elbow caught the wind chime June had hung from the porch beam. Three small clay birds she’d made in 1987, which I knew because she’d told me every time I knocked them, which was often. They swung out and off the hook in what felt like slow motion.
His hand went to exactly the right place. The chime settled into his palm without a sound.
We both looked at it for a moment.
“Good catch,” I said.
“The hook’s been loose.” He rehung it with one hand, reaching past me, brushing my arm with his. Warmth, sadness, and loneliness—all pushed in toward my magic. “She made those the summer after she moved in here full time. I kept meaning to fix the hook.”
Of course he knew when she’d made them.