Chapter 90
We’d worked on the back shed all morning, inventorying boxes of books and older tools that didn’t look like they’d been touched in years, and when we stopped for lunch Jonah produced a picnic basket and a blanket.
He didn’t announce it. It was just there, packed, like it had always been going to happen.
We ate out front, in June’s garden. Mozzarella and prosciutto sandwiches, pickles, olives. A cold bottle of rosé he poured into coffee mugs.
“Wine glasses wouldn’t be stable on the stump,” he said, and kept a straight face almost all the way through it.
The sun was doing its best against the chill. Blue sky ran out over the ocean and kept going. Around us the late-season beds were still holding—herbs and flowers that should have gone down with the early frosts and hadn’t. Nobody had told them.
We told June stories. He had more than I expected.
“Did you know she was trying to put lemon into things?”
I laughed. “Crossbreeding?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Lemon thyme, fine. Everybody has lemon thyme. But lemon mushrooms? Lemon strawberries?”
“I had no idea.”
“There’s a bed behind the greenhouse I’ve been afraid of for two years.”
He shook his head at the strawberries and the sun was full on him. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes. Dark hair along the backs of his hands, thicker at the forearms, gone under the rolled denim of his sleeves. I framed him without meaning to—cropped at the shoulder, light from the left.
A camera would have been an excuse to stare. My hands were empty. I stared anyway.
I heard laughter, and jerked my head toward the spring. “Did you hear that?”
He tilted his head. “Hear what?”
I felt her everywhere.
While we packed up, he handed me a notebook—thick with bits of herbs and plants taped onto the pages, June’s handwriting running off the lines and twisting to chase the edge of the paper to finish her thoughts. My hands closed around it before I’d decided anything.
“Go sit at her kitchen table and read her notes and enjoy yourself.” He shook his head. “I sure did.”
I read until midafternoon, then left a note on the kitchen table.
Gone for coffee. Back in an hour.
Jonah was on the porch roof. I could hear him up there, the quiet systematic sounds of someone working through a problem.
I didn’t actually care about the coffee.
I felt an urgent need to walk around. To refamiliarize myself with this place that I’d once known so well, and loved with every part of me.
I grabbed my camera before I could second-guess myself and headed down the lane.
The farmers’ market was on the Town Green, likely the last one of the season, or close to it.
I smelled it before I saw it—woodsmoke, apple cider, something baked with cardamom and something else underneath that I couldn’t name, green and herbal and October-sharp.
The season turning over for real now, done pretending it was still summer.
The green had been transformed. Stalls ran along the old stone wall, the vendors in canvas and waxed jackets, their tables loaded with the end-of-season abundance—pumpkins in every color from bone white to deep forest green, dried herb bundles tied with twine, late-harvest apples in wooden bushels, honey jars catching the afternoon light.
A man with a border collie was selling smoked fish.
A teenager in a knit cap was ladling hot cider from an enormous pot.
I let the camera come up. It always helped—the viewfinder, the rectangle of it, containing the world to a manageable size. I moved through the stalls slowly. Let the market have its way with me.
A woman in a waxed jacket at the herb stall looked up when I stopped.
“You’re June’s girl,” she said.
Not a question. I was starting to understand that nothing about June in this town was a question.
“Her granddaughter,” I said.
She pressed a sprig of rosemary into my hand without being asked. Then a second one, tucked alongside the first. “She kept the best rosemary in the county,” she said. “I always told her that.” She turned to her next customer.
I stood with the rosemary and let the market move around me.
My magic wasn’t flooding. It was just a crack—open the width of a held breath.
I reached out, careful, the way you’d test a stair you weren’t sure of.
The vendors had their own textures, their own histories: a woman selling jam who was quietly happy about something she hadn’t told anyone yet, an older man at the apple stall carrying something heavier, a child at the edge of the green in a witch costume who had an emotional transparency so complete and unselfconscious I had to look away.
Their feelings came back to me distinct and separate and theirs—and none of it bled into me.
It felt different now. Not like reaching for my magic meant it would swallow me whole.
More like—anything was possible. I took photographs.
I ate an apple that somebody handed to me.
I didn’t think about the cottage. Or June. Or the greenhouse.
And I definitely didn’t think about Jonah.
At the far end of the market, tucked between a pottery stall and a woman selling knitted things, was a small table with no sign.
Just a woman—seventy, maybe more, her white hair up, her hands in her lap—sitting behind an arrangement of stones and cards and small dried bundles.
She wasn’t calling out or handing things to passersby. She was just sitting. Watching.
She looked at me when I was still twenty feet away.
I meant to keep walking. Stopped anyway.
She had eyes that did what Jonah’s did—found me and stayed there. But where his were gray and steady and warm, hers were dark and slightly amused.
“You’ve got your grandmother’s hands,” she said. “And her trouble.”
I opened my mouth.
“Don’t,” she said pleasantly. “I’m not reading you. I don’t need to. You’re walking around this town with everything showing.” She tilted her head. “You’ve been down a long time. Whatever you’ve been keeping under is done staying quiet.”
I closed my mouth.
“Enjoy the market,” she said, and turned her attention to the knitted things next door.
I turned to go and that was when I saw her.
Across the green, a hand-lettered sign I couldn’t read from here, a queue of people waiting to sit down across from her one at a time. Dark head bent toward whomever was in the chair. Listening like the rest of the market had gone quiet around the two of them.
Layla.
I knew her by the back of her head. By the set of her shoulders.
I could sense that she’d grown into her power. Whatever Layla was now, she was comfortable with it. Good at it.
I didn’t go closer. I told myself it was the line, and I marched as fast as I could away from the market, my heart going like I’d been running.
The lane to the Ancient Burying Ground ran along the east hill, the stone wall on one side and the old woods pressing in on the other. I hadn’t planned to go. My feet just went.
The maples were past peak—past the postcard gold—and into something deeper. Rust and bronze and a stubborn dark red, the color that said this wasn’t going to stop now, the color of autumn meaning it. The ground was loud with leaves and my breath made small clouds in the October air.
The gate stood open, iron worked with a symbol June had told me not to ask about when I was eight. I’d asked anyway. She’d given me the look that meant: when you’re ready.
I still wasn’t sure I was ready.
Beyond the wall, it went quieter. The old oaks held the sound differently in here, absorbed it. A crow somewhere in the branches had opinions. I walked the rows without hurrying.
The stones told the town’s history if you knew how to read them—founding family names, dates going back to 1645, epitaphs carved by people who understood that the dead deserved a final word. June had walked me through every stone when I was nine. A school project. She’d known every name.
I stopped at the oldest.
Goodwife E. Halcott, 1645. She Kept the Spring.
She kept the spring. I stood there for a moment with that. The same spring I’d been hearing from the cottage lane every morning, louder than it should be. I’d never put those two things together before.
The memorial tablet was along the north wall—granite, weathered, the text partially legible.
I’d known about Mercy Finch since I was old enough to understand what June was telling me.
Twenty-three years old. The acting wisewoman of Driftwood Pointe.
The last person executed in the witch trial period. Hanged on July 19, 1693.
June had said: she was doing what wisewomen do. She was tending this town. And the town couldn’t protect her.
She’d said it the way she said everything important—matter-of-fact, no drama, like she was telling me something I’d need later. I’d been twelve. I hadn’t understood what she was giving me.
I understood it now.
The gallows hawthorn was in the northeast corner.
I smelled it before I saw it—not the blossoms, something older underneath, something alive that went past botany.
The trunk was enormous, the bark furrowed deep, the branches spreading wide and low.
A few late blossoms still clung on. White. Wrong for October.
Don’t bring a hawthorn flower inside, June had said. Some help is for outside only.
I didn’t touch the blossoms.
At the base of the trunk, I noticed a flower.
Not hawthorn—a single stem of heliotrope, the blossoms deep purple, still faintly fragrant despite the cold.
Greenhouse grown. No heliotrope had any business being cut fresh in October in coastal New England.
Recently placed. I crouched down and looked at it for a long time.
June had a heliotrope in the greenhouse.
Jonah.
I took the smooth stone from my pocket—picked up from the cottage path that morning without knowing why, the way I’d always picked up smooth stones, the way June had always picked up smooth stones—and set it beside the flower.
Then I put my hand on the ground at the base of the tree.