Chapter 90 #2
I didn’t mean to. My hand just went.
What came back through was old. Not frightening.
Not a flood. Just—old and patient and enormous.
The way deep water is enormous when you understand how far down it goes.
Three hundred years of something being witnessed.
Three hundred years of a town coming to stand at the base of this tree and be held by it.
My magic moved toward it before I could stop it.
I sat under the hawthorn until the crow stopped making noise and the October afternoon went amber around me. Not thinking. Just—present. In a way I hadn’t been present anywhere in a very long time.
I heard footsteps on the lane.
Jonah came through the gate with his hands in his jacket pockets. He stopped when he saw me. We looked at each other across the old stones.
“I found your note,” he said.
“I can see that.”
He walked toward me, looking at the hawthorn, then at the stone I’d left, then at the flower. He went still.
“Did you leave that?” I asked.
A beat. “Yes.”
“From the greenhouse?”
“June’s heliotrope. In the back corner. It was her favorite.” He looked at the tree. “She told me about Mercy Finch the first autumn I was here. She said someone should come on July 19 and bring something from the garden.” A pause. “So, I have. Every year.”
“It’s still fresh, though. It’s October.”
“Yeah. It’ll stay that way until I bring the next one.” He looked at the tree. “Took me a while to figure out I could do that. I had to stop fighting what I was first.”
I looked at the flower, then back to Jonah. A man who’d arrived in this town two years ago and immediately started tending its grief, quietly, without being asked.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
Coming down the hill I looked toward the cottage. Smoke from the chimney. A thin column of it against the October sky, pale and steady. Jonah had lit the fire before he came after me.
I slowed my steps, but kept walking.
The Hex & Hearth was on Harbor Street, the old chandlery building, on this corner since before the Revolution.
I’d been in it a hundred times as a child and I’d never once not felt at home.
It had always been a place that held more history than walls should be able to contain, and I loved the feel of that history under my hands, in my soul.
It was aware of us too. The floor hummed when we crossed the threshold. Not subtly.
Jonah felt it. I saw it in the way he held himself—reading the building, his magic extending the way it did when he was working, feeling for what was sound. Whatever he found, his expression didn’t change, and he didn’t pull back.
The bar ran the length of the back wall, dark wood worn smooth from a century or more of elbows and glasses and conversations that mattered.
Behind it, a man with dark hair pulled back at his nape was doing something with a cloth and a glass that had probably been done in this exact spot for longer than was reasonable to think about.
He looked at us once. A clean, unhurried look that took everything in and filed it. Then he turned back to the glass.
A cat was sitting on the bar. Black, with a white mark on its chest, the shape of it almost deliberate—a thumbprint, or a star, depending on the light. It watched us cross the room with the focused attention of something that had been expecting us.
We took a table near the front window. The harbor was visible through the old glass, pewter in the afternoon light, the Widow’s Point headland dark against the sky.
Not the northeast corner table—I’d registered it the moment we came in, something about it that pulled at the edges of my awareness.
The staff would have redirected us anyway.
Some things in this town were not casual.
The cat jumped down from the bar and crossed the room and jumped onto our table.
It sat there between us and looked at me. Then at Jonah. Then back at me.
Jonah looked at the cat. The cat looked at Jonah.
“He doesn’t do that often,” said a voice. The bartender had appeared beside us—no sound of approach, no warning, just there. Up close he had dark eyes that were doing something more than looking. “The town cats have good instincts about people.” He glanced between us. “Apparently.”
He set down two things we hadn’t ordered and left before we could respond.
A whiskey, neat, for Jonah.
For me, a coupe glass, pale gold, a long sprig of rosemary laid across the rim with a thin wheel of lemon.
Still faintly warm from whatever the rosemary had been passed through.
The smell came up—gin and lemon and honey and something herbal, and underneath it all something that smelled like the greenhouse at its most alive.
My magic registered it before I did. Something in this glass had been made with intention.
I picked it up. Sipped. The sea salt hit first, then the rosemary, then something bright I couldn’t name.
The cat settled itself between the glasses and began to wash its face.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “In Driftwood Pointe.”
A small smile tilted the corner of his mouth up on the right. Like—ok, small talk, fine. “Two years in November.”
“And before?”
“Portland. Before that, a town in Vermont that didn’t need me anymore.” He turned his whiskey glass on the table. “I came here because a job came through. Restoration work on one of the older houses. And then June heard I was in town.”
“She sought you out.”
“She had tea waiting when I came to introduce myself.” A pause. “I don’t know how she knew I was coming.”
I smiled into my glass. “She always knew.”
“Yes.” He looked at the harbor. “What about you? Before the traveling.”
“Boston, technically. I have an apartment there. I’ve been in it maybe four months total in the last three years.” I ran my thumb along the stem of the coupe. “I went to art school for photography. Dropped out after a year because I sucked.”
He was shaking his head before I’d finished the sentence. “No way. I don’t buy it. I’ve seen you shooting… might have snuck a glance over your shoulder at the screen.” He tossed back the last of his whiskey. “And you do not suck.”
“No, really. Everything was—flat. One dimensional. Just—bad. I became a travel writer by accident. An editor liked a piece I wrote about a market in Oaxaca and it went from there. Once I found something that I wanted to write about, the photos got better too.”
“Do you like it?”
“I’m good at it.”
He heard the difference. I saw it.
“I like being good at things,” I said. “Like doesn’t really matter.”
He looked at me then. Direct. “What would you like, even if you weren’t good at it.”
No one had asked me that. Not in years. Maybe ever.
“This,” I said, before I could stop myself. I gestured with the glass—vaguely, at the harbor, the town, the October light coming through the old glass. “I’d like to write about places that mean something. Have history in them. The kind you can feel.”
“You can feel it,” he said. “You can literally feel it.”
I went very still.
He said it simply. Not unkindly.
“June told you,” I said.
“She said you felt things in rooms and in objects and in people. That it had been difficult for you.” He paused. “She didn’t say more than that.”
My hand was on the table. I turned it over, palm up, without quite knowing I was doing it.
“Everything you’ve fixed in that cottage,” I said. “I can feel that you did it. Not just that it was done—you. Your care. I’ve been feeling it since I arrived. I didn’t know it was you at first. I just knew someone had been paying very close attention.”
“I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Most people don’t.”
The cat paused its washing and looked at the harbor window.
I had something I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t sure I should.
The bartender showed up and refilled his glass, bringing me a new drink and sliding it over smoothly, not a drop spilling.
He nodded at me, a knowing look in his eyes, before heading back to the bar.
I pulled in a deep breath. “So. The heliotrope.”
I hadn’t phrased it as question, but he took it how I meant it.
“June said Mercy Finch should be remembered by someone who understood what she was doing when she died.” He looked at his hands. “I understood what it was to do your work in a place and have the place not protect you.”
There it was. Not a confession. Just—placed on the table.
The cat put its chin on the table and closed its eyes.
“What was it?” I said. “The place that didn’t protect you.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“A marriage,” he said. “Seven years. She loved a version of me she built herself. When I showed her something real she left.” He picked up his whiskey. “I thought it was my fault for a long time. That I’d shown her the wrong thing.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No.” He said it simply. “She wasn’t looking at me. I just didn’t know that at the time.”
“I left at seventeen,” I said. “Because of my best friend, Layla.” I set down my glass. “Or rather, because of what I did to her.
“We were at a party. My magic was all over the place. I didn’t know how to control it yet, I didn’t even know I should.
Back then it used to go in and out. Suddenly I could feel everything coming off her, and the guy she liked, all of it at once, and I couldn’t tell her feelings from mine from his.
And I said something out loud. I don’t even remember what I said.
But man, right there in front of everyone, before I even knew I was going to. ”
I looked at the harbor. “I was right. That was the worst part. I was completely right, and it terrified her, and it terrified me, and she couldn’t look at me after. So I asked June if I could turn it off. She said it was part of me.” A breath. “So I left instead.”