Chapter 1 Eva, Eight Years Later
Eva,
Eight Years Later
Eva plucked a thorax from the water bucket and set it in a bowl of corpses.
They’d finished pulling honey from the northwest apiary yesterday.
Most of it went to the extractor, but misfit chunks like these were submerged in water overnight to let the honey slough off, exposing the naked, uncapped comb floating on top.
Eva could boil those down and tin them into beeswax candles, salves, and lip balms.
Nothing, however, sold like raw honeycomb. This late in the summer, bottles of the sticky, sugared medicine practically flew off their shelves.
Eva understood. Twenty-five years of keeping the bees with her father and older sister, and still she thrilled each time she sank her teeth into those warm, dripping cells. There was a strangely primal allure to that hint of spice among the sweet, pollen and enzymes sliding down her tongue.
It was hard, when paired with one of the teas in their Honey Shoppe, not to call that magic.
Tourists came from miles around for a taste of the honeyman’s bottled summertime and a sachet of herbs they fully believed would rid them of their ailments.
Dad shrugged off their wilder beliefs, always saying that nature was magic enough.
He didn’t disclose his somewhat enchanted green thumb, or his habit of collecting rare and mysterious flowers far up the mountain. Nor did he mention his magical daughter, whose greenhouse was brimming with herbs and florals Eva had cultivated to heal and cure.
“It’s not too late, you know.”
Eva watched Izzy swirl her finger in the water bucket across from her. “To do what, exactly?”
“Literally anything.” Izzy flicked a little water at her. “It’s Friday night, and we’re here.” When Eva snorted, her sister leaned closer. “Come on. This’ll keep. Let’s go dancing.”
“At Dawson’s?”
If social gatherings with people who’d picked on her in high school were really the lifeblood of small towns, Eva preferred social anemia. She hated crowds. They made her feel like a bug stretched under a microscope.
Besides, the town’s nightclub was literally the worst place for Izzy to be.
“We can find a sober bar down the mountain,” Izzy urged. “It’ll be fun!”
Eva loved her sister, but she’d rather die than willingly subject herself to a night of painful pickup lines and some dry-humping stranger on a dark dance floor.
“I think I’m good here, Iz.”
Izzy rolled her eyes, which Eva pretended not to see. Let the sheriff take her dancing.
When she’d cleared all the torn wings and insect parts from the dirty honeycomb, Eva turned the bowl out onto a swath of cheesecloth, then swiped her wet fingers over the back of her neck. This summer was a scorcher.
The door to the workshop creaked open, spilling in a shaft of apricot sunset light as Dad stepped in, ducking Goliath shoulders under the door’s lintel.
Eva’s eyes fell to the vee of her father’s shirt, where the brunt end of scar tissue and tree root lifted his flesh.
The skin split at his sternum, a stubborn sapling pushing through a fistful of viscera and bone.
Soft green moss spread over his chest, peeking from beneath the well-worn flannel of his shirt.
Every day, he got a little harder to look at.
“I thought you had an appointment,” Eva said.
Dad grunted and shook his head.
The roots of his sapling had burrowed deeper with every passing year, webbing his thoracic cavity into a mesh of wilderness and man. Eva usually tried to hide her worry. Dad and Izzy already treated her like glass ready to break. But her fears lay fallow beneath the surface.
“You rescheduled?” she prodded.
“No.” Dad tightened a grimace and sat across from her. “No more appointments.”
Eva’s heart skipped. She didn’t miss the guilty look that flashed across Izzy’s face, or the way her sister’s eyes dropped to the bucket in front of her.
She knew.
Dad must have seen Eva’s face fall, because his expression softened. “There’s nothing more Dr. Rosen can do, honeybee.”
“But—”
“I’m tired of tests,” Dad said. He flicked one of the fluttering leaves. “I’m not going anymore.”
Eva’s mind spun. There had to be something Dr. Rosen hadn’t tried. Some angle they hadn’t considered.
“Hey.” Izzy took her hand. “It’s gonna be okay. Right, Dad?”
Eva squeezed her eyes tight. Glass, again. The pity made her stomach twist.
And made her magic bloom.
At her sudden onslaught of emotion, her gift flung itself wide, finding its mark in a burlap sack leaning against the wall. Eva’s palms warmed as bright green stalks carved their way out of the fabric and the pungent smell of onions filled the room.
She swallowed hard. Focus. She couldn’t lose control when Dad was so close. Her gift could make the roots of his tree push even deeper into his chest. What if they pierced a lung, or slipped into an aortic valve?
Or, or, or.
There were endless possible nightmares, and she’d gone over them all in her head a thousand times.
Breath tight in her lungs, Eva locked away her fear.
She couldn’t let them see her like this.
Brittle. Breakable. Dad had taught her once that she could be more than the storms in her head.
Now she had to be. She forced a slow exhale and pictured her anchor: a blue sky full of clouds, slowly clearing.
Izzy squeezed her hand again. That, too, was grounding, even though it hurt to think that her sister had known about her father’s decision and had chosen to keep the truth from Eva.
“I want to show you something.” Dad plucked a roll of newspaper from his back pocket and held it out. Eva stiffly accepted it. They weren’t done talking about this, but she knew if she pushed now, he’d only bar the door further.
Later, when he wasn’t so visibly stressed, she’d bring up Dr. Rosen again.
Dad opened the newspaper to the obituaries. As Eva scanned the line of names, brows furrowed, a honeybee landed on her knuckles.
Connoway.
Heat shot to her spine. Eva sucked in a hard breath, suddenly taut as a bow. No. Not that name. Not his name.
She pulled back, reading again.
Charlotte Connoway.
Relief dulled her panic. The mother, then. Not the son.
It wasn’t a local newspaper but something that must have been sent to him. She hadn’t realized that Charlotte Connoway had put down roots after so many years of flitting from place to place.
When Eva thrust the newspaper back at her father, the bee flew away. Eva hated the flush up her neck, hated the gentle way both of them looked at her. I am not fragile. She wanted to scream it.
Instead, she bit the inside of her cheek, where they couldn’t see her bleed. Dad took the crinkled sheet and smoothed it out. “Lottie called me about her illness last month,” he said.
Surprise hooked Eva’s ribs. He hadn’t told her that.
“She wanted to come to visit herself, but”—his voice cracked—“she couldn’t travel, in the end.”
“Oh.”
The resounding silence told Eva she’d said the wrong thing, and awkwardness stirred between the three of them, thick as molasses. Eva should comfort her father. Yes. No matter her own distaste for the woman, Dad had cared for Charlotte.
For whatever reason.
Eva turned to her sister, desperate for someone to better guide this conversation. Eva hadn’t known Charlotte, not really. If anything, the tidbits she’d gleaned from her former friendship with Charlotte’s son, Arthur, had turned her bitter toward the enigmatic woman.
Izzy was sharing a strange look with their father, her eyebrows slightly raised. “Dad,” she said. “We don’t have to do this now.”
Eva looked between her father and sister. “Do what now?” She didn’t want to be walked around, talked around, as though she were a bomb that might go off. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Dad reassured. “I’m simply fulfilling a promise.”
Eva swallowed. “You’re going to her funeral?” she guessed. That would be difficult. It was hard enough to get him down the mountain for his checkups. Eva didn’t know how far he could travel.
“Not exactly.”
Dread gnawed inside her. Something wasn’t right. Eva stood, but her father was an absolute bear of a man, and even on her feet, she didn’t meet him eye to eye. “Tell me.”
See me. Let me be strong in your eyes.
Dad crooked an unconvincing smile. “She’s coming here.”
Eva blinked. “What?”
“Well, not her, obviously,” Izzy cut in.
“Right.” Dad stumbled slightly over the correction. “Her ashes are being delivered. I promised Lottie we’d scatter them on the farm. Tell the bees she’s gone, like we did with your mom. Remember?”
Eva nodded, a knot in her throat as she clicked together what he wasn’t saying. Someone had to bring those ashes back to these mountains. Someone Charlotte had trusted.
There’s a strange kind of knowing that comes just before a storm. Pressure crowds between your ears. Old joints ache. The air grows wet and mineral. Eva held her breath so tight her lungs began to burn, that knowing drawing back into her mind the very storm clouds she’d tried so hard to shove away.
“Who?” she rasped.
Izzy furrowed her brows. “What?”
And maybe Eva was glass after all, because the question she pushed to the front of her lips made something in her crack.
“Who’s bringing the ashes?”