Chapter 3
Three
Wren
I’ve learned one thing about Ember Hollow in three and a half weeks. It does not take no for an answer, and it says no back to you so sweetly you don’t notice you’ve been overruled until you’re already holding a tray.
That’s how I end up outside the firehouse on Sunday morning with four dozen pastries and a plan to be gone in ten minutes.
Della did this to me. I’d seen her through the diner window every morning for three weeks, and we’d never traded more than a wave.
Then yesterday afternoon there she was at my counter, all warm eyes and quick hands, telling me the first-Sunday breakfast was on, the whole town would be there, wouldn’t it be lovely if Marigold’s niece brought a little something.
No pressure. Oh, and she’d already told everyone I was coming.
No pressure.
So. Pastries. Ten-minute plan. In, drop them off, smile, out, back to my nice quiet apartment before anyone can learn a single new thing about me.
The firehouse is not built for a ten-minute plan.
They’ve pushed the big truck out onto the apron.
The whole bay is full of folding tables, every one of them packed.
The noise reaches me at the door before I’m even through it.
Kids underfoot. Two old men fighting over a coffee urn.
Somebody’s dog going table to table on a begging route it clearly runs every month.
And over all of it, a hundred pancakes and syrup and bacon, wrapped around the burnt-coffee smell that seems to live in these walls.
I stand in the doorway holding my boxes and think, very clearly, that I have made a mistake.
“There she is.” A woman comes at me through the crowd like a tugboat, gray braids and an apron that reads KISS THE CHIEF. She lifts a box out of my hands without asking. “Wren Bailey. Marigold’s girl. I’m Dot. I run this circus.”
“I can’t stay long. I only wanted to drop these and—”
“Of course you did.” She isn’t listening. She’s already got the lid up, and her whole face changes. “Oh. These are good. Marigold taught you.”
“She taught me everything.”
“I can tell.” She looks up at me, and there’s a warm, calculating gleam in her eye I don’t trust one bit, a woman running sums she’s very good at. Then she glances past me, to a spot across the room, and whatever the sums come to, it pleases her enormously. “Come and meet everybody.”
I don’t get a vote. I’ve already worked that much out about her.
She sets my pastries on the dessert table, presses a coffee into my hand that I didn’t ask for, and points me at the long griddle along the back wall. That’s the moment the morning stops being about pancakes.
There are three of them behind that griddle, and I know before a word is said that they belong to each other. You can see it in how they move. No bumping, no reaching across, each one right where the others need him, a machine that’s been running a long time.
Cal, I already know. He spots me and lights up, spatula in the air. “Sugar. You came.”
“I brought scones,” I say. Which is not why I came, but it’s safer than why I came.
“She brought scones,” Cal tells the other two, delighted, like it’s front-page news.
The one on the left doesn’t look up right away. When he does, it stops me for a second.
He’s built like the rest of them, but where Cal is an open door, this one is a shut one.
Brown hair, cut neat. A serious set to his mouth.
He looks at me slow and level, in no hurry, reading me end to end before he’ll move an inch toward me.
Not rude. Just certain, like a man who’s learned the cost of being wrong about people.
Then his scent reaches me, under all the syrup and smoke. Black coffee. Rain coming down on warm stone. Old leather gone soft with use. It settles a jangle in me I didn’t even know was going, drops my shoulders a full inch before I’ve decided to let them down.
I have no idea what to do about a stranger’s smell doing that to me. So I stand there and let it, like a fool.
“Eli,” he says. Just that. Low.
“Wren.”
“I know.” He turns back to the griddle. It should feel like a brush-off. It doesn’t. He says it like my name is a fact worth holding onto. Then he lifts the best pancake off the stack, slides it onto a plate, and sets it at the front for me without one word about it.
I’m still working out what just happened when the third one leans in.
“So you’re the reason Cal’s been useless since Thursday.”
Dark hair, near black, shoved back off his face.
A grin already halfway to trouble and plainly set on going the rest of the way.
Hands in his pockets like the whole morning belongs to him and he’s in no rush to spend it.
When he tips his head at me, his scent comes too.
Smoke. Cracked black pepper. A warm note buried under it that might be clove.
It does the exact opposite of what Eli’s did.
It doesn’t settle me at all. It strikes a match somewhere low and unhelpful.
“It was yesterday,” I say. “The scones. Not Thursday.”
“Was it?” Facts don’t seem to trouble him. “Feels like he’s been going on about you a week.”
Heat climbs my neck, fast and obvious, and his grin gets worse when he catches it, because naturally it does.
“Rhett.” Cal says it like a warning with a laugh folded inside.
“I’m being friendly.” Rhett still hasn’t looked away from me. “We’re a friendly town. Aren’t we friendly, trouble?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I’ve been working very hard not to meet anyone.”
That one lands. He laughs, a real one, surprised out of him, and even Eli’s mouth shifts at the corner into what might be a smile in a man who rations them.
“Too late,” Rhett says, thrilled about it. “You met Dot. It’s over for you now.”
He’s not wrong. I can feel it happening while I stand here. The town closing over my head like water, warm and impossible to climb back out of.
Della rescues me, or believes she does, turning up at my elbow with a plate.
“Ignore all three. It’s the only thing that works.
” She’s warmer up close than she was through the glass, and a knot in me loosens at a friendly face that doesn’t smell like a problem I’ll have to solve.
“Come sit before Dot assigns you a husband.”
“Or three,” Rhett says to his pancakes.
I do not look at him. I refuse to look at him. I follow Della to a table, sit down, breathe, and inform my stupid racing pulse it’s the goddamn coffee.
It’s not the coffee.
Eleven minutes in this building. So much for ten.
Della gives me the lay of the land while I eat.
The two men brawling over the urn are the Pelham twins, who run the hardware store and know everything about everyone roughly nine seconds after it happens.
The dog is nobody’s and everybody’s. That whole far table is the church crowd.
They’ll want me for the choir, and the only defense is to start saying no early and keep it up.
Then Eli’s at my elbow with the coffee pot, filling my cup before I can ask for it, unhurried, like it’s a thing he’s quietly taken charge of. He sets the little cream jug down by my hand before I reach for it. Says nothing. Goes back to his griddle.
Della tracks him the whole way there, then turns to me with both eyebrows up.
“Huh,” she says.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She’s smiling into her pancakes. It is very much not nothing, and we both know it.
I’m nodding along to the rest of her rundown, half of me still back at that griddle, when Dot drops into the chair across from me and folds her hands on the table like a woman about to close a sale.
“Now.” She smiles. “Marigold ran the bake tent at the Harvest Festival two decades running. And the dessert auction for the firehouse. Brought in more money than the whole rest of the town put together.”
“I heard.” I keep my voice careful. “It sounded like a lot of work.”
“It is. Festival’s about a month out.”
“I’m sure you’ll find someone wonderful to—”
“We found you.” She pats my hand, once, the deal already closed in her head, maybe closed in the whole town’s head weeks back, before I ever arrived.
“Your aunt would have wanted her girl to carry it on. And those,” she nods at my scones vanishing off the dessert table two and three at a time, “those tell me you can.”
I open my mouth to say no. I’ve got a good no ready. I’ve been practicing no for three and a half weeks.
Then I think about Marigold’s recipe box on my shelf, and her handwriting in it, and how she stood at that same bake tent for twenty-two years while I was three hundred miles away being nobody’s anything. And the no dies in my throat.
Across the bay, Cal grins at me over a tower of pancakes. Rhett catches my eye and lifts his coffee like a toast to my total downfall. And Eli, quiet Eli, has those careful eyes on me, and when I look his way, he gives me one small nod, like he already knows what I’m about to do.
I came here to drop off some scones and leave in ten minutes.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “I’ll do it.”
The whole table cheers. Dot looks like a cat that got into the cream. Behind the griddle, three alphas who each smell like a different kind of trouble go back to their pancakes, and I sit in the middle of a town that has decided, without ever once asking me, exactly where I fit.
Quiet life. Six and a half weeks.
I never stood a chance.