Chapter Twenty-Four
The doorbell rang the next morning as Tasha was coming downstairs, hoping saltines dipped in ginger tea would settle her morning sickness before Gary got out of the shower.
She detoured to the front door, stopping to switch on the fire logs below the mantel she’d decorated with pumpkins.
There was a wreath hanging on her door window, but she could still see Bailey standing on the other side.
She was wearing a French-striped long-sleeved shirt and had a bandana over her hair, kerchief-style, so that only her neon-blond bangs could be seen.
There had been a time in her life when Tasha would have immediately thought, Why doesn’t that come as easily to me?
But not now.
With her hand on her stomach, Tasha opened the door and said, “What do you want?”
Apparently she looked as bad as she felt, because Bailey said, “I can come back if you’re not feeling well.”
“Coming back won’t help,” she said irritably as she waved Bailey in. “I’m pregnant.”
Oh, God. What on earth had possessed her to say that? The first person she told was Bailey Wester?
Bailey smiled. “Congratulations!”
“No one knows yet.”
She seemed to automatically understand something essential, like how hard transitions could be. “In that case, I won’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to convince me you’re good at keeping a secret.
” Tasha motioned for her to sit on one of the couches flanking the fireplace.
Tasha sat on the couch opposite. It was a light, lovely room.
She wondered if Bailey thought so, too. No one knew what the Wester House looked like inside, but Tasha had lived next door long enough to know that the shades were drawn most of the time, so it had to be dark.
“I saw you last night, in the window,” Bailey said.
“I’m not in the habit of watching your house, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I also saw someone in the backyard.”
Tasha raised her brows and waited for her to get to the point.
“It’s just that he looked like Clutch, and it’s the second time I’ve seen him since coming home.
So I thought I should tell you. We both know Clutch must have lost his wallet when I was with him that night in the woods.
When he tried to … you know. There’s no correlation to that bone.
I’ll tell anyone that now, if it helps take attention off of you and the project you’re planning out there.
I just ask that it wait until after my grandmother is gone, and I can break it to my dad first.”
“Stop,” Tasha said. “Just stop. It doesn’t matter if that bone is his.”
“It’s not.”
“No one knows what happened that night. No one has seen him since that night. You were adamant about my not getting involved in your mess back then, and I have a lot more to lose now. So we’re not having this discussion.”
“I’m still adamant about you not being involved in my mess. Please don’t worry.”
Tasha remembered Bailey running out of the woods.
How terrified she’d been. She knew that mess hadn’t been entirely of Bailey’s making, but sometimes Tasha deliberately glossed over that fact.
She sighed. “If you think you’re seeing him, it’s because he’s still in your head.
And he doesn’t deserve space there anymore. ”
Bailey smiled slightly. “Stop being nice to me.”
Those words gave Tasha pause. What Tug had shared about Bailey’s life over the years had a common thread running through it. She was refusing to create a life she could enjoy, as if it were some sort of penance. “Being mean to you isn’t going to help.”
“I should go.” Bailey stood and Tasha walked her to the door. As soon as she stepped into the cold, she said, “Our friendship when we were children was probably the last time I really liked myself. Thank you for letting me be me. Tell Olivia Grace I’m sorry again.”
Because of her mother, Tasha’s nervous system was constantly scanning for tiny changes in the moods of those around her. And she resented having to worry about Bailey right now. “Should I be concerned about you?”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean for that to sound gloomy.
I just meant I’m going to keep trying to find that version of me.
Like I said, please don’t worry.” Tasha watched her walk down the steps.
She paused on the sidewalk, considering something.
She took out her phone and started texting.
Tasha closed the door and put her hand on her stomach again before going to the kitchen.
She opened one of the upper cabinets for a tea bag, but then stared into space, distracted.
Damn it. Now she had to know. She left the cabinet door open, and went to the kitchen office nook, where there was a Janet Hill original hanging on the wall and a laptop on the desk.
After the bonfire, she had spent months terrified that the Westers had a security system that had caught what her mother had done to Clutch.
It was only after marrying Gary and moving into this house that she found out neither the Tillburys nor the Westers had any sort of monitoring system back then, beyond Willamena herself.
It had been such a relief. But they had plenty of cameras now, and one of the upper ones pointed toward the Wester House.
She clicked on their home security link and rewound to last night when she’d seen Bailey step outside.
She watched the camera pan to Bailey in the doorway to the Wester back patio, her posture stiff.
She called out something. Then the camera panned over the backyard.
Nothing was there.
Tasha was about to click out, but decided to scroll further back to before Bailey stepped outside. She stopped the video and waited while the camera panned over the Wester’s empty patio, then slowly over their backyard again.
Wait.
She rewound the video and watched again. A blip appeared on the screen for just a second, and then was gone. It was near where the lawn sloped down to the creek. She watched it over and over, trying to make out what it was. She finally paused the video right when the blip appeared, and zoomed in.
The image was grainy, but with enough imagination it could be the form of a man.
The backyards in this neighborhood were virtually inaccessible from the creek side, because you would have to cross the fast-moving water and then walk up the steep hill.
So if someone had been in the Westers’ backyard, they weren’t there by accident.
She wasn’t sure what this feeling was, but the scent was a combination of the dread of black licorice, and something curious like tobacco smoke.
“Tasha?”
She turned to see Gary in the kitchen. He was in his golf clothes. His curly salt-and-pepper hair, usually a little wild and endearing, was tamped down, still wet from his shower. There was a front moving in later, bringing much-needed rain, so she knew he was in a hurry to get in a round.
“You scared me,” she said, clicking the video closed. Secrets were a slippery slope.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes, of course,” she assured him. “Bailey Wester just stopped by.”
“You’ve been distracted lately, Tash,” he said, closing the cabinet door she’d left open.
But it wasn’t the door he cared about. He was such an easygoing man that she could leave every cabinet in the house open and he wouldn’t mind.
He’d told her once that his mother used to call him Airy Gary.
“If something’s wrong, you can tell me. I’ll do everything I can to fix it.
And if you don’t want me to fix it, I won’t. I just want you to be happy.”
There were times when she was sure that Gary believed she was going to leave him one day.
She recognized it, because it was the same fear she had that he would leave her.
“I’m fine, really.” She knew she needed to tell him about the baby.
But she wanted to live a little while longer as this incarnation of herself, before everything changed.
Before she changed, back into her old self, back to Smeller.
Or worse, her mother.
It was only minutes after Gary left and Tasha brewed her tea that she heard, “Look who I found outside.”
She was resting her forehead on the breakfast table, but at Gary’s voice her head jerked up like a puppet on a string. She pushed her dark hair out of her face to see him leading Olivia Grace into the kitchen.
“Thanks, Gary,” Olivia Grace said as he left again.
It was Sunday, and Olivia Grace had weekends off work from the country club, but she had on her official burgundy sweater with the club’s crest on it anyway.
She usually came by at some point on Sunday just to hang out, which Tasha enjoyed, just not this early.
She seemed to take a great deal of comfort in being inside Tasha’s house.
Tasha once asked Gary if he minded her frequent visits, and if so, they could go to a coffee shop.
Gary told her not to worry, that it was something everyone did at one time or another in their lives, without even realizing it.
Fundamentally, we orbit the lives we most want.
But there were times it still caught Tasha off guard, that people liked her life so much that they wanted to be in it.
“I knew Gary would be headed to the course this morning,” Olivia Grace said.
“Would you like some tea?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m not staying.
I just wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday.
I don’t know what came over me. Bailey is the only Feather I’ve seen in years, and she wasn’t even the worst of them.
Remember Vanna? She was the real evil queen.
I want to believe Bailey’s different now, I really do.
But I think I want even more for her to see that I’m different. Then I wonder, am I, really?”
“Yes, you are. And as much as it pains me to say this, Bailey is, too. That’s where you need to leave it. You’re digging up trauma, so step out of the hole before you uncover something that needs to stay buried.”
Olivia Grace leaned over and gave Tasha a hug. “Thanks for putting up with me.”
“I don’t put up with you. I love you,” Tasha said, waving as Olivia Grace walked out of the kitchen. She waited until she heard the front door close, then she ran to the bathroom and threw up.
His text last night had read:
Hey Cinderella. Theo here. I didn’t get to give you something before you left. Meet me at the shop tomorrow?
Bailey hadn’t answered last night. She wasn’t going to meet him again. What was the point? But after she left Tasha, thinking about finding a good version of herself, she texted him back and said she’d meet him there in about ten minutes.
When she walked into Mother Hen’s, Theo was taking some chicken puff pastries from a bag that had the Java Chicken logo on it. “I got us some coffee,” he said, gesturing to the lidded cups on the table. “And I wasn’t sure if you’d had breakfast or not.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking a seat. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“You wouldn’t let me pay you for your help.”
“It was the least I could do. This shop brought me a lot of joy when I was a kid. Tea ice cream every day was what I thought my life was going to look like as an adult.”
“This is what I wanted to give you.” He slid a folded apron across the table. “I thought you might like to have one. I found some old employee aprons while cleaning out Ruby’s house. People around here apparently still call it the old Sanderson farm.”
Bailey laughed at the pink and green tie-dye monstrosity. “Thank you.”
“They were in boxes stored in the chicken coop. It doesn’t look like Ruby ever had chickens, yet she had a chicken coop.”
“The Sandersons kept chickens, before they left town. As the story goes, Mrs. Sanderson gossiped about my grandmother in church, something about her lack of moral standards or something. If you ever met my grandmother, you would understand how hard that is to believe. The very next day, Mr. Sanderson left Mrs. Sanderson for their mail carrier. Mrs. Sanderson was floored. She said it was like her husband was under a spell.”
“Your grandmother put a spell on him?” Theo bit into a pastry and crust shattered into his lap.
“And just like that,” she snapped her fingers, “you’ve been pulled into my grandmother’s world-building. She’s very good at controlling the narrative.”
“Your grandmother sounds like quite a character.”
“Oh, she is. People call her the Witch of Wester House.”
“So tell me more about her. And this town. And you.”
She immediately regretted the Sanderson story. She reached for her coffee cup and took a sip. “I don’t know what else to say.”
He tilted his head. “I get the feeling you didn’t like living here.”
“I did, actually. But I didn’t know any better,” she said. “My grandmother wasn’t a benevolent ruler, and because I wanted to be like her, I wasn’t one, either. That whole display last night at the fair was deserved.”
“Was it?”
Theo clearly carried the beta studiousness of his youth in his round face, so he couldn’t have gotten through his youth unscathed. There were students like the Feathers in every high school. “No one ever bullied you?”
He shrugged. “His name was Heath.”
“And you wouldn’t take some pleasure in seeing that he wasn’t as powerful now?”
“If the bullied becomes the bully, isn’t that just the same story told a different way?” She considered him with a smile. “What?”
“I was just thinking that you’re charming.”
“That’s me. Prince Charming. Go on. Tell me more. I want to know everything.”
“No,” she said seriously, “you don’t.”
“Everything but the secrets. You keep those.”
She tensed slightly at that. “What makes you think I have secrets?”
“Every unread book is a secret. I majored in lit and have the student loans to show for it, so I know.” He took another bite of the pastry. “Do you like to read?”
She immediately thought of all those bagged-up books now sitting in her room, her relinquished teenage fantasies ready to be given away to someone else. “I read a lot of romances as a teenager. These days I like listening more. Audiobooks. Podcasts.”
“So pretend you’re narrating.” He wiped his mouth, then sat back and closed his eyes. She took that opportunity to stare at him, his tanned face, the lines around his eyes. He had a single freckle on his cheekbone. “Come on. I know I’m a talker, but I’m going to run out of things to say.”
“Once upon a time there was a girl who wasn’t very nice,” she said. “In fact, she came from a family of witches.”
He smiled, his eyes still closed. “Ah. A fairy tale. And what made this witch change?”
“What makes you think she changed?”
“Redemption makes for a great character arc.”
Bailey thought about it. “Maybe because she finally felt regret for the things she did.”
He opened one green eye to look at her. “Do you know what just occurred to me?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I think it bothers you when people only see the person you are now.”
“Why would that bother me?” she asked almost breathlessly, because she really wanted to know.
“Because,” he said, “you still believe you’re a witch.”