Chapter 25
Matt
She ambushed me with a script on a Tuesday.
I’d stopped by the Stop it gets so much worse. Keep going—”
“There’s more?”
“There’s two minutes more, Hartford, there’s a whole thing about—” She stopped herself, flapping a hand.
“No. Stop. Don’t read it. You’ll do it cold Saturday, and the timing will be pure.
Trust the material.” She was grinning at the page like a proud parent.
“Just know that by the end of it, Rosemary is going to pretend to disapprove and then quote you for a month.”
“You wrote me two minutes.”
“Yes, and you’re going to deliver every line like a Miranda warning, which is the entire joke, because you have a face like a closed case file.
It’s a gift, Matthew, and for years you’ve squandered it on actual police work.
” She was still smiling at me, closer now, and the store was empty around us, the coolers humming, the radio murmuring in the back, and I did the arithmetic I do about forty times a day now, which is how many steps between Elizabeth Starling and me and whether I’m allowed to close them.
I was allowed, and the thrill of it still hadn’t worn off.
I closed them and kissed her, and it went deep fast, the way it always did with us once we started, no slow build left in either of us anymore.
She made a low sound against my mouth and got both hands into my jacket and pulled, and I turned her into the counter and followed her back against it, one hand sliding into her hair and the other flat on the small of her back, bringing her in until there wasn’t much daylight left between us.
I had her backed against the register with her breath coming quick and my name half in her mouth, when the radio in the back cut out.
We came apart fast. Both of us went still, listening—the clatter of Becca restacking something, the radio coming back on, a hummed bar of a song two rooms away.
“Okay,” Elizabeth breathed, a little wild-eyed, hand pressed to my chest, holding us both there. “Okay, no. Not here. Your sister is thirty feet away, and this town already has a group chat about us.”
“There’s a group chat.”
“There’s always at least one group chat.
” She was flushed to her collarbones and trying to fix her hair and not doing a great job because her hands weren’t quite steady, and it was, hands down, the finest thing I’d seen all week.
“If she walks out of that walk-in and catches me making out with her big brother against the lottery machine, I will never hear the end of it as long as I live. She’ll bring it up at my funeral. She’ll have it put on the program.”
“You started it.”
“I absolutely started it, and I take full responsibility, and we are stopping.” She pushed off my chest, put a whole foot of space between us.
I sat. She fanned herself with the loose script page once, entirely unprofessional, then got her face under control and went back to work, because Elizabeth Starling can turn on a dime and it is genuinely unfair.
“Okay. Homework. You should read the whole thing tonight, out loud, alone, till the pauses feel like yours. You’ll freak out if you try to do it cold.
” She tapped the page. “I timed the whole set out, the beats are marked, it’s all in here—”
She reached under the counter for the festival clipboard and set it on the counter between us, flipping past the top sheet to find her timing notes, and a few of the back pages slid loose before she caught them. One of them faced me for a second or two. Long enough.
It didn’t look like the rest. The festival pages were all big loops, exclamation points, arrows.
This one was small and squared-off, a short column of figures with a total at the bottom and a date beside it, circled twice.
And a name written across the top and underlined. Not the farm’s name. Iris’s.
Reading upside down is part of the job, and numbers come up quickest of all.
I had the total and the date before I’d made any decision to look at them—a figure with more digits than I wanted it to have, and a deadline that fell two weeks after the festival’s last weekend.
Iris Starling’s name over the top of it, by itself.
I knew what I was looking at. At least I thought I did.
The tickets to the Harvest Ball were meant to cover the new roof for the barn.
It was the trouble under everything, the reason she ran this festival like a woman bailing a boat with a coffee cup, the reason the whole family tightened up when the sky did.
This was something else. I’d known they were behind. I hadn’t known how far. And I didn’t know why it was her grandmother’s name up there alone, instead of the farm’s, only that it sat wrong with me and I had no time to work out why, because Elizabeth had already seen my face.
She didn’t say anything for a second. Something moved behind her eyes, and then she smoothed it over and tucked it away, fast. This was the moment. A better man sets the script down and says her name and asks her how bad it is and what they do about it together.
“Ignore that.” She slid the page to the bottom of the stack, light and easy, already smiling again. “Old math. Festival brain. It’s a disaster in there, no civilians allowed.” She tapped the top sheet. “Focus, Hartford.”
I let it go.
Every part of me that has ever moved toward a person in trouble was up on its feet and reaching for that page—and a quieter part of me, one that has been running the show a lot longer, got there first and stopped me from asking about it.
It called itself kindness. It had a dozen reasonable arguments, and I accepted every one of them, because underneath all of them was the one I couldn’t turn and face, which was that if I asked her straight out what she needed, she might look at me and say nothing from you.
I couldn’t hear that. I wasn’t strong enough to hear that. So I chose not to ask.
It stayed with me the whole shift. I kept picturing her the night before, in the middle of the maze with all that happiness on her face, kissing me with the same numbers folded in the back of the clipboard the entire time.
I didn’t sleep much. I got out a legal pad of my own instead, because work is what I do with a problem like this, and my hands were steady even when nothing else was.
I knew the state kept a preservation grant for old farms. I’d helped Mrs. Pruitt, my kindergarten teacher, fill it out last year.
I knew the paperwork ran long and fussy, and long and fussy has never scared me a day in my life.
So I started fixing the problem. I wrote out the letter the historical society would need for the application. And the whole time I felt something in my chest ease off for the first time since I’d read that total, because I had found a way to put myself between her and the bank.
I’d tell her afterward. That was the deal I made with myself so I could finally close my eyes and sleep.
After the festival. Then I’d show her all of it, with the grant ready for her signature and everything already handled, and she would see that I hadn’t gone around her; I’d gone out ahead of her, and she would understand.
I needed her to understand so much that I built the whole plan around that need and convinced myself it was a good idea.
I’m a thorough man. It’s the best thing about me, and it’s also the worst thing about me. But tonight, I honestly couldn’t have told you which one I was being.