33. Elizabeth #2
The drive was lined with pumpkins split open and hollowed for candles, flickering all the way up to the barn doors, and the doors themselves stood thrown open onto a floor swept clean and scattered with fresh straw, long tables down both sides heavy with cider, tiny sandwiches, and snacks, cinnamon donuts, and pie in every variety this farm had ever grown a filling for.
A trio had set up near the far wall—guitar, upright bass, a woman with a violin tucked under her chin—working through something slow and sweet while people found their footing on the dance floor.
Candlelight and string lights together turned the whole barn amber, warm enough that you forgot, for a minute, that it had a roof problem at all.
People were everywhere, dressed up in a way this town didn’t usually bother with, kids running loose between the hay bales with sparklers somebody probably shouldn’t have handed them, Aunt Tiffany already several cups deep into what she was calling cider and what was, by the smell of it from four feet away, her own secret spiked cider, decanted from a flask she thought nobody had noticed.
She had not fooled a single person in three generations.
The air smelled like cinnamon and crushed hay and candle wax, and underneath all of it, faint, the sweetness of the last honey of the season.
June climbed up onto the little stage they’d built at the barn’s mouth and took the microphone with the easy confidence of someone born to hold one.
“Evening, Sweetbriar!” Her voice rang out clean over the crowd, and a cheer went up from somewhere near the cider table.
“Welcome to the Starling Harvest Ball, the last and best night of a season that has, honestly, given every single one of us more than we bargained for.” Laughter rippled through the crowd, warm and knowing, the sound of a town that had lived through the same fall season together and come out the other side mostly intact.
“We’ve got dancing, we’ve got pie, and later tonight, right there at that gazebo, we are going to crown this year’s Mr. Pumpkin and settle, once and for all, which of our extremely reluctant contestants has been the best sport about a contest only a few of them signed up for voluntarily.
” More laughter, louder this time, somebody hollering a name I didn’t catch.
“So eat something. Dance with somebody. And stick around, because before the night’s over, we’ve got a crowning to get to and a farm to celebrate. ”
The crowd surged forward toward the tables, and Gwen and June peeled off into it almost immediately, swallowed by cousins and neighbors, and I stood there a moment at the edge of the light alone, one hand pressed flat against my stomach like I could physically hold the nerves down that way, scanning the crowd without meaning to, the way I’d been doing all evening since I’d walked down that path.
And then I saw him.
He was standing near the gate in the navy suit he’d worn to Becca’s wedding, and I hated, immediately and with my whole chest, how good he looked in it—shoulders set the way they always were, like a man permanently at attention, jaw freshly shaved, hair combed back except for the one piece that never stayed, standing there looking more uncertain than I had ever once seen him look in all the months I’d known him.
He was, infuriatingly, unfairly, the best-looking thing at this entire party, and some small, humiliated, entirely inconvenient part of me noted that even now, even furious, even wrecked, I still wanted to walk straight across that yard and put my hands against his chest the way I had on the bluff, and demand that he tell me that what we had was still real.
He hadn’t seen me yet. He was staring into the crowd like someone might tell him what to say once he found me.
Jonas came up the path just past him with my grandmother on his arm, the two of them laughing about something, her hand tucked properly into his elbow, and I had one half-second to feel my whole chest go warm at the sight of her out here at all, dressed and laughing, before my eyes moved past them.
And found my mother, now right beside Matt, close enough that her hand was tucked into his arm.
She was wearing a pretty blue dress I’d never seen before, something new she must have bought just for tonight, and her hand sat in the crook of his elbow the exact same way my grandmother’s sat in Jonas’s—easy, familiar, a woman standing beside someone she’d already decided to welcome back in.
The joke I’d had ready, the one already halfway up my throat, died before I could get it out, and something else took its place instead—not hurt. Something closer to relief, so sudden it nearly buckled my knees.
Because there was no anger left anywhere in that yard for him.
My mother’s arm through his. My grandmother laughing on Jonas’s.
Both of them out here dressed and ready, exactly like they were every single year, because nothing short of the roof caving in had ever once kept a Starling woman home on the night of the Harvest Ball, and both of them had apparently decided, sometime between last night and tonight, that whatever he’d done wrong, he’d more than made up for it.
They wouldn’t have looked at him like that, wouldn’t have let him anywhere near them like that, if he hadn’t earned it honestly.
Which meant I didn’t have to walk into this alone. Whatever I still had to say to him, whatever he still had to say to me, the two women who loved me most in this world had already looked him over and decided he was worth trusting.
I straightened my spine, smoothed the front of the dress I hadn’t chosen but now couldn’t imagine wearing anything else, and walked toward him.