Chapter 1
Hazel
I like my life.
I know how that sounds, coming from a woman who spends most of her waking hours alone in a field with fifty thousand insects that could, collectively, kill her if they felt like it.
I know what people think when they drive past my place at the end of Cutter's Lane and see the faded APIARY — PRIVATE PROPERTY sign nailed crooked to the fence post. They think: sad.
They think: lonely. They think: what happened to her.
They can think what they want. I have honey to extract.
Here is what my life actually is, for anyone keeping score: forty-one hives, give or take, depending on swarm season and how many of my girls decide to relocate without asking me first. Six acres that used to be my grandmother's, then my mother's, and are now, God help me, mine.
A farmhouse with a porch that needs restaining and a kitchen I've never once let anyone else cook in.
A truck older than some of my customers.
A dog named Mustard who is technically not mine, in the sense that he showed up four years ago and I never told him to leave, which around here counts as adoption papers.
And bees. Bees who show up every single day and do exactly what they're supposed to do and never, not once, decide halfway through the season that they've changed their minds about the arrangement.
I find that reliability soothing. Sue me.
The farmers' market is the one part of the operation I actively dislike, and I do it anyway because Dunmore Apiary doesn't run on goodwill, it runs on cash, and the diner and Harper's bakery and the mill restaurant all buy in bulk but the retail jars — the little six-ounce ones with my grandmother's label design, the ones tourists buy because they photograph well — those sell at market or they don't sell at all.
So every Saturday, April through October, I load the truck at five-thirty in the morning, drive into town, set up my table under the same oak I've used for eleven years, and spend four hours pretending to tolerate strangers.
My system is simple and it has worked for eleven years.
Be curt. Answer the question asked and not one syllable more.
Let the silence do the talking. People buy their honey, maybe ask if it's local — it's local, it's the most local honey in the county, I make it fifty feet from where I'm currently standing, no I do not want to explain the difference between wildflower and clover to you for the fourth time this morning — and they leave.
It is, I would like to state for the record, an extremely effective system.
Right up until the Saturday in early spring when a very tall, very golden-haired disaster of a man walked up to my table wearing a cut with an iron thorn stitched on the back and asked me which jar was the red one.
I clocked the cut before I clocked the face.
Iron Thorn. I knew who they were — everybody in Clover Ridge knows who they were, the motorcycle club that's been quietly running half this town's soft power for twenty years, the one that half the shops in the historic district are somehow connected to through marriage or friendship or both.
I'd sold honey to some of them before. Big man named Silas, terrifying at first glance, turned out to be perfectly pleasant, bought four jars a month for a woman I assumed was his wife.
This one was different. This one was smiling before I'd said a single word to him, like the day had already gone well and I was just an extension of that.
"Morning," he said.
"You gonna buy honey or just stand there," I said, which is not, in retrospect, the warmest opening line in the English language, but it's mine and it works.
It did not work.
He asked about the buckwheat. I told him it was an acquired taste, tried to warn him off with my voice, my face, every tool I had short of physically turning him around by the shoulders.
He bought it anyway. Grinning. Like I'd told him something delightful instead of something designed to make him leave.
"I'll be back next week," he said, handing over cash he didn't need to hand over yet, because I hadn't finished ringing him up, because apparently basic transactional patience wasn't a thing this man possessed.
"Please don't," I said.
"Definitely will."
He came back the next week.
I want to walk you through my internal state during that second visit, because I think it's important context for everything that followed.
I saw the cut first, from thirty feet away, coming down the row of stalls, and I felt a very specific, very familiar sinking dread — the kind you get when a dog you scared off comes trotting back with its tail wagging like the scaring didn't take.
He bought two jars of clover honey. He asked how long I'd been keeping bees.
I told him twenty-two years, my whole life practically, hoping the number would bore him.
It did not bore him. He said that was incredible, said something about how few people stick with anything that long these days, said it like he meant it, which was somehow worse than if he'd been performing interest, because performed interest I know how to deflect.
Real interest just sits there, warm and inconvenient, refusing to be deflected.
"You don't have to keep talking to me," I told him. Bluntly. On purpose.
"I know," he said. "I want to, though."
"Why."
He considered the question like it deserved an actual answer, which nobody ever does, everybody just wants to fill the silence with noise, but he stood there with his head tilted, thinking about it.
"Honestly? You're the most interesting person I've talked to all week, and I say that as a guy who lives with nineteen other bikers, four of whom are currently in a running feud about a coffee maker."
"That's a low bar."
"Hazel." He said my name like he'd been saving it up.
I hadn't told him my name. It was on the sign.
Of course it was on the sign. "That's the highest bar I've got.
You cleared it in about four minutes flat, and you did it by threatening me with a jar of buckwheat honey.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm easily impressed by the right things. "
I did not smile. I want that on the record too.
I did not smile at the farmers' market on the second Saturday in April, no matter what anyone tells you, no matter what Briar Ashworth may claim she witnessed from her flower stall two rows over, because Briar Ashworth was thirty feet away and cannot possibly have seen my face at that angle and I will die on this hill.
He came back the third Saturday.
And the fourth.
By the fifth, I had learned several things about Finn Archer whether I wanted to or not, because he volunteered information the way other people breathe, constantly and without prompting.
I learned he was twenty-eight. I learned he'd been with the Iron Thorn since he was a teenager, which he mentioned lightly, the way you'd mention a fact about the weather, and which I noticed him mention lightly, the specific practiced lightness of someone smoothing over something with a rough edge underneath.
I learned he was, according to him, "professionally delightful," which was his actual job title inside the club, self-appointed, and which nobody had apparently ever successfully argued him out of.
I learned he was completely, constitutionally incapable of taking a hint.
"You're not going to scare me off," he said that fifth Saturday, buying his third jar of that visit — he always bought at least two, sometimes three, more honey than one grown man could possibly need, and I chose not to think too hard about where it was all going.
"I've been thrown out of better places than this stall by grumpier people than you, and I came back to all of them too. "
"That sounds like a personality flaw," I said.
"It's my best one."
I almost smiled. I want to be very precise about the almost. My mouth twitched.
There was a structural shift in the muscles of my face that, under laboratory conditions, might have registered on some kind of extremely sensitive smile-detecting instrument.
That is the full and complete extent of what happened, and if Finn Archer tells you otherwise, he is exaggerating for effect, which is a thing he does, constantly, about everything, including — I would learn much later — how attractive he found my scowl, which is not a sentence that should be grammatically possible and yet.
He didn't linger past that. He never did, actually, that first month — a strange mercy I noted and didn't examine too closely.
He'd talk for four, five minutes, land some ridiculous line, and then he'd wave and wander off toward Del's coffee stand or Harper's bakery table, leaving me alone with my honey and my irritation and this strange residual warmth I refused to name.
It should have stopped there. A friendly biker with too much charm and not enough sense, buying more honey than one man could use, chatting up the grumpy beekeeper for sport. Novel entertainment. The kind of thing that gets old.
It did not get old.
By the sixth week I noticed I was checking the row of stalls before he arrived, some traitor part of my brain scanning for gold hair and a leather cut, and I hated that noticing, hated it with the specific fury I reserve for things I can't control, which is not a long list, but everything on it makes me furious.
"You're doing that thing again," Mustard's actual owner — my one friend in this town, a woman named Ruth who runs the vegetable stall next to mine and has known me since I was eight — said to me on the sixth Saturday, not looking up from her tomatoes.
"What thing."
"Watching for the biker."