Chapter 1 #3
Hive fourteen was building up nicely, frames heavy with capped brood, the colony's temperament calm under smoke.
Hive twenty-two needed a super added before they got cramped enough to swarm on me out of spite.
Hive thirty-one — my problem child, always has been, ever since I split it off a hot-tempered parent colony two summers back — greeted me with the specific aggressive hum that means pay attention or get stung, and I paid attention, moving slow, breathing even, until they settled.
It's meditative work. People assume it's terrifying — fifty thousand stinging insects, hands in the middle of it — and it can be, if you're careless or unlucky.
But mostly it's quiet. Mostly it's just you and the low gold hum of forty thousand small, focused lives doing exactly what they're built to do, and there's a peace in that I've never found anywhere else.
Not in people. Not in town. Not in the handful of relationships I let myself half-attempt over the years before deciding, with the cold clarity of someone who's done the math, that the math didn't favor it.
People leave. That's not bitterness, it's just observation, gathered the hard way, starting with a father who left before I could walk and ending with a mother who stayed in body only, present at the kitchen table every night and absent everywhere else, until she wasn't even present at the table anymore, until it was just me at twelve years old learning to run a honey operation because somebody had to and there wasn't anybody else.
Bees don't leave. Bees die, sometimes, in numbers that would break your heart if you let them, but the colony itself — the arrangement, the promise of return-on-effort — that holds. That's dependable in a way almost nothing else in my life has ever been.
I finished the last row as the light went long and gold, pulled off my veil, and stood there a minute in the hum of it, sweat cooling on the back of my neck, and thought — against every piece of sense I own — about a man with a grin that seemed to run on the same principle as my bees.
Show up. Keep showing up. Do the thing regardless of whether anyone asked you to.
It was an unwelcome comparison. I filed it away to be angry about later and went inside to make dinner.
That night I sat on my porch with Mustard's head heavy on my foot and a cup of tea going cold beside me, and I did something I hadn't done in longer than I wanted to count: I thought, specifically and at length, about a person.
Not a bee. Not a hive count. Not the crystallization rate of the buckwheat batch or whether the mill restaurant's order needed adjusting for the season.
A person. A specific, tall, golden, aggressively cheerful person who bought too much honey and asked too many questions and had, somehow, in six Saturdays, gotten further under my guard than anyone had managed in eleven years of me standing behind that table with my sign and my system and my carefully engineered solitude.
"He's going to be a problem," I told Mustard.
Mustard, who has never once in his life met a person he didn't immediately love, thumped his tail against the porch boards in a manner that suggested he did not consider this the disaster I was making it out to be.
"You don't get a vote. You liked the mail carrier's replacement for three weeks before she quit, and you moped for a month. You have terrible judgment about who's going to stick around."
Mustard sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a dog being lectured about emotional risk assessment, and rested his chin heavier on my foot.
"I'm serious," I told him. "It's a stall.
He buys honey. That's the whole transaction.
There's no meeting, there's no festival, there's no — whatever Nadia What's-Her-Name thinks she's organizing that requires my participation.
I have forty-one hives and a truck that needs new brakes and a mortgage that doesn't care one bit whether a biker with good teeth thinks I'm interesting. "
Mustard did not respond to this, on account of being a dog, but I felt distinctly like he wasn't buying it either, which was rich, from an animal who eats out of a bowl I refill entirely because he showed up on my porch one January and refused, politely but completely, to leave.
I thought about that. The parallel arrived uninvited and I did not appreciate it.
"You're different," I told him. "You don't talk."
He thumped his tail again, which I chose to interpret as agreement rather than the mild betrayal it probably was.
"Traitor," I said, and went inside, and did not think about Finn Archer for at least another eleven minutes before I fell asleep, which at the time felt like a victory.
It was not a victory. I know that now. I didn't know it then, sitting on my porch with my tea gone cold, congratulating myself on eleven whole minutes of not thinking about a man I'd sworn, six weeks earlier, meant absolutely nothing to me.
Eleven minutes. That's how much of my wall was still standing.
I had no idea, that night, how fast the rest of it was about to come down.