Chapter 9 #2
A fourth woman appears. Small and blonde, with creative energy crackling off her like static. She takes the chair across from me and says without preamble, “I’m Kitty, Tom's wife. Shay told me about your nails. Can I see?”
I freeze. I want to curl my fingers and hide, but Kitty’s expression isn’t one of horror or fascination; it’s the focused look of a woman solving a problem.
I uncurl my fingers and lay them flat on the table. Bitten to the quick, cuticles torn.
Kitty studies them for three seconds. No flinch. “I can work with that. Remind me before you leave.”
Luna stands and collects one of the jars from the counter.
She crosses to me and sets it on the table next to my plate.
It’s sealed with a handwritten label. She opens it to reveal the thick, cream-colored contents, flecked with green, and the smell that rises is a combination of herbs and something earthy, made with intention.
“Kitty made it,” Luna says. “For your skin. Calendula, oats, beeswax. She tested three batches.”
My hands are in my lap, and the jar is on the table, and I cannot reach for it because reaching means accepting that someone told these women about my skin. But they’re not offering pity. They made something especially for me.
“Oh.” My voice comes out cracked and small. “You didn’t have to—”
“Of course we didn’t.” Shay interrupts my protest before it forms. “Kitty’s been looking for a reason to use the calendula she dried last fall. You’re doing her a favor.”
I pick up the jar.
Three batches. Kitty, whom I met minutes ago, tested three batches because Ethan told them about my skin. He didn’t make a speech. Didn’t ask for my permission. He gave these women what they needed and stepped back. Built me a whole family of caretakers without ever telling me he was doing it.
I grip the jar, and the room blurs at the edges.
Shay is saying something about the next batch while Luna tops off my coffee.
Delaney’s hand briefly rests on my arm, a practical pressure that conveys, “I know. You’re okay.”
Henry moves through the background with Max on his hip, fixing a cabinet hinge one-handed.
Nobody comments on the tears I’m blinking back because every woman in this kitchen has been where I’m sitting.
“Angus made her test it on him first,” Luna adds. “Both forearms. He let her slather calendula paste on him for twenty minutes. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there with his sleeves rolled up and his scars visible, letting her work.”
“He’s ridiculous,” Kitty says, though her voice is soft.
“He’s Angus.” Luna shrugs like a woman who has stopped being surprised by her husband’s devotion and has started to expect it. “He doesn’t know how to love small.”
Shay snorts. “None of them do. Henry ate twelve scones this morning because I was nervous about the batch. Didn’t tell me they were overbaked until I found him drinking a gallon of water behind the barn.
” She shakes her head, but her smile is that of a woman who watched a man the size of a barn door choke down bad pastry because her feelings mattered more than his stomach. “Tom’s the worst, though.”
Kitty groans. “Don’t.”
“He named the new barn cat Kitty Two,” Shay says, looking delighted. “He told Angus it was because the cat reminded him of his wife—small, blonde, and hisses when startled.”
“I do not hiss.”
“You hissed at the toaster last week,” Luna says mildly.
The laughter that fills the kitchen is warm and layered.
Delaney catches my eye with a look that says, this is what you're walking into.
“Five for five,” Shay says, quieter now, looking at me. “Marlie hasn’t missed yet.”
I press the jar to my chest. Around me, the sound of laughter overlaps, filling the kitchen like sunlight. I’ve never been inside a world like this. Never been part of the overlap.
The foster kid inside runs the numbers again. How long until they see through me?
Then Shay puts another scone on my plate, and the calculation keeps returning the same impossible answer:
Stay.
An hour later, Ethan finds me on the porch, sitting on the top step with the jar in my lap and Max asleep against my shoulder.
Shay said he’ll only nap if someone warm is holding him.
She might have made that up, but I don’t care because this baby weighs almost nothing, and his fist is curled around my collar.
I have never held anything this small and this certain.
Ethan stops at the bottom of the steps, looking at me, the baby, and the jar.
His whole expression shifts, becoming tender and aching, so full of want that I have to look away. If I don’t, I'll say something that sounds like forever, and I’m not ready to risk saying that word out loud.
“You told them.” My voice is thick. I don’t specify what, but he knows.
He sits on the step below me, tipping his head back until it rests against my knee. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t ask me first.”
“No.”
“They made me a jar, Ethan.”
His hand finds my ankle, wrapping around it, and his thumb traces the bone in small circles. “Kitty likes to help. They all do.”
I press my lips to the top of Max’s head to avoid saying something reckless. The biggest thing anyone has ever done for me happened in a conversation I wasn’t part of, and the evidence is a jar and four women who said, “Sit down.”
Ethan’s head is warm against my knee. Max’s soft little breaths are the only sound.
In the truck on the way home, my hand turns palm-up on the console. He takes it and holds on. The jar sits in my lap, warm where my body has heated the glass. Outside, the valley rolls past in gold and green, and neither of us speaks because the silence is full enough.