Chapter 26
Lifting his glass, Rowan took a sip of the whiskey he’d ordered and looked at the woman across the table from him. What was he even doing?
If it went horribly wrong that would all be on him. He’d suggested this, set up the meeting. Said it was just drinks and an update. But in his heart that was a lie. He wanted more. He always wanted more.
He’d driven to Charlottesville to meet her.
He’d picked the place and showed up early so then he’d had to order something hard enough to take the edge off.
But she’d walked in ten minutes later and slid easily into the booth across from him.
Rowan let out the breath he was holding, finally admitting he’d been afraid she wouldn’t show up.
She looked at the glass of red wine he’d ordered for her, and he immediately felt like a goddamn fool.
It was a Chianti, and it was what she drank when they were in high school.
When she turned seventeen, he’d bought her the most expensive bottle he could find.
He’d cooked her a pasta dinner with sauce he’d made from scratch—with Jasper’s help—and their grandmother’s recipe.
Young hopeful Rowan had packed up the food and grabbed his girlfriend and they’d driven to the edge of Charlottesville where they’d snuck into a house that had been for sale for a few months.
As a lawyer, now he understood how daring, stupid, and illegal all of it was.
But at the time, they had a house to relax in with almost half of the rooms staged to look like a real home, and they’d pretended it was theirs.
Back then they’d both believed they would be together forever.
That not even their families would keep them apart.
If he’d told that young couple they would have gone fifteen years without speaking, they would never have believed him.
But it hadn’t been their home, and even pretending could only go so far.
He could see that looking back now. Not willing to turn on the lights and tip off the neighbors or the cops what they were doing, they’d eaten dinner by candlelight and snuck upstairs.
The staged bed turned out to only have a comforter on it. They hadn’t cared.
They’d celebrated her birthday until the sun came up the next morning. They’d celebrated her family finally getting the insurance money to rebuild the house. It hadn’t occurred to him then, but he wondered now where the three women had been sleeping if they didn’t have a house.
Now, he still didn’t ask. Swallowing his stupidity, Rowan waved his hand to the glass and brushed his own idea off. “It’s a Chianti. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
But she grabbed for it, tipping the barrel of the glass into the soft lips that he could still remember tasting, and took a sip. “It’s really good. Thank you.”
Either she was willing to lie to him, or he’d done passably well at this point. A relief. He’d sat here for ten minutes with his nerves tightening down in a vise of anxiety for long enough that he was willing to take it. “So, I hear you’ve been teaching Jenna some baby magic tricks.”
He watched as one side of her face scrunched, and he knew she was trying to ignore him for calling it magic tricks. “And how would you know I’m training Jenna?”
They were here, only twenty minutes away from Belle Hollow as the crow flies.
But they weren’t crows and it was closer to forty with the winding roads to get out of the mountains and into Charlottesville.
He’d driven a good forty-plus minutes from his office outside Richmond to meet here, and he didn’t miss the metaphor of not meeting her halfway.
But though they weren’t in the Hollow right now, they were both still from the Hollow.
“It’s Belle Hollow.” He shrugged. “I think rumors may be our biggest commodity.”
“Maybe magic,” she countered.
It was clear she was referencing multiple families, several of whom considered themselves generational witches. Still, he shook his head and grinned. “No, magic is definitely secondary to gossip and rumors.”
His heart lifted as she laughed. “Did your cousin set anything on fire?”
“Only what she was supposed to.” Annelise tipped her wine glass in a mock toast. “Here’s to Jenna.”
Though he should have sipped the whiskey, he gulped it, soothing the nerves that jangled. Getting her here was only the opening gambit. “They’ve got a really good menu here. I was intending to order dinner.”
Only the slightest shift in her eyebrows told him what he needed.
He could see the subtle shade change in her eyes.
It let him know she was surprised by the offer.
If he didn’t read her as well as he did, he would have missed all of it.
She hadn’t changed all that much in fifteen years, maybe her feelings wouldn’t have either.
He wanted to backpedal, to say it wasn’t a date, but he also didn’t want to do that. He settled for: “I’d recommend the gnocchi with mussels. It’s the best in town.”
Okay. Maybe he should stop or at least rein it back.
This shouldn’t be a show of how well Rowan knows Annelise, because honestly, he wasn’t sure he was nailing it anymore.
They were coming up on a date when it would have been longer that they’d been apart than they’d been together, and that was only if he counted them as together from birth—which, to be fair, he pretty much did.
He remembered the daycare workers and their grandmothers casually pulling them apart when they were younger.
“No, not the Lockhearts.” Then there were whispers of witchcraft.
He’d heard “Those Velasco boys” more times than he could count, even after Indie had come along.
But he and Annelise had met as infants. The hollow wasn’t big enough for young mothers to ignore or block each other out, and Melissa and Vienna had no room or respect for the old ways.
The directives of not playing with those Velasco boys had come from Story, from Marina, from Bloom, sometimes even from Monica if she was around, and not from Annelise’s mother or his.
Vienna Velasco wasn’t the surprise in that situation.
She’d never quite believed in the old ways.
Her family, the Elborns, had magic in the roots of the family tree, but her own mother had stepped aside from it.
Giving the girls modern names and eschewing all forms of the craft, while her younger sister Tesh had embraced it.
The Elborns walked a morally ambiguous line with their magic.
Tesh was well respected as had her brother Micah been.
But he vowed out of the craft and his daughters, Paris, and Rowan’s mother Vienna, had been removed from it.
He’d wondered if his own mother had been warned away from “those Velasco boys” in her generation.
He and Annelise had snuck out even as kids to see each other.
He remembered going out his window as a teenager, ready to secretly meet up after his parents believed he was in bed.
But before that, as a kid, when his mother sent them out to play, he’d simply often abandoned his own brothers and walked through the woods to the Lockheart house.
He’d helped Annelise finish her chores on more than one occasion, and she’d showed him simple magic, like calling a fish or changing a leaf to a fall red in the middle of spring.
Though he hadn’t been able to do it himself despite all her instruction, she’d continued to casually use her magic for him.
In their later years, she’d waved a cop away more than once so he hadn’t gotten tickets.
Now he had to wonder if she’d directed more magic at him despite the late-night promises of warm, naked bodies tangled together when she said she’d never do that to him ever.
But she must have cast on him to have their paths never cross in the tiny town, and that had held for fifteen years.
He wanted to believe she wouldn’t do it again. He tried not to smile when she ordered the gnocchi with mussels. He remembered she told him at one point if she ate another pasta primavera with whatever vegetable Story had pulled out of the garden that afternoon, she was going to lose her damn mind.
But as soon as the food was ordered, she laced her fingers, elbows on the table, and got down to business. Of course, because this was what he told her they’d come for.
“So you need me to do something, but I don’t know what we’re doing with this insurance business.”
He’d told her already how he’d known Story wouldn’t sign the papers for herself.
Rowan remembered being taught in church about God helping those who help themselves, and how he’d always wondered about Story thinking the universe would just hand her what she needed.
Yet, somehow, relatively consistently, it had.
So Annelise was stuck with her grandmother who wouldn’t even save herself.
But she would sacrifice herself for others.
He’d dug up the homeowners insurance of the other neighbors.
“I told Story they all have the same insurance. Six houses in a row.”
“All six?” Annelise seemed incredulous.
“That’s what I thought.” He took another sip of his whiskey, trying not to gulp again, because he felt the shift between them.
He might not be able to light a candle by snapping his fingers, but he knew this woman.
He felt connected to her despite the heavy wooden bar table and the years between them.
He wasn’t surprised when Annelise dropped her head into her hands when he told her what he’d learned from her grandmother. “They all have the same homeowners insurance because Story had talked them all into it.”
“Of course she did,” Annelise said. “I’m sure she told them that everything would be just fine and now they’re panicking.”
“You bet they are.” He watched as Annelise sucked in a huge sigh, then tried to retract it as the food was placed in front of her.
Even before she took a bite, she looked up at him and said: “How many of them are blindly believing in her to fix it?”
“Three. One couple is divided. The wife says to sit back and wait, and the husband is losing his ever-loving mind.”
“The Rickmans.” She said as if it were fact. Rowan nodded, because of course Annelise knew.
“And Story’s not going to fix it for them,” she commented as she dug in for her first bite. “I am, and you are.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed, and he outlined his plan.
“You think it’ll work?”
Nodding easily, he grabbed for the whiskey again before realizing the tumbler was empty.
Though he desperately needed more, he would hold off.
Though he lied to himself and said it wasn’t the case, he’d recommended meeting here so he could casually sneak in dinner, and he was hoping to casually add more later.
“I think we have more than enough leverage to keep it out of court. We don’t want to go to court. ”
He watched as she added more gnocchi to her fork and then thought better of it. He knew that about her, too. She was winding down, and she’d get the rest to go. “We don’t want to?”
He shook his head no. “Court cases drag on. There can be appeals. It takes forever to pay out—easily years. The leverage here is that if they don’t pay, and pay quickly, and hopefully pay more than they owe, we expose them.”
He saw what she was thinking, and it both bothered and delighted him that he could read the thoughts. Somewhere in there, she was as dedicated to the Hollow as her grandmother was. She wouldn’t have come back if she wasn’t. So she asked, “How did you get Story to agree?”
“To save the other families.” He felt good about that one.
“Of course.” It was bitter, and for the first time he saw that Annelise needed her grandmother to save her, too, sometimes. She bounced back though. “What was the issue? The leverage?”
“They were sloughing off the homes here. Jenna was right.” He paused. “They jacked the rates a year ago. But everyone had issues with their payments going through about three months ago.” Right when Story quit paying. He’d seen the documents.
He watched as Annelise blinked those blue, blue eyes at him. It hadn’t all been Story’s fault. Rowan continued. “The termination date on the policy is four days short of the ninety-day legal requirement.”
“Why four days?” She took another sip of the chianti, and he could see she was trying to reason it out.
“Because that’s when the weather report first predicted the flooding in the Hollow.” He let that hang as her mouth fell open. The insurance company was trying to drop the homes in the Hollow. But he could see Annelise’s drive for justice and Rowan just wanted to save her.
“If you go after the whole company, you’ll lose.
You’re absolutely right, they shouldn’t be doing this to anyone.
Once our case is cleared, I will notify other lawyers in the area.
Hopefully we can do both. But for now, if you try to make it bigger than these six families, you’ll wind up in a fight too big.
It will take too long. By the time you win, no one will have anything left and the victory will be too late. ”
He shouldn’t have said the last part. He didn’t know why, or maybe he did, but a dark shadow flitted across her face. He asked the server for the bill and then the server left without her asking for a box. “Not getting it to go?”
“Nowhere to put it.”
Of course she didn’t want to keep it. That was old Annelise, and a woman sat across the table from him in place of the young woman he’d once known so well.
With the meal finishing, he stood up, stepping around to her side of the table in a move he hoped looked far more casual than it actually was, he held out his hand. He was simultaneously both uncertain and incredibly sure of what he was about to do. He motioned softly. “Come with me.”
At first, she didn’t accept, and his chest felt like it was caving in on him.
But then, slowly, the tips of her fingers slid across his palm and her fingers wound softly through his.
His heart rate kicked up, and his pulse raced, and he told himself he shouldn’t be as excited as he was—that it was the first step in many to what he truly wanted.
And any of the steps along the way could go horribly, horribly wrong.