33. Chapter 33
Milo
The path climbs toward the old mill, and the temperature drops the second we step into its shadow.
The air there has a different texture: damp stone, stagnant water, leaf rot, the metallic bite of machinery left too long in the weather.
Evie’s fingers tighten around mine, and I become aware of every place her hand fits against my own.
The mill hunches at the top of the rise, half-swallowed by ivy, its empty wheel housing hanging uselessly over the stream. The water below keeps working at the rocks with a patient, grinding sound. Through the broken slats, the interior holds a darkness thicker than the night around it.
Daisy tells us about the workers who built the place: the long hours, the accidents, the foreman who walked the floors after closing, checking equipment nobody else heard running. As she speaks, something inside the mill answers with a slow wooden knock.
I lean toward Evie’s ear.
“Her description of post-mortem manifestations is technically imprecise.”
“Milo.” Her hand lands on my forearm. “If you well actually my sister’s ghost tour in front of paying guests, I’m not saving you from her wrath.”
“Understood. No corrections.”
“No corrections, clarifications, or helpful addendums.”
“What if something is genuinely inaccurate?”
“Milo.”
Daisy gestures toward the mill, looking delighted with the whole thing. “Would she accept notes afterward?”
Evie bites down on a smile and fails. “Try it after the tour. She’ll pretend to be offended, then ask you seventeen questions.”
Behind us, a branch snaps.
“What was that?” Priya freezes.
“Wind,” Beck offers, but his hand has migrated to her waist.
“Fauna,” Wilfred declares firmly. “Deer, most likely. This area has a significant cervid population density.”
“I don’t care what it’s called. I don’t like it.” Priya glances toward the tree line.
Another snap, then a rustle travels through the branches overhead from left to right. Evie presses closer without pretending she isn’t spooked, and I curl an arm around her, tucking her under my chin.
“It’s nothing dangerous,” I murmur.
“Then why are you holding me like that?”
“Protective instinct.”
“Your hand is on my ass.”
I correct the placement upward by three inches. “My hand is on your waist.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It is now.” My thumb finds the strip of skin between her sweater and jeans, and the muscle beneath tightens. I have to resist doing it again just to feel the reaction.
“We should keep walking.” But she doesn’t move.
Daisy’s voice carries from ahead, but I don’t hear a word of it. Evie is still pressed against me, her fingers bunched in my shirt.
“Walking,” she repeats, tightening them instead of letting go.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’m ready now.”
“You’re gripping my shirt.”
“I’m not.” She looks down at her own hands and uncurls her fingers with visible effort.
Daisy brings us to a clearing near the mill ruins, where a stone wall curves in a low semicircle. She runs her hand along the top. The mist has crept up to lap at everyone’s knees.
“This is where they gathered. Not just the workers, but the whole town. Before the mill and any of the houses, this valley was a meeting place. People came here at the end of harvest to share food, tell stories, and acknowledge whatever shared this land with them.”
My hand tightens on Evie’s waist.
“The traditions we still practice during the Harvest Festival started here. They’re all remnants of something older.
Little protections, mostly. A candle in the east window.
Salt at the back step. Rowan twigs sewn into coat hems before the first frost. Even the ribbons tied to the old ash trees, if you know where to look.
People call it superstition now, but superstition is usually just a ritual that outlived its explanation. ”
“Protections from what?” Stanley asks.
Daisy considers this. “I think it was about thresholds. The boundary between one season and the next, safety and the unknown, belonging and passing through. The old families had women who understood those things better than most. Not witches in the storybook sense. They marked crossings, fed the hearth, kept certain names out of songs, and made sure every door had a rule attached to it. Not because they were frightened of what came through. Because they recognized that a welcome and an invitation are not the same thing.” She smiles.
“Brindlewood has always been a spot where the strange finds its way in, whether that means people, stories, energy, or whatever word makes you feel least ridiculous. The first settlers didn’t try to seal it shut.
They learned how to live beside the gap. ”
Evie’s hip shifts against my palm, and I realize my grip has tightened again. I loosen it. She glances up at me.
“You okay?”
I glance ahead at Daisy, who has produced a small flashlight and is holding it under her chin, purely for effect, delighted by her own theatrics.
“She’s good at this. Everyone else on this walk wants to be either scared or proven right.
Your sister just wants there to be something real underneath all the stories. ”
“That’s Daisy for you.” Evie’s voice softens. “Don’t tell her about you. Ever. She’d never sleep again because she’d be too busy following you around asking a million questions.”
I recognize that part of her: the need to keep turning a question over until it gives up an answer. Under different circumstances, I’d ask to see her research. Instead, Evie’s beside me, and the only thing I want to know now is how much of her I can learn before I have to leave.
“Noted.”
The third landmark is Widow’s Crossing. The bridge waits at the bend in the river, so narrow that two people would have to turn sideways to pass each other.
Its railings are bleached almost white, slick with damp.
Below, the current moves with a quiet, stubborn pull, dragging moonlight through the supports in broken strips.
Daisy stops us along the near bank, where the river chill slips under my coat.
“This bridge has come to represent something the whole town understands: what it means to stand between one thing and another and try to hold on.”
I glance down at Evie.
Eleven days.
The number arrives uninvited, the way it always does now, and it lodges somewhere below my ribs.
“Couples walk this bridge. It’s where people promise to find their way back.” Daisy lowers her voice. “Who wants to cross?” Her attention lands on the two of us with all the subtlety of a spotlight.
Evie exhales through her nose. “She’s unbearable.”
“She’s brilliant.”
“Those two states coexist.” She eyes the bridge. “We’re crossing it. Don’t make it a big deal.”
But it became one the moment Daisy said find their way back, because the words catch on the hope I’ve been trying very hard not to name: that Hell could take me away and some stubborn part of me would still know the way back to her.
If souls remember anything, mine will remember Evie.
Leaving her is no longer the worst outcome; forgetting her is.
I thread my fingers through hers. Her hand is small in mine, callused at the base of each finger, and as we step onto the planks together, the wood lets out a long, low protest beneath our feet.
Halfway across, she stops.
Evie turns into me, and the bridge seems to narrow around us. Her hand lifts to my coat, not quite touching skin, only catching the edge of the lapel and holding me there.
As if I’d go anywhere.
She tips her face up to mine in the dark. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Because it’s hideously unfair to be given this much wonder on a deadline.
For fifteen years, my life has been contracts, punishments, and ledgers. Now I finally have something I want to keep, and I’m already running out of time. It shouldn’t be possible to meet someone this late and still feel as if some part of you has been moving toward her forever.
“I’m using every scrap of restraint I have not to say something that will make this more complicated than it already is.”
Her fingers splay wider over my chest. “Then don’t tell me.”
“I wasn’t going to make you a promise.”
“Good.” Her jaw loosens. “I hate promises.”
“I know.”
“They’re structurally unsound. No load-bearing capacity whatsoever.
” She goes up on her toes and sets her lips at the hinge of my jaw.
The kiss is barely more than pressure, but it hits like she’s put her lips directly to a wound.
Then she takes a fistful of my shirt and brings my mouth down to hers.
What stuns me is where she’s chosen to kiss me: out here, halfway across a bridge, with her sister and seven strangers ten feet away. Evie guards everything, and she’s doing this in plain sight.
I groan into her mouth and give in. My arm locks around her waist to drag her flush against me while the other slides into her hair. She gasps and I swallow it, kissing her back like the world ends in eleven days. Which, for me, it does.
Wolf whistles erupt from the group.
“Oh, come on,” Theo says. “That’s so gross.”
I can’t imagine a less accurate assessment, but he’s young and therefore prone to catastrophic errors of judgment.