37. Chapter 37
Milo
The thing about Foxglove Inn is that it runs on a clock only Evie can hear, and I’ve spent weeks learning its pattern. Coffee before dawn. The oven at six thirty, and then the whole downstairs smelling of whatever she’s decided the guests deserve that day.
The longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes that this place’s rhythm extends well beyond its walls.
People from town appear whenever they have something the Inn could use: surplus produce from their gardens, armfuls of flowers cut before the rain can spoil them, revised walking maps, or new leaflets for whatever Brindlewood has decided to celebrate next.
None of it’s presented as a favor. Someone sets things on the kitchen table or tucks them beside the reception desk while catching Evie up on a neighbor, a road closure, or which stall will be at the market that weekend.
Then they leave again, as though tending to the Inn is simply part of ordinary life here.
Evie takes it all in stride. She remembers who owns each basket and vase, thanks people without fuss, then returns to whatever demand was already vying for her attention.
What she seems unable to see is the structure beneath the Foxglove: a web of small devotions, practical and unspoken, holding the Inn steady from every side.
The back garden is the part of this place I love most, though I’ve never told her.
The herbs have escaped their neat rows and begun encroaching on the path, fragrant and unruly in the afternoon sun.
Beyond them, the gazebo sags beneath years of weather, its paint bleached gray and peeling at the joints.
The swing beside it hangs at an angle from a single corroded chain, abandoned in the middle of a repair no one ever returned to.
More often than I should, I think about fixing it.
Replacing the chain. Scraping back the old paint while Evie sits nearby pretending she isn’t supervising.
Halfway through, she’d change her mind about the color.
The whole afternoon would leave nothing behind except tired arms, a repaired swing, and the certainty that tomorrow belongs to us too.
Since moving in with Evie, Hell has receded enough that, for hours at a time, I forget it exists.
The bargain, my father, the sentence waiting inside every borrowed hour all disappear beneath flour on the kitchen counters and her calling for me from another room.
This life has become real enough that returning feels like the lie.
Only the calendar refuses to be fooled. There’s tonight, and then a dwindling number of mornings I can still count on both hands.
But none of that is happening today. Today, three strangers scatter across the garden, nudging potted ferns by fractions of an inch while a woman on a stepladder studies the porch gable through the lens of her camera.
Matte-black cases lie open, crowded with cables, reflectors, spare lenses, and equipment whose purpose I can’t begin to guess.
They keep adjusting things that were already fine.
I know what this means for Evie. The feature could bring guests, attention, perhaps enough bookings that she stops examining every invoice as though it contains a personal threat.
I want that for her. But I’m still selfish enough to resent every hour the shoot takes from us.
They’ll pack their cases, take the photographs, and leave with time I’d have given almost anything to keep.
The photographer is called Zia. She arrived at seven with two assistants and has been unflappable ever since.
She spends several minutes looking at each room before touching anything, tracking the morning light across the floorboards and the shadows gathered beneath the furniture.
Her adjustments are minute but deliberate.
She’s photographed a castle and a monastery, but nothing in her attention suggests she considers the Foxglove less worthy of being preserved.
Evie’s everywhere at once, wearing my clothes, which feels unnecessarily hostile to my concentration.
The overalls are soft with wear and make her look cute, but my flannel turns cute into a problem.
It hangs open over her smaller frame, sleeves rolled to her elbows, the hem shifting around her thighs whenever she moves.
Each step gives me another brief view of the narrow waist beneath it, the denim drawn snug over her hips.
She doesn’t realize that seeing her in something of mine has turned every ordinary movement into a private provocation.
I take up a position near the archway and make myself useful from a distance.
Evie rehangs the same picture twice, corrects the lace in the Sunrise Room, keeps the coffee circulating, and presses food on the assistants whenever they pass through the kitchen.
She looks lighter beneath all that movement, excitement loosening the vigilance she carries so habitually.
For once, she isn’t waiting for something to go wrong.
She’s simply happy, and somehow that makes it even harder to keep my hands to myself.
Each time she crosses the hall, my fingers remember the width of her waist. I want to pull her against me, bury my face in her hair, and kiss her until the composed expression she offers everyone else disappears.
Evie would despise being distracted while people are working.
Anything more than a brief touch while she’s hosting a professional shoot would have her glaring holes through me, so I keep my hands occupied and let her move past untouched.
Restraint has rarely required this much concentration.
Being soulmates might explain the instinctive certainty that keeps pulling me toward her, but it didn’t invent my fascination.
That belonged to Evie from the start. Not only her body—though that has been its own particular torment—but the stubborn mouth, the impossible standards, the way she feeds everyone before herself and pretends care is merely efficiency.
I was attracted to her when she was still a furious stranger who threatened me with a rolling pin.
Even without fate pressing its thumb against the scale, I’d have chosen her.
The only creature refusing to participate in today’s happiness is Marmalade.
He’s developed an urgent interest in rooms I’m not occupying, while I’ve avoided cornering him until I know precisely how he knew so much.
My current theories are limited to forbidden witchcraft, an elaborate curse, or some undocumented infernal species capable of passing itself off as an ordinary house cat who eats insects, sleeps in a laundry basket, and has Evie trained to meet his every demand.
Obviously, the townspeople have noticed today’s commotion.
Maureen Pritchett is the first up the hill, which tells me plenty, since nothing waits at the top of this road but the inn and the forest behind it.
She marches toward me in a bright green raincoat, silver hair clipped away from her face, and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a beaded chain.
Tucked under her arm is a bright plastic container.
“Returning Evie’s dish.” She thrusts it at my chest.
It’s shiny and factory-red, not a scratch on it.
Nothing in Evie’s kitchen looks this new.
Her shelves are full of other people’s leftovers, cloudy old jars, thrifted bowls in colors they stopped making decades ago, one yellow mug with a crack she insists is perfectly safe provided no one pours boiling water into it.
I turn it over. Faded marker spells out MAUREEN across the base.
Pointing this out would require contradicting her, and I’ve avoided doing that since she caught me feeding ducks by the river.
She informed me that bread swells in their stomachs, encourages rats, and is the reason people can’t have nice riverbanks anymore.
I’ve kept a respectful distance thereafter.
She reminds me of Thessara, Hell’s HR administrator, if she had a livelier human sister with stronger opinions and a fondness for orthopedic shoes.
“I’ll make sure she gets it.”
Maureen nods, phase one concluded to her satisfaction.
“Quite the production.” She looks past me toward the camera equipment. “Rebecca heard it was a national feature.”
“It is. They flew the photographer in and everything.”
“That’s lovely for Evie.” Her attention swings back to me. “And how are things otherwise?”
“Busy,” I manage, which is the shortest true thing I can find.
“I couldn’t help noticing you both left the potluck early last weekend.”
So this is why she hiked all the way up a hill that leads nowhere except here.
“We were tired.”
“Mm.” There’s an entire cross-examination in that one syllable. “And you still haven’t told me where you’re from, exactly.”
“I did say it was rather far.”
“How far?”
“It would be difficult to explain without—”
“And are you and Evie official yet?” Maureen cuts me off with bright, unwavering interest.
“I think that’s something you’d have to ask Evie,” I say, which feels both diplomatic and cowardly.
“I have. She tells me nothing.” Maureen gives a small, aggrieved sigh. “That girl’s a locked drawer. You, on the other hand, are much easier to read.”
This is how Brindlewood gets me. If I give Maureen anything, Evie will be annoyed. If I stay quiet, the silence becomes so unbearable that I start filling it and give away more than I meant to.
“There’s no need for either of you to be coy,” she continues. “Anyone with eyes can see it.”
“See what?”
“How you look at her.” My face grows hotter. “And the way she looks at you when she thinks nobody’s watching.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Maureen nods as though I’ve confirmed something.
“You’re a good match,” she says. “Better than most, honestly. My Eugene and I had nothing in common when we met. Hardly said two words together, that man. I talked enough for both of us, and it worked out beautifully. Fifty-one years, and he still insists I proposed to him.”
“Did you?”