Chapter 8
The bramble had roots like a grudge.
Maris braced one boot against the base of the collapsed gazebo, wrapped both gloved hands around the thickest cane, and yanked.
The whole tangle groaned. Somewhere underneath it, she was fairly sure, was a rose that had survived twenty years of neglect purely out of spite, and she had every intention of setting it free.
“There you are,” she muttered. “Come on. I’m only trying to help.”
The bramble disagreed.
She had been at it since eight, working her way along the ruined stone edge of what had once been a formal rose garden.
She was filthy and she was happy, the way she always was on a job with a lot of problems and satisfying solutions to those problems. This corner of the grounds had the best bones of anything she’d found so far.
She could see the old geometry in it—four beds, a central axis, the ghost of a path—buried under two decades of everything else deciding it lived here now.
She set her feet again and pulled. The cane came free with a wet ripping sound and a shower of dead leaves, and she staggered back a step triumphantly.
“That one’s been winning for a long time.”
She turned so fast she nearly sat down in the dirt.
Garrick stood at the bottom of the three shallow stone steps that led up into the garden, and she had no idea how long he’d been there.
He was in dark jeans and a grey T-shirt with the sleeves straining over his biceps.
He was so large and so still against the overgrown green that her eyes had almost slid right past him, the way they slid past a wall.
“You could announce yourself,” she said. “People do that. It’s considered polite.”
“I did.” A pause. “You were arguing with a plant.”
“I was winning.”
“You were.”
She couldn’t tell if he was teasing. Garrick’s face gave up almost nothing, and his voice was so level that a joke and a threat sounded nearly identical.
She had decided, somewhere over the last few days, that the safest assumption was that he was probably being funny and she simply couldn’t always hear it.
“Did you need something?” She peeled off a glove, shoved her hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, and immediately felt something crunch. She’d have leaves in it for a week. “Or are you supervising?”
“Neither.” He came up the steps. Even that was quiet, for a male his size. “I wanted to see what you were planning here. Specifically.”
Here it comes.
She braced for it out of long habit. In her experience a wealthy client who wanted the plans specifically wanted to explain what he had actually pictured, which was invariably something out of a magazine, and then to be disappointed that reality involved dirt and time.
She had been ready to have that fight since she signed the contract.
“All right.” She gestured with the loose glove.
“This whole area. You’ve got four original beds under the mess.
The stone edging’s mostly intact—I found the northeast corner this morning.
My plan is to clear it back to the bones, keep whatever old roses are actually alive under here, and replant the gaps with the same kinds.
Old varieties. Not the modern ones that need spraying every three days. ”
She waited for the objection.
“Why the old ones?”
She blinked. “Sorry?”
“The old varieties.” He was watching her, not the garden. “Why not replace them with something that performs better? You said yourself these have been neglected for twenty years.”
It wasn’t a challenge. She had heard that question with an edge on it plenty of times, and the edge always meant convince me not to do the expensive obvious thing. His had no edge at all, and he wanted the answer.
“Because the old ones were bred for scent and toughness, not for looking perfect in a catalog,” she said slowly.
“Even with a lot of attention, the modern ones are gorgeous for about ten years and then they sulk. These have already proved they’ll survive anything.
Including me.” She nudged a cleared cane with her boot.
“And because whoever planted this garden chose these. Ripping them out and starting over would be—” She stopped.
“Would be what?”
“It’d be throwing away the whole point of the place.” She met his eyes. “You don’t restore something by replacing it with a nicer version. Then it’s just a new thing.”
His whole face changed, and warm gold burned in his grey eyes for one startling second. She stared, and then he blinked and it was gone so quickly that she wondered if she’d imagined it.
“My mother designed most of this,” he said. “There was a small garden here originally and she built on that.”
Her stomach dropped. “Oh.” She looked at the mess of the garden again, with completely different eyes. “Garrick. I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t know it was—”
“You didn’t need to know.” He crouched at the edge of the cleared bed, bringing himself closer to her level, and spread one enormous clawed hand over the old stone edging she’d uncovered.
“She designed it the year I was born. There used to be a bench here.” He nodded at nothing, at a gap in the ruin where she supposed a bench had once been.
“She’d sit here in the evenings. My father built her the gazebo. ”
The one she’d been fighting all morning. The one she’d been about to recommend they demolish.
“I can save the gazebo,” she said quickly. “It’s rotten, but I can copy it. Same shape, same—”
“No.” He shook his head. “Rebuild it properly. She’d have preferred it sound over sentimental.” The corner of his mouth moved. “She used to complain it wobbled.”
She laughed before she could stop herself, and after a second the flat line of his mouth softened into an answering smile.
“When did she die?” she asked.
“When I was eighteen.” He said it with no emotion at all.
“It was fast, once it started. After that my father—” He stopped, and his hand flexed against the stone.
“Everything changed. The house. The grounds. Him. He stopped keeping any of it up. Stopped keeping himself up. He let it all go, because she wasn’t in it. ”
The garden went very quiet around them. A bird worked at something in the ivy. Down the hill, past the wall, she could hear the ordinary sounds of the town going about its morning.
“My husband died when Toby was ten months old,” she said.
She hadn’t meant to tell him. It came out anyway, because she couldn’t leave him standing there alone with his sorrow.
He looked at her.
“Car accident. Nobody’s fault, which somehow made it worse, because there was nobody to be angry at.
” She turned the glove over in her hands.
“We weren’t… It wasn’t a great love story.
We were friends. Good friends. Toby was a surprise and we decided to be a family about it.
But he was a good man, and Toby should’ve had him, and he doesn’t.
” She shrugged, aiming for lightness and not quite making it.
“After, I stayed with his parents in Charleston. For Toby’s sake. Grandparents, stability, all of that.”
“For how long?”
“Almost four years.” She heard the old tightness come into her voice and couldn’t do anything about it. “They were never unkind. That’s the thing I can’t even complain about properly. They were perfectly polite the entire time they were letting me know I wasn’t quite what they’d have chosen.”
He didn’t say anything soothing. He didn’t say I’m sure they really loved you, or they meant well, the way people always did, in the way that made her feel she’d whined about nothing.
He just watched her with those steady eyes, actually hearing what she’d said, and she had to look down at the glove for a moment.
“Give me the cane,” he said.
“What?”
“The bramble.” He nodded at the tangle she’d been losing to before he arrived. “You’ve got about six roots left in that anchor. It’ll take you an hour. Let me do it.”
She should say no. She’d built a whole small business on saying no to exactly this, to the wealthy man who assumed she needed rescuing and wanted the satisfaction of solving her problem for her. She opened her mouth to say it.
“It’s not a favor,” he said, before she could. “I want to know if I can pull it. You said it’s been winning a long time.”
Oh, he’s clever.
He’d handed her a reason that had nothing to do with charity and everything to do with a large male wanting to fight a plant. It was so exactly right that she laughed and stepped aside.
“Be my guest. Watch the thorns. They’re vicious.”
He wrapped one hand around the base of the bramble anchor, set his feet, and pulled.
There was a sound like a small tree giving up its will to live.
The entire tangle tore free of the earth in one piece, roots and all, in about the time it took her to blink, and he tossed it onto her debris pile without apparent effort.
“Show-off.”
“You asked me to watch the thorns.”
She stared at his hands, and there wasn’t a mark on them. Thorns were never going to win an argument with stone.
“That would’ve taken me an hour.”
“I know. You told me.”
She went back to work with him beside her, and it stopped being strange with unexpected speed.
He turned out to be an excellent person to garden with.
He didn’t chatter. He did exactly what she asked, with more strength than three men, and he asked good questions and then listened to the answers.
She found herself talking, which she rarely did on a job, but he made it easy.
“I’ve done this since I was a little kid,” she said, working her trowel around the crown of a surviving rose.
“Community garden plot behind our apartment building. My mom couldn’t afford much, but she could afford seeds.
” She worked a little more soil away, exposing a thick old stem.
A tiny green shoot pushed out low on the cane, almost hidden beneath the debris. “Would you look at that?”
He leaned closer. “What?”
“New growth.” She touched it lightly with one finger. “Not everything neglected is dead.”