Chapter 25 #2
The first time she’d ever seen him like this she’d panicked.
She’d found him on a bench in the overgrown garden, grey and hard and not breathing, and cold to the marrow.
She’d had her hand on his neck when he opened his eyes.
He’d told her that he wasn’t gone when he was in the stone, just very distant.
She knew the difference now, the way she knew his breathing in the dark. This was not death. This was rest.
He sat where the morning light came through the glass, wings folded, head slightly bowed, grey and vast and utterly still. She put her hand on his stone arm.
Cool. Not dead-cool. She had known that much since the afternoon she sat and read beside him in this room.
Cool as a river rock in the shade, with something under it going so slow it was almost nothing.
She had felt it that day and set it aside without looking at it, the way she had set aside four greenhouses.
She looked at it now. It was not almost nothing. It was him, down deep inside the stone.
She sat down on the cool tile beside him, her back against the great curve of his wings, and pulled her knees up.
She only found the courage to speak because he couldn’t answer.
He had told her that he could hear from inside the stone, and she was counting on it.
He could hear her, but he couldn’t turn his head and look at her with those gold-flaring eyes, or say one word back.
He would stay silent, and she could say what she needed to say, and not have to survive being watched while she did it.
“I turned it down,” she told him. “The offer. I decided about ten minutes ago, on a wall by the duck pond, and you’re the first one I’ve told, and you can’t say a word back, which is apparently the only way I can get it out.
” Her voice cracked and she let it. “I nearly took it, Garrick. I want you to know that. I sat at that table and I nearly did the sums the way she wanted me to, and it scared me how much sense it made.”
The still grey form said nothing. Morning sunlight drifted over him.
“I’m not going anywhere.” She placed her palm against his cool arm.
“I’m staying. Me and Toby. We’re staying here.
And I need you to know that before you know it, because I don’t think I can say it to your face yet—not all of it.
But I can say I love you to a rock.” A shaky laugh.
“So. I’m staying. And it terrifies me, because the last time I let myself belong somewhere I was seven years old and it turned out the somewhere didn’t want me.
Every day since then I’ve kept a bag packed in the back of my head.
And I don’t want to anymore. That’s the part that’s frightening. Not the leaving. The unpacking.”
She leaned her head back against him and shut her eyes and stayed there a while in the sunlit quiet. Eventually she would have to say all of it to him awake.
“You put yourself on the line to protect those lilies,” she said softly. “You didn’t even tell me. You beautiful impossible stone-headed man.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “We are going to have to talk about that.”
Then she got up, and touched the top of his bowed head once, the way she’d smooth Toby’s hair, and went to write a letter.
She wrote it at her kitchen table with the Ashby prospectus pushed to one side, in her best handwriting, on the good paper. Cornelia would notice the paper. Maris wanted her to.
Dear Cornelia, she wrote, and then she did exactly what she’d watched Cornelia do for six years and finally understood, sitting on a wall by a fountain that morning.
You never raised your voice. You were unfailingly gracious.
You thanked, and you agreed, and you declined so beautifully that the person you’d just refused went away feeling they’d been done a kindness.
She thanked them for the offer, and meant it, and said so. She wrote that she knew what it had cost them to open their family and their home so wide. She wrote that Toby was lucky past measure in his grandparents. That was true too.
Then, gently, with no edge anyone could point to, she declined.
She wrote that Toby’s life was here now.
His school and his friends, and Dot’s baby sister who’d learned to make a raspberry noise, and the ridge behind the town where the rare things grew, and the male he wanted wings like.
Then she wrote that her work was here, the business she’d built and would not set down—and she let that sentence sit in the middle of the page, plain and unapologetic.
A figure entered at last on the other side of the ledger, where no one had thought to put it.
And then she set her own terms, the way Cornelia set terms, with an invitation that was both a wall and an open door.
I would love nothing more than for Toby to know you both deeply, and often.
So please—come to us for Christmas. Fairhaven is beautiful in the snow, and the Inn is very comfortable, and Toby has been asking when you’re coming back since the moment your car left the drive.
There is a great deal here I’d like you to see properly, without a festival crowd.
Come and stay as often as you can. You will always, always have a place at our table.
The part she didn’t write was equally true. You’re welcome on my terms. In my town. In the life I’m keeping.
She read it over once. It was gracious. It was warm. It was entirely genuine. And it gave up not one single inch of ground, and did it so softly that Cornelia would have to read it twice to understand what had happened. She signed it before she could read it a fourth time.
She sealed it, and set it by the door to mail on the way to fetch Toby.
Then she picked up the Ashby prospectus, walked it to the recycling bin under the sink, and dropped it in.