Chapter 21
Danner refused to search Magnolia Inn in the dark.
“The wall safe has waited twenty years,” she said. “It can wait nine more hours without turning into a pumpkin or a lawsuit.”
June opened her mouth.
Danner pointed at her. “No.”
“I had not said anything.”
“You had arranged your face.”
June accepted that as fair.
For safety, everyone slept at June’s apartment above Porter Blooms. Rowan was there only because Danner had ordered a protective detail and made clear he was not to make investigative decisions from June’s armchair.
Bea took June’s bed after insisting she could sleep on a chair and being overruled by three people and one raised eyebrow from Danner. June claimed the air mattress with theatrical martyrdom. Clara took the sofa. Rowan took the armchair by the door beside Harold, the cast-iron rooster.
Harold looked ready for violence.
Rowan looked ready to envy him.
The apartment settled slowly. Pipes ticked in the walls. Rain whispered against the windows, gentler now. Downstairs, the flower coolers hummed beneath the floorboards, keeping roses alive for funerals, apologies, and occasions Magnolia Cove had not yet invented.
Clara lay under June’s quilt and stared at the ceiling.
Every time she closed her eyes, she heard Marianne.
I did not abandon my daughter.
The words did not heal anything.
They changed the shape of the wound.
Across the room, Rowan sat awake, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely. The shadows cut his face into sharp angles. He had removed his jacket but not his vigilance.
“You are terrible at sleeping,” Clara whispered.
His gaze moved to her. “So are you.”
“I have an excuse.”
“I have several.”
From the air mattress, June murmured, “Some of us have employment in the morning.”
“You own the employment,” Clara whispered.
“That makes it more judgmental.”
Bea’s bedroom door remained closed.
Clara sat up, quilt around her shoulders. “Your mother sounded brave.”
Rowan looked toward the window.
For a while, he did not answer.
“I had forgotten what she sounded like afraid,” he said.
“That was not all she was.”
“No.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “My father always described her as tender. He said it like tenderness explained everything. Why she trusted people. Why she broke. Why she died.”
“Maybe he needed her to be fragile.”
Rowan looked at her.
“So he would not have to admit she was brave and he failed her anyway,” Clara said.
The words were cruel.
They were also true enough that she wished she had not said them.
Rowan leaned back in the chair. “I have spent most of my life trying not to be Thomas Hale.”
“That is a lonely ambition.”
“It is a useful one.”
“Those are not the same.”
“No,” he said. “They are not.”
The room quieted again.
June shifted on the air mattress. “I am asleep and therefore cannot hear emotional honesty.”
Clara almost smiled.
The almost was enough.
She stood and crossed the room before she could think better of it. Rowan watched her come, his body going still in that careful way of his.
“Clara.”
“I know.”
“You do not know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to say this is a bad idea.”
“It is.”
She stopped in front of him. “Probably.”
He looked up at her from the chair, and for once the badge, the history, the old family damage, and the investigation did not stand between them so much as crowd around them waiting to be acknowledged.
“I left Magnolia Cove because of my mother,” Clara said. “Because of Evelyn. Because every room in that house was full of people not saying things.” Her throat tightened. “And because if I saw you, I might have stayed.”
Rowan’s expression shifted.
She went on before courage could leave. “If I stayed because of you, I would have spent every day waiting for you to leave too.”
“I would not have.”
“You were nineteen.”
“No.” His voice was quiet. “But I know what I did for sixteen years after.”
“What?”
“I stayed.”
The answer was simple.
It hurt anyway.
Clara lowered herself onto the edge of the coffee table, close enough that their knees nearly touched.
“That was not fair,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“To either of us.”
“I know that too.”
His hand lifted, then stopped before touching her.
Permission, Clara realized.
Still asking after all these years.
She took his hand.
His fingers closed around hers with such care that it was almost worse than hunger.
Behind them, June’s breathing had become suspiciously even.
Clara leaned forward.
Rowan did too.
The bedroom door opened.
Bea appeared in June’s floral robe, hair flattened on one side, dignity wounded but alive.
“I need water,” she said.
Clara and Rowan sprang apart with the united guilt of teenagers.
June rolled over on the air mattress. “Nobody ever sees anything in this town.”
Bea paused, took in Clara on the coffee table, Rowan in the armchair, their hands no longer touching but not convincingly innocent.
“I saw nothing,” Bea said. “But if I had, I would remind both of you that emotional repression is not birth control.”
June made a strangled sound into her pillow.
Rowan stared at Harold as if the rooster might arrest him.
Clara got Bea a glass of water and returned to the sofa.
Rowan returned to his post by the door, though his gaze found Clara once before the room went dark.
This time, when Clara finally slept, Marianne’s voice did not chase her.
The morning did.
A hard knock rattled June’s apartment door before sunrise.
Rowan was up with his hand near his sidearm before Clara could sit.
Danner stood in the hall, holding her phone.
“They hit the inn overnight,” she said.
Clara’s feet touched the floor.
“The library?” Rowan asked.
Danner shook her head.
“The room behind the wall is untouched. East wing too.”
“Then what?” Clara asked.
Danner looked at her.
“Evelyn’s bedroom.”