“Actually,” I say, forcing a smile. “It’s all wrapping up much faster than expected.”
“Mmm.” He shifts the box to one hip. “That so?”
“Just a few forms. Maybe a committee vote. But nothing that’ll slow things down for long.”
He snorts. “I’m sure it’ll be smooth sailing.”
Isla watches the exchange from behind the counter, chin propped in her palm, beaming.
Wells glances at her, then back at me. “Don’t suppose you’re heading back up to the inn soon? I’ve got some nails to finish driving into the porch steps you must’ve tripped over yesterday.”
“Good I didn’t break anything,” I reply sweetly. “Would’ve sued the handyman.”
He grins. “And lost.”
I blink at him. “Are you enjoying this?”
“It’s a fine coffee run,” he says, stepping up to the counter and setting down the box. “Despite the detour into municipal delusion.”
“Would you like June’s special? A cinnamon fog with a splash of vanilla,” Isla finally cuts in, “or just your usual today?”
Wells gives her a crooked smile. “You pick.”
“I’ll surprise you,” she says.
I grab my cup and head toward the front, fully prepared to flee. I don’t like feeling out of place, though I often do. Crowds tend to magnify the wrongness in me.
“See you back home,” Wells calls.
I stop. “It’s not your home.”
“Oh, sugarplum,” he drawls, annoyingly. “Keep telling yourself that.”
The words hit like an unwanted kiss—too close to ignore, smug to the bone. I falter, and my boot slips on the wet tile. Hot coffee sloshes over the rim, straight down the front of my cotton sweater.
I hiss, straighten, and keep walking. Behind me, I hear Isla gasp softly and the clink of Wells setting down his box. I’m too embarrassed to look back, so I don’t. Not even once.
4
WELLS
I leaveJuneberry with a too-full cup of black tea and an even fuller urge to throw it at something. Preferably, the stubborn woman who thinks she can sell a living house like it’s nothing but shingles and plaster.
The wind cuts sharply as I take the path out of town. Wick’s Ridge rises behind me, the inn tucked up there nice and cozy. From this distance, Blue Willow looks the way it always has: orderly, lovely in a lived-in way, and quiet. But beneath all that, there’s history pressing in.
The Harts, the Winslows, the Marlowes, the Ashbys, and the Langfords. Five families who carried the town’s bones onto this soil and rooted themselves deep. Each one left something strange behind, though no one agrees whether it was deliberate or just the way magic settles.
An inn that breathes. An apiary with healing honey. An orchard in perennial bloom. A co-owned bog that keeps, and steals, the best of our memories. That’s the land we’re standing on, and no matter how Elsie tries to deny it, she’s tied to it as much as I am now.
I push down the road, boots slipping where snow’s hardened to ice, hunched against the cold. My shoulder’s been giving mehell again—a dull burn that grinds down into the joint and flares if I breathe too deeply.
Every step shakes the ache loose, so by the time Honeywild comes into view, it’s humming steady, sharp enough to make me clench my jaw.
The farm looks half-wild even in winter. Lavender stalks have gone brittle in their beds, and the hives stand stacked like sleeping sentries. The place carries a quiet warmth in spite of the frost—the kind you feel more in your chest than on your skin.
Home of the Marlowes, flower growers turned beekeepers. Winnie, steady as summer, grew up here. With the bees. With the fields. With this patch of inherited magic. She knows it better than anyone.
Which is how she must’ve already known I was on my way. I open the gate, and she waves from the porch of her cottage, cheeks pink from the cold, hair frizzing loose from her braid. The brim of her sun hat hangs on a hook beside the door, out of season but waiting.
