“So why ...” The question climbs my throat like a man trying to scale the wall he built himself. Why would you leave the only place you were ever allowed to be yourself?
Something fractured between her and Elspeth, but she loved her fiercely. She belonged here once. She could again if she’d let herself.
I bite it all back. She’s already cracked herself open more than I expected. No point in prying deeper just to satisfy my own need to understand.
“I’m glad you had that,” I say instead because it’s true.
She reaches for my freshly wrapped hand, turns it over, and drags her thumb lightly across the pale new line hidden bygauze. It’s nothing. It’s exactly the kind of nothing that undoes you a little.
“You did a good job not being a man about this,” she says.
“I did an excellent job being a baby in private.”
We sit there until the wine is gone. I tell her about the time her grandmother accidentally hit me with a hammer. She tells me how Elspeth taught her to thank the house when the lights came back after a storm. Two knuckles to the banister, a whispered thank-you.
She doesn’t cry this time.
It feels like the kind of evening that leaves an echo. Not that I want it to, because I’d rather forget the sound of her laugh than remember it later in a quiet room. It’s not safe, knowing how easily she fits here. How easily she fits with me.
When she shivers, the blanket solves the problem by slipping from the love seat arm into her lap. She laughs, soft and startled. I tug one corner over her knees and one over mine, and we end up in the most dangerous configuration known to man—shared quiet under the same piece of cloth.
The wine and the nearness tilt the room. They make me want what I have no right to want. It would take an impossible sort of mercy for two people who keep choosing opposite directions to meet halfway and survive it.
So, I ask the house, just this once, to keep its miracles to itself.
17
ELSIE
Someone’s come knockinglike they mean it. It’s not the courtesy two-tap from a delivery person dropping eggs at the back steps, nor Wells’ shorthand rap on the mudroom door. Rather, three solid knuckles that carry through the house and straight into my gut.
Wrapping myself up in a thick sweater, I open to a gust of cold and Bobby Brindle standing on the step with a ball cap in his hands. He smells faintly the citrus oil he must use on the counters at the hardware store.
“We don’t have a meeting tonight, do we?” I ask.
“No, Lil’ Miss,” he says, peering past my shoulder. “I’m after your wassail bowl.”
“Mywhat?”
“Your grandmother’s, I should say,” he clarifies. “We’ll be needing it for Old Twelvey.”
I blink at him. “Old . . . what now?”
“Twelvey,” he repeats, like everyone keeps the date circled on the calendar. “The seventeenth. We go up to Mirabelle Grove after dark. Wake the trees, wish ’em health, soak a little toast in the cider for the robins. Bit of singing, bit of noisemaking to wake the sap.”
“And you need a bowl for that,” I say, slower.
“Not just any bowl.” He lifts his hat and holds it by the brim. “Has to be Elspeth’s. She kept it here between years so it wouldn’t get lost at the grove. Tradition, you know how we are.”
“Wells is around back,” I say, though my stomach sinks. “If anyone knows where it is, it’ll be him.”
“I’m sure his hands are full,” Bobby says. “You’re here, and you know the cupboards. You wouldn’t mind bringing it up to Mirabelle by five o’clock, would you? Isla’s got enough on her plate, and I told her I’d ask.”
“You didn’t have to come all the way out for that,” I protest. “You could’ve just called.”
“Phones make people say no,” he says cheerfully. “Bowl to Mirabelle by five. Ceremony’s at sundown. Isla’ll be waiting.”
He’s halfway down the path before I think of an objection.
