It’s not that I mind helping. It’s that every time I say yes, the threads pull tighter. Every errand, every small favor, knots me a little deeper into this place I keep swearing I’ll leave.
With a sigh, I shove my feet into a pair of boots whose laces sulk out the sides and head around back.
Wells is at the long table outside the mudroom, a plank laid across two sawhorses, sanding one of the downstairs treads. His breath turns white in the cold, curling through the scruffy blond hair that refuses to behave.
There’s sawdust on his sweater, too, because of course there is. And God help me, the grittiness of it all looks good on him.
“Do you know anything about a wassail bowl?” I ask.
“Bobby?”
“Yes.”
“Old Twelvey,” he says, like the words themselves are muscle memory. He sets down the sanding block, wipes his hands on a rag. “It’s shallow and wooden, with copper around the rim.Couldn’t tell you where Elspeth kept it, though. Kitchen would make sense. So would the attic.”
“I’ll start there, I guess.”
“Your call.” He glances past my shoulder, toward the stairs that climb through the house. “You want company?”
It’s a fair offer, but after last night, the thought makes something in me twist. We sat up too late, drinking and talking until the candles burned low—about Elspeth, about our childhoods, about things neither of us meant to share.
It was easy. Too easy. The kind of connection that’s dangerous when you know it has an expiration date.
I like his company more than I should. I like the quiet between us, too. It’s the kind that doesn’t demand anything. But I’m leaving, and missing him is one more thing I don’t have room for on my agenda.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “If I don’t find it, I’ll come back, and we’ll try the kitchen.”
He nods. “There’s a step stool beside the pantry. Take that instead of the red chair.”
My brow furrows. “I wasn’t going to use the red chair.”
He smiles without showing his teeth, dimples cutting in anyway. And I carry that smile upstairs the way you carry a mug that’s just a little too full.Careful. Careful.
Up in the attic, I start with the big things. Trunks labeled in Elspeth’s tidy hand. Guest linens. Winter quilts. Blue Willow crockery wrapped in tissue.
I slide my fingers into the spaces where a bowl might hide—behind the trunk, under the low table with the nick in one leg. There are a thousand little remnants up here, and every one of them hums faintly with her touch.
A spool of thread. A cracked teacup. A map folded so many times the creases shine.
I don’t say the words out loud to the house because it feels needy, but I think them.
Help me, would you? Please.
A lamp flickers to life in the corner, and I whip my head toward it. I know what that means; the house is trying to tell me something. A small rocking chair sits there in a thin spill of dusty light.
Not the bowl, though. Because why would she make things easy on me?
Still, the sight of the chair there makes me jittery. It feels like I’ve stepped over some invisible line, trespassed back into a life that no longer fits. Every trunk, every quilt, every scrap of handwriting seems capable of cutting me open if I touch it wrong.
Last time I was up here, I found a stack of letters that sent me into a weeklong panic spiral. I still have Wells’ tucked in my nightstand. I keep planning to show it to him, but the plan keeps failing to choose a day.
Cupboards. Boxes. Cedar chest. No bowl.
“Fine,” I tell the rafters. “Kitchen it is.”
On the way down, I pause at the landing window. The glass ripples faintly, imperfect and old. I remember Wells saying he loved wavy glass, the way it softens everything beyond it. He was right. The world outside looks like a painting, all blurred edges and muted light.
From here, I can see him in front of the house, bent over the tread again. Sleeves shoved to his elbows, head tipped as he works. The wintry light catches on his hair, and for a second, he looks unreal. A fairy tale wrapped in Carhartt.
