The sound EJ made when the knife sank into his eye.
The knife.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have left it where I found it, tucked it back under the floorboard to wait another hundred years or so. But I didn’t. It lives in the drawer now, cleaned,sharpened, and wrapped in cloth, beside the old herbs Mom now keeps for salves and poultices. We’re making good use of the hidden space in the cupboard, filling it with recipes and oils of our own.
I can’t explain what happened. Not really.
There are moments when it all feels unreal. How the floorboard came loose just when I needed it. How my hand found the blade without looking. How Foxglove was hiding just what we needed to save Lewis. How the women who came before me knew just what to hide, and where.
Somehow, they planned for everything. It’s impossible, and yet…
When I get too lost in my thoughts, I start to question whether it might’ve been…magic, I guess. I don’t know the answer to that, even now.
I don’t know if I believe in spells, in whispered words under moonlight, in curses or potions. I don’t think I need to.
I believe in tea.
I believe in this house.
I believe in the women who walked these rooms before me—the ones whose names are written on doorframes, carved into stones out by the meadow, whispered in family stories. I believe in the others, too, the ones who’ve been completely forgotten by this world, though never by this land. Never by Foxglove.
I believe in the knowing. In believing. In trusting myself.
I believe in Foxglove.
And I believe in Wilde women.
We’ve buried husbands and secrets in this soil. We’ve fought off men who wanted to own us. We’ve raised daughters and fed them food and stories, even when we didn’t always believe them ourselves. Even when we wished they were stories we didn’t have to tell.
We stayed, and we survived.
Foxglove may not be everything, but she is our home. She is everything we need, and everything we have ever needed.
This land belongs to the Wilde women.
And we aren’t going anywhere.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
TAYLOR WILDE - FOUR YEARS LATER
The cabin looks smaller than I remember when I return.
Funny, how that happens. The way your whole childhood can feel like a myth by the time you’re twenty-two. The trees seem different now, or maybe I’m just finally standing among them with grown-woman bones.
Foxglove rises out of the field like a secret that refuses to be forgotten, stubbornly alive.
Just like the women who built her.
It smells like smoke and lavender, and I swear the wind slows as I open the door. Like it knows who I am.
Inside, everything is still. The same fireplace with our name carved deep into stone. The same board hanging above the window—another carving from a woman who came before me, another promise. WILDE WOMEN.
My shoes echo on the old floorboards. The board near the hearth is still loose. Mom never fixed it, and I didn’t ask why. I step around it without thinking.
Grandma Billie filled it with all sorts of things, trinkets and treasures she couldn’t bear to part with. Now, it’s another secret, this one added by us.
I kick off my shoes, drop my bag on the chair by the fire, and move toward the door again, past the kitchen where dried herbs still hang in the window—faded now, though their scent lingers in the air. I’ll bet Mom couldn’t bear to take them down yet, and I’m quietly grateful.
