“So it’s not her car?” Conrad asks. “The one up here?”
“What kind of car was it?” Lewis asks, and I realize we should’ve asked that already.
“Who is that talking?” Mom asks.
Conrad looks at the man, who looks back at me. “A Lexus, I think. Looked black.”
My hand trembles without warning, and for just a moment, everything stops. Time doesn’t exist. It’s just me and the sound of my breathing, the pulsing of my heart.
“It’s just up here.” Conrad turns down a gravel road as my eyes find Lewis’s in the dark.
Neither of us drive a Lexus, but we both know who does, and I see it all over his face. The realization, followed by the questions.
Because this isn’t possible either.
My stomach aches. “Mom, can I call you back?”
Before she can answer, I hang up, leaning forward to get a better look at the car just up ahead, pulled off to the side of the gravel road.
“What the…” Lewis, trying to see as well as I am, is pressed up next to me. Just as confused.
But it’s real. It’s her.
Greta.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HESTER WILDE - 1787
From my earliest moments, I have understood my home is both a blessing and a curse. My father, Elliot, died before I was brought into the world, and my mother never fully healed from his loss.
My mother was a kind but broken woman. One I never actually got to know. Oh, she was here, all right. She called Foxglove home until the day she died, but she didn’t leave the bed most days. It was my mother’s cousin who raised me—Rachel. Who fed me and my mother along with her own daughters, who made sure I knew how to mend my dresses and prepare a meal.
Long before the sadness took my mother from me, I knew the price of Foxglove’s secrets and just how heavy her weight can be.
Because of all I’ve lost, because the rules have been hammered into my bones from the time I took my first step, the moment I bring Jonah to live at Foxglove, my hackles are raised, and my world flips on its head.
I do not feel safe here, though I should. I feel in danger of my own tongue, of whatever cruel fate it might condemn him to, this man I love.
I’m thinking of this as I stare at him sitting next to me, our legs brushing on the sofa as the fire crackles in front of us, warming us on this chilly night. Snow covers the ground outside of Foxglove—has for many a night now—and the chill has set into my bones.
He has this way of looking at me—through me—as if he can see everything inside of me, my brain and my thoughts. My heart and my fears. That’s how he’s looking at me now, innocent and kind as ever as he watches me in the firelight.
And it’s because of this, because he makes me let my guard down so, my own heart betrays me. Love and Foxglove do not mix, and I know this. I just wish I didn’t.
He touches a hand to my growing stomach, to the babe inside my womb. “Just think of what our little lad will get up to in this place. In the meadow catching frogs and sword fighting with his shadow.”
“She’ll be a little girl,” I tell him, the words slipping out without thought. That’s all it takes, and I know this. Ihaveknown this.
He leans away from me, a peculiar look on his face. “How could you know?” He smiles up at me so brightly it hurts, trusts me so much it hurts.
I swallow hard. “I didn’t mean anything by it. My family always have girls first, that’s all.”
“We may break the spell, then,” he says with a wink, and the word seeps into me like water into soil.
My lips are tight as I force a smile. “Perhaps.”
My mother’s warnings, the images of her wasting away in her bed flash into my mind like lightning. Like thunder.
