She smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think he will.”
We sat like that for another stretch of stillness, the soft rustle of her pen against paper starting up again. She was writing something new—something good, I could feel it. She always got this look when the words were right.
“So…” I said. “Healing. What about it?”
June kept writing for another few seconds, then paused with the tip of the pen resting against the page. Her eyes flicked up to mine.
“That it doesn’t always look like you think it will,” she said. “It’s slower. Stranger.”
I let that sink in. “Is that so?”
She nodded, shifting Asa just slightly so he could rest more comfortably. “Healing isn’t about going back to who you were before. It’s about becoming someone new…someone softer. Wiser. Freer. And yeah—holier, too. Because it leaves room for grace.”
My throat tightened again. I reached up to run a hand over my face, not because I was tired, but because she always had this way of saying things that made mefeel.
Wiser. Freer. Softer.
She was already proving herself right.
“That what you’re preachin’ tomorrow?” I asked.
She smiled again—gentle this time, but no less sure. “I think so. About healing, and mercy…about what it means to keep showing up.”
I sat back on my heels, breath slow in my chest.
Because that’s what it all came down to, wasn’t it?
After everything—the ghosts, the grief, the curse—we were still here. Still reaching. Still learning how to hold each other without dropping the past, without letting it ruin the future. Still finding our way through.
Still healing.
“I think that sounds like the best damn sermon I’ve ever heard,” I said, brushing my knuckles over Asa’s soft cheek.
June raised her eyebrows. “Better than the Gospel of Mothman?”
I snorted. “Well…maybe not quite.”
She laughed and went back to writing, her pen scratching quietly across the page. And I stayed right there beside her.
Outside, the light turned golden.
Inside, everything I’d ever prayed for was already in my hands.
Soft, sacred, and deeply, deeplyloved.
This love spell is about to have its way with the next Ward brother.
Beau Ward thought the hard part was over—until a sharp-tongued paranormal podcaster named Noelle Kinney shows up asking questions he’s not ready to answer.
She’s hunting cryptids. He’s hiding ghosts. And Willow Grove isn’t done with either of them. Keep reading in Where the Shadows Linger.
Sneak Peek
WHERE THE SHADOWS LINGER
I did not drive fourteen hours from Austin just to get murdered by some banjo-wielding hillbillies out in the boonies.
