But her best friend wasn't here to laugh or advise, and Ivy was alone with her inconvenient feelings for a man too broken by his family’s bitter abandonment to open his heart.
Her thoughts couldn’t help skipping to some of the favorite memories she hoarded. The way he braided his daughter'shair each morning. He did it badly—lopsided, too loose, with stray wisps escaping almost immediately. But every time, the tenderness of the act undid her.
Jewel would sit on her stool by the stove, patient and trusting, while Torin's large, long-fingered hands, scarred across the knuckles from years of the kind of work he'd never been raised to do, fumbled with the fine strands, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“Hold still,Cariad,” he'd murmur when Jewel wiggled. The Welsh endearment—spoken so softly she wasn't sure Torin knew he'd used it—made something warm bloom beneath her ribs.
As Jewel’s governess, Ivy should have offered to braid the child's hair. But some instinct had held her back. This ritual belonged to them—father and daughter.
She loved when Torin read aloud to Jewel in the evenings—fairy tales, mostly, from a battered volume of the Brothers Grimm—his pitch dropped into a register that was rich and low, almost musical. He did the voices: a rumbling giant, a squeaking mouse, a wicked queen with haughty vowels that made Jewel shriek with delighted terror.
The performance was so at odds with his usual reserve—the clipped sentences, the long silences, the careful neutrality of a man who had trained himself not to feel too much—that Ivy found herself pausing in her reading or mending to listen, her finger marking her place on the page or her needle suspended in midair.
When she played the harp, he listened with his whole body, the tension in his jaw easing, his muscles relaxing. Often, his fingers would beat the rhythm on his thigh. Sometimes, Torin seemed to find a piece so striking he closed his eyes and leaned back, the better to absorb every thrumming note.
She rolled onto her side and looked at the window, where moonlight silvered the glass. Sometimes, she didn’t close the curtains, preferring to view the sliver of sky.
Although she couldn’t see many stars from her bed, Ivy now knew they existed—a vast and majestic swath across the heavens. The stars made her feel as though she were a different person here, someone braver and more honest than the girl who'd hidden her earnings under the floorboards, avoided her father as much as possible, and swallowed her dreams like bitter medicine.
You are not that skittish girl anymore.
Ivy closed her eyes and whispered her gratitude to the Lord of the Firmament—that she was here, in this picturesque setting, where she was needed. Like St. Francis in his beautiful prayer, she asked to be made into an instrument of peace and healing for her two loves.
A sudden awareness came to her that if she asked to be an instrument, she, too, would be challenged. Would need to grow.
Will I be able to, and who, then, will I become?
14
The next day, the sky stretched into the kind of cloudless blue that made Torin forget winter had ever existed. The air held genuine warmth for the first time—not the teasing warmth of an afternoon that would vanish by dusk, leaving behind a bitter cold. But a settled, confident heat that promised to linger. A heat that proclaimed,I'm here to stay.At least, for a few days.
He stood at the kitchen window, coffee in hand, watching the sunlight play across the lake. The water had lost its winter heaviness—that deep, olive-green opacity—and had turned a clear, bright blue that reflected the sky. Along the shore, the last patches of snow clung in shaded hollows.
This morning, he'd spotted something new—a pair of swans gliding close to shore with a trailing flotilla of gray-brown cygnets, fuzzy and ungainly and impossibly small. He counted them as they paddled in the adults' wake. Six tiny creatures riding the ripples with wobbly confidence.
Jewel will be beside herself.
The thought gave him an idea. He set down his coffee and turned from the window.
Ivy sat at the kitchen table, writing a letter to her sister, while Jewel practiced forming the worddogwith her letters. After learning to spellcat, the girl, with frequent mentions of Sassy, insisted on being taughtdog. She’d place the letters in a carefulD-O-Grow and then scramble them before starting all over again.
Torin waved toward Jewel. “I think we need to celebrate. What would you say to a picnic?”
Ivy looked up, her pencil suspended. Her hazel eyes brightened with the particular light they got when something pleased her. “A picnic? Today?”
Torin had become embarrassingly attuned to noticing that expression. “The weather's fine. Warmest day we've had.” He leaned against the counter, trying to sound casual instead of eager—an effort complicated by the fact that hewaseager. “We’ll head over toward Hank’s house. There’s a clearing by the lake about halfway there. We can spread a blanket on the beach area right by the water. Good views of the mountain. The swans seem to favor it.”
“Pick-nick!” Jewel abandoned her letters and clapped her hands. “Pick-nick, pick-nick!”
“I’ll take that as a unanimous yes.” Torin allowed himself a small smile. He glanced at Ivy. “I’ll pack the food if you'll get Jewel ready. And bring whatever teaching materials you want. I know you—lessons happen everywhere.”
“Is that a complaint?” she teased.
“An observation.” He held up his hands. “Arespectfulobservation. I can hardly complain when your methods are so successful.”
They worked in the easy tandem that had developed over the weeks—a pattern of cooperation so natural that neither had remarked upon it. Although Torin, privately, was uncomfortably aware of how domestic their routine felt.
He wrapped cold chicken in a cloth, along with the last of the cheese. After cutting up half a loaf of bread and chopping apples into small pieces, both for Jewel and the swans, he filled a jar with water and packed three enamel cups. On impulse, he tucked in the remaining oatmeal cookies.
