“What’s the matter?” she asks as they walk together. He’s alone, which is odd. She didn’t anticipate being his first stop upon his return, and surely Lottie and Edmund would not want to leave his side after being apart for so long. “Where are your faithful companions?”
“Lottie would not be caught dead on a magical isle. She doesn’t believe in anything fun,” he says with a tired laugh. “And Edmund, well—it seems that he had not the patience to wait for my return. He’s moved on.”
She gasps so hard that she chokes on the air. “What? You two are no longer together?”
“So it seems. Though he lacked the decency to respond to my letters and tell me.” They turn toward the cottage together as she lightly rubs his back.
“I am sorry, August. That’s so unfair to you.”
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I suppose it was not my place to ask him to wait for me for months. It’s not easy to go that long without affection.”
“I beg to differ! I have gone nearly five years without affection and I am perfectly fine. Edmund made a promise, and time does not give him permission to break it.”
“I suppose that’s true,” he says solemnly before furrowing his brow. “Wait, did you say five years? What happened five years ago?”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to pry?” she says quickly as she opens the door to the cottage and rushes inside.
Following her, he says, “She tried, but that is not in my nature. Prying is my strongest talent.”
The door closes behind him and he takes a seat at the table, looking up at her through his thick lashes. “Who broke your heart?”
Sighing, Marigold sits across from him. The breeze from the kitchen window tickles the back of her neck as she brings her hair to the side and fidgets with the ends. “There were a few small heartbreaks when I was young. A girl who never responded to my terribly written love letters, a boy who threw away my sad attempt at a portrait of him. But the real heartbreak, the one that felt like a knife wound, was George. He was my first and only love.”
It feels strange to call it love now. It was hardly so grand—it was merely someone else giving her permission to love herself, and then trying to take that away.
“What made you love him?”
“Upon reflection,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear, “I am certain it was less about him and more about enjoying the feeling of being chosen by someone who I thought was better than me. I was infamously strange back home, you see, and he seemed to like that. For a short time, at least. But then he proposed to another girl in front of me right before I came here.”
He takes her hand and gives her a sympathetic look. “Was she pretty?”
“Gorgeous.”
He scoffs. “That’s the worst.”
Laughing, she says, “It’s perfectly fine. Heartbreak is not always bad. It led me to my purpose here.”
“Well, maybe you can help me find some purpose throughthis heartbreak of my own. I worry that it will take me a lifetime to heal from losing Edmund unless there’s a spell to fix that.”
“A spell to mend a broken heart,” she says knowingly, and he nods. She flips through her grimoire quickly, though she is nearly certain she remembers the spell perfectly. She had just read it yesterday.
“Give me a few moments and I’ll have it ready for you. And again, I’m so sorry to see you like this. I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling.”
He smiles and shrugs. “Even with a broken heart, I still would rather feel this loss than never have had the love at all.”
She flinches, suddenly wobbling under the weight of her curse. She shakes it off and says, “Ah, so you’re a hopeless romantic, then?”
“I’m certainly a romantic, and at this time, I do feel quite hopeless,” he says with a laugh as he pushes his curly black hair off his forehead.
“Well, I can fix the hopeless part, but I do hope you keep your romanticism.” She smiles and starts gathering tools and ingredients.
“Can I help you at all?” He rolls up his blue linen sleeves.
She almost shakes her head before glaring up at the top shelf. That shelf is her nemesis. No shelf has any business being that high. “Could you grab that jar of blue hyacinth petals there for me?”
He barely has to stretch to reach the jar. He hands it to her and returns to his position at the table.
“You’re a peach,” she says as she sprinkles the petals into her bowl. She grabs black sage honey, orange peels, lavender essence, and the last of her moon water, mixing everything with a hard stone grinder. August laughs softly behind her, and she turns to find him crouched beneath the kitchen table.
