She tapped a highlighted line. “Therewasa mention of a Barker baby in a census,” she said. “But here’s the kicker ... it’s not listed under Alma, but herbrother.”
My face scrunched. “Her brother had a secret baby?”
“Maybe,” she said. “This mystery baby appears out of nowhere, but again ... no mother and no birth record that I can find. So either he had a kid out of wedlock and we haven’t found the right records or ... something else happened that we haven’t put together yet. It’s thin, but it’s ... weird.”
“Everything about this town is weird,” I muttered, scanning the photocopy. The black-and-white type blurred a little. “So the Lady wasn’t the only one with secrets.”
“Apparently not.” Selene sighed. “It’s probably nothing. Or everything. I don’t know yet.”
It pinged something uneasy and electric in my chest—lines on a family tree we still didn’t understand, legacies of shame and bad luck echoing forward.
Hayes. The curse. The farmhand’s face.
I shook it off, scribbled a note in the margin, and promised I’d look again at the photos later. Ghosts could wait.
Real life—with a very-much-alive man at the front of the store—was calling. I hugged Selene and playfully flipped the end of Winnie’s braid.
When I stepped back into the main room, I spotted him instantly.
Wes sat on a plush couch near a low shelf of oversize books, shoulders relaxed, glasses on. The frames had slid a little down his nose while he thumbed through a coffee-table book full of stormy landscapes and blurred, beautiful brides in long trains.
His thumb dragged slowly down the edge of a page, brows drawn in that intent way that meant he was actually interested, not just pretending. The sight of him—big, solid, a little rumpled from the day, wearing his reading glasses in my favorite place—made me fall even harder for him.
He glanced up as I neared and gave a small, crooked smile that hit me right in the knees. “They’ve got half your shot list in here,” he said, nodding at the open spread. “Look.”
He shifted sideways on the battered leather couch so I could sit, giving me that familiar little pocket of space that had somehow become mine without either of us agreeing to it. I sank down beside him and leaned in.
The photo he’d stopped on was a bride framed in a barn doorway—snow falling in a soft blur, twinkle lights behind her, the hem of her dress dusted in white.
“Okay, that’s rude,” I said. “That’s exactly what I saw in my head. Down to the weirdly impractical no-coat thing.”
“I thought so,” he said. “See the way the light’s behind her? You could fake that with your fairy lights and a couple of heaters. Just don’t let Cal plug everything into one outlet or he’ll blow half the county.”
I laughed. “Noted. Divide and conquer the power strip.”
We flipped to another page. This one was all golden fields and storm skies, the kind of moody drama Elodie secretly loved.
“I want the farm shoot to feel like this,” I said, tapping a photo where the bride looked like she was about to walk into a hurricane and grin her way through it.
“Then it will,” he said, like weather and budgets and logistics weren’t a thing. “You’ll have the barn, the inn, all those trees. It’ll look better than this by the time you’re done with it.”
The certainty in his voice did that thing to my chest again, like someone was slowly turning a crank and stretching it wider. He didn’t sayif. He didn’t saytry. He said it confidently like it was a fact.
I shifted, turning so my knee bumped his thigh, the book balanced across both our laps. “Someday I’d love a space that looks like this,” I heard myself say. “Big windows, white walls, racks of dresses. A corner for lookbooks. A storage area where I pretend I don’t shove everything into one closet before clients come over.”
“You need a studio,” he said.
“Yeah.” My cheeks heated, like I’d said something outlandish instead of the most basic creative dream. “Somewhere that’s all mine. Not somebody’s garage or borrowed barn. I won’t always be in front of the camera.”
He watched me for a beat, eyes softer behind the black frames. “You’ll have it,” he said simply.
The words landed like a stone dropped into deep water—small and quiet at the surface, ripples spreading everywhere underneath.
You’ll have it.
He didn’t try to temper it or joke it away. Just set it between us like a promise he didn’t even realize he was making.
Ridiculous questions pressed at the back of my throat.Will you be there? Will you help me pick paint colors? Will you build impractical storage cabinets and complain about them the whole time?
