“Oh my,” Cora breathed when it reached her. “That poor girl.”
“So she really was pregnant,” Kit said softly. “She had a baby.”
“And then she comes back here, and there’s suddenly an engagement announcement with William Lovell,” Elodie murmured, eyes distant as she pieced it together. “No mention of a baby. No whisper. Just ... respectability.”
“An engagement to save face,” Helen said quietly. “To make it all go away. As if it ever does.”
The Lady of the Dunes had always been a story to me. A shiver. A warning. A ghost that haunted the shoreline and, supposedly, cursed my brother with bad luck and inconveniences and hearts that never quite healed right.
Right now, sitting in a circle of women with yarn in my lap and the smell of bergamot in the air, Alma Barker felt less like a ghost and more like a nineteen-year-old who had been terrified and in love and then forced to choose between her child and her reputation.
Selene flipped to another photocopy—the old engagement announcement we had already seen, brittle and yellowed.
“Do we know what happened to the child?” Harriet asked, voice low.
Selene shook her head. “Not yet. I checked for adoption records under Barker and Lovell in this county and the next two. Nothing that matches. Which doesn’t mean the baby disappeared. Things went unrecorded all the time, especially if someone wanted them quiet.”
“Or if the baby went to the father’s family,” Mom added. “Out of town. Out of sight.”
The farmhand’s face flared in my mind—the one in the old photograph, the one who looked unnervingly like Hayes if you squinted. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same stubborn tilt to his mouth.
“Has anyone considered ...” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The farmhand. The one who looks like Hayes. Could he be the father?”
Elodie let out a low whistle. “That would track for our luck. Our cursed ancestor knocked up a ghost.”
“She wasn’t a ghostyet,” Kit cut in, though her lips were pressed tight. “Maybe they were in love.”
“The point is,” Selene said, eyes back on the papers, “Alma had more at stake than anyone bothered to write down. She wasn’t just a girl. She was a mother. She had something huge to lose. That changes the way we look at her story. She wasn’t some vengeful sea witch or morose lover haunting a town for fun. She was someone who had her story taken away and rewritten by the men around her.”
The words settled heavy and sure.
My fingers tightened around my needles, the yarn cutting into the soft flesh of my palm. I thought of Alma, pregnant belly, sent away to another county so nobody would see. I thought of her labor recorded on a single sheet of paper, no father listed, then her return with a ring and a smile that probably didn’t reach her eyes.
A hidden pregnancy. A rushed engagement. A baby whose name no one bothered to say out loud in any of the records.
No wonder Alma couldn’t rest. She had never gotten to tell her own story. It had been written over her in ink and whispers.
My own broken engagement slid into that space, uninvited. Greg’s fingers clenched around mine at the fancy restaurants, the way his eyes would subtly slide over me as he looked for something better in the room. The way I had lied to everyone here for so long about how happy we were. I thought I was doing the best thing for the both of us.
Wes’s mouth on mine flickered across my mind, hot and immediate. His hand on my cheek. His groan in my throat. The way I had kept that kiss secret, too, tucking it into the same place in my chest where all the other unspoken things lived.
Secrets had weight. They clung. They warped the shape of a life.
I looked down at the uneven row of stitches between my fingers and exhaled slowly.
“Poor Alma,” I murmured. “Everyone else got to decide who she was.”
Selene’s gaze met mine over her knitting, sharp and knowing. “Not if we have anything to say about it,” she said.
The yarn slid a little easier through my fingers on the next stitch.
In an attempt to lighten the suddenly sullen mood, Kit bounced her knee, the giant eggplant wobbling obscenely in her lap. “Speaking of the living,” she said, eyes cutting to me, “what are you doing tonight?”
I blinked. “Uh ... knitting and staring at my ceiling?”
Mom clucked her tongue as her head shook. “Absolutely not. You are too young and too pretty to sit in that miserable house every night like a recluse.”
“It’s not miserable,” I protested automatically, then thought of his dented couch and winced. “It’s ... cozy adjacent.”
“Great,” Kit said. “You can tell yourself that after you come out to the Lantern tonight. Drinks, dancing, poor decisions.”
My stomach did a weird little flip. “The Lady’s Lantern?”
“Is there another bar in Star Harbor?” she deadpanned. “Come on, city girl. You can wear something slutty. I’ll even let you borrow my good lip gloss. We’ll shake off this depressing mood.”
Mom took a sip of her tea, eyes twinkling over the rim. “You should go, Clara. Get out. Let yourself have some fun.”
Heat crept up my neck, stupid and telling. “I’ll think about it,” I said, which in Darling translation was already a yes.
Kit grinned like she knew it. “Perfect. I’ll pick you up at eight.”
