She doesn’t answer right away, just reaches out and sets her hand on mine, fingers warm and steady. She doesn’t squeeze. She doesn’t speak. She just leaves it there.
I don’t pull away.
I should. I know that. The council’s watching. The Hollow is listening. If I let her in, it won’t be quiet. It won’t be easy. It’ll cost something. It always does.
But when she looks at me like this, when her voice finds the parts of me that haven’t been spoken to in years, I think… maybe she could stay.
Maybe I want her to.
CHAPTER 9
KRISTA
The kitchen smells like apples and dust and the faint lingering trace of last night’s candlewax. The table is littered with watercolor paper, bits of crayon wrappers, and Mari’s current artistic masterpiece; one she won’t let me look at yet. She’s got that determined tilt to her head, tongue caught between her teeth like the concentration is leaking out through her mouth, and the tip of her brush is loaded with a suspicious amount of glitter paint.
“Almost done,” she says, without glancing up. “Don’t peek.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, even though I’m dying to.
The morning is slow and heavy, wrapped in a kind of quiet that feels borrowed, like it’s letting me rest just a little before it asks for something harder. The fog never really lifted today. It just pulled back enough to give the trees their shape again. There’s a hush in the leaves outside, like even the wind’s trying not to interrupt.
I sip my tea. The grimoire sits open on the far end of the table, nestled beside a stack of scrap parchment and a few dried flowers I’ve been experimenting with. I’m not supposed to be reading it this much.
I know that.
Delphina said once that magic needs space to breathe, that if you try to shove too much of it into your skin too fast, it’ll push back. But I keep going back to it anyway. Not for the big spells—not yet—but for the margins. For the notes Johanna scribbled in between the lines.
Things likedon’t forget to bless the bread knifeandrose petals work better when you sing to them first. She wrote like she was talking to someone she trusted. It feels like being spoken to. And it feels like someone’s listening when I read it.
“Okay. Ready,” Mari says suddenly, standing with both hands behind her back and cheeks flushed like she’s holding a secret made of starlight.
She holds out the paper with a dramatic little bow.
I take it carefully, and my heart does something strange as soon as I see it.
It’s a picture of the three of us—me, Mari, and Hardin—drawn in that soft, smudgy way only six-year-old hands can manage, with big heads and tiny bodies and giant eyes. We’re standing in front of the cottage, and there are pink hearts floating all around us like bubbles. Mari is holding both our hands. My hair is a mass of looping curls. Hardin’s tusks are… aggressive. But there’s a sweetness to it that knocks the breath out of me a little.
“Mari,” I whisper, fingers tightening on the page.
“You like it?”
“I love it,” I say. And I do. But I also feel like the ground just shifted under my bare feet.
She grins. “I think he likes you.”
“Hardin?”
“Yeah. He watches you like your face might change when he blinks.”
I laugh, a little too sharp. “He watches everything.”
“No. He watchesyoudifferently.”
She says it like it’s obvious. Like it’s settled.
Later,after I’ve cleaned up the paint water and set Mari up with her worn stack of fairy books on the porch swing, I return to the grimoire. My fingers find the page without trying, flipping to a charm I’ve read three times and never dared to speak aloud.
Small Affections
