"Rhodes called me this afternoon. He wanted to let me know you were all right so I wouldn’t have to wait for news.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching Opal, who had recruited Hattie and Lila into the project and was directing them toplace a ceremonial stone, with the patient authority of someone accustomed to collaborators who needed instruction.
I didn't say anything, but I took her hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it. My brothers would have let her know, but it was still nice that he’d taken the time to do it himself.
“I’m worried for you.” Maggie’s mouth pinched.
“The boys will handle it. Rhodes will help.” She nodded, soothing a hand over my hair, but didn’t say anything. They’d do their best, but we knew that things happened in life … accidents, crazy people. Every day should be hugged tight and savored.
"It's perfect," Lila was saying to Opal.
"Obviously," Opal agreed, and wiped her hands on her jeans in the exact way her father had done at the greenhouse, the same gesture, the same unconscious economy of motion. I felt it move through me like a tuning fork finding a frequency it already knew.
Rhodes crossed the lawn in the way he moved everywhere — measured, unhurried, his gaze doing its sweep before settling. It touched on me just for a moment before he came to a stop a few feet from Opal's kingdom, looking down at it with an expression that went unguarded in the way it always did when it was just her, the unlocked version of him.
“Tell me about your house?” he asked with a quirk of his lips, crouching to Opal's level.
“This one is for Jessamina. She's a princess. That’s lavender." She pointed at each element with professional precision. "Sage said it helps with love.”
He looked up and found me over his daughter's head, and the look lasted exactly one beat longer than informational. "Smart," he said.
"I know," Opal said. “I’m building another one over here for Princess Dewdrop,” she sighed exasperatedly, “I have to get busy. Lots of work to do.”
“Of course.” He held up both hands. “Sorry to bother you.”
She hustled back to work, bossing Lila and Hattie around again, while Rhodes stood and moved toward the wall, stopping beside me with the ease of a man who had decided where he was going and saw no reason to make it complicated, close enough that his arm pressed against mine. He looked out at the grounds the way I’d been looking at them, the oak trees and the last of the light turning copper at the property's edge.
“Maggie, I’m looking forward to dinner, but I think you and the others made enough food for the entire county. Nobody is going to starve, that’s for sure.”
“You haven’t seen how much food the Holts can eat yet,” she teased. “You better take care of my girl,” she said, pressing a brief, warm hand to his forearm as she passed.
Rhodes watched her retreating figure with an expression I recognized. It was the look people got the first time in the radius of everything Holt. "She's something," he said, quiet enough that it was just for me.
"She's everything," I said. “We are so lucky to have her.”
Opal had abandoned Jessamin’s kingdom in favor of chasing Hattie across the lawn, both of them shrieking about something that had devolved from faeries into a game with rules I couldn'tfollow from here. Lila had drifted toward the greenhouse with her mug and her particular quality of being exactly present enough without crowding anyone. It was just me and Rhodes on the wall with the last of the April light going gold and the sounds of my family filling the house behind us.
"Thanks,” I said. "For today. For coming. For—" It was an inadequate attempt, but the only one I had.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I know. I'm doing it anyway." He had dropped whatever he was doing to help me. Maybe he thought I was spoiled being around the Holt clan, but I wasn’t stupid. Not all men were like my brothers. A lot of them either weren’t good people or they were selfish. Rhodes was neither of those.
He looked at me with the grey eyes that I had privately thought a great deal about since the first time I'd been close enough to see the depth of them, and something in the look was careful and unhurried and very much not the look of a man who was thinking about professional arrangements or greenhouse plans.
"Dinner's in twenty minutes," Phiny's voice carried from the kitchen doorway, cheerful and deliberate and timed with what I could only describe as surgical precision. "Sage, Maggie says, wash your hands, you've been touching dirt."
"I'm always touching dirt," I called back.
"That's why she said it!"
Rhodes made a low sound in his chest that took me a moment to recognize as a laugh.
"Come on,” I said, standing from the wall and brushing the stone dust from the back of my jeans. “Mags made you dinner. The least you can do is eat it."
He stood, and for just a moment we were close as we had been in the office, and his hand lifted to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear with the same careful, deliberate touch he had used, as if he'd been waiting for another excuse and had found one.
“Jessamina’s kingdom is lopsided," he said, nonsensically.
"Don't tell Opal that."
