She studied the navigation and the road until they came on the right-hand turn that would narrow into Agatha’s lane. Edie made it and then stopped and put the car in park. “What’s our plan?”
“Knock?”
“After that?”
“After that, we tell her who we are,” Cosima said.
Edie thumbed the gearshift, looking out at the darkening twilight.
Telling Agatha who they were sounded harder than an introduction. In the same way the landscape was starting to look formless, there was a way Ediefeltformless. Who was she now?She wasn’t the same person who’d checked in with Morag the first day she arrived, wet, oversharing, and sad. She was in love. She knew that Cosima was it for her, no matter what happened—and given that their future together was the definition of uncertain, this told her that the heartbreak of Fauxmage hadn’t broken her.
Maybe heartbreak could teach someone to risk more, not less, because of how much it was possible to learn about love every time a heart started to heal.
“Tell me who you are,” Edie said.
Cosima turned to the side, her long legs folded awkwardly in the small seat. She was so beautiful in the blue-purple light. “I forgot to ask myself who I was,” she said. “I ran away. I shut myself up in my room at the inn and turned into primordial ooze. I slept, and when I woke up, I knew I was hungry. I ate, and then I knew I wanted to soak in the hot bath. I drank Morag’s juice and decided I’d like to read a book. When you came to my door and asked me to take a walk with you, I did, because I discovered I wanted to.”
“Youonlyever do what you want to do.”
“That started when I came here.” Cosima looked out the windshield at the cottage. “I needed to find her. Find me. It made sense to start from ooze and do only what I wanted, one thing at a time.”
“You were following the clues.”
Cosima turned back toward Edie in time to catch her smile and return it. “I was following the clues. I started with my body’s clues, then I followed my mother’s clues, and now we’re following our clues, which are Agatha’s clues.”
“Did you find her? Did you find Cosima?”
She clasped her hands in her lap and leaned closer, her eyebrows lifting into an elegant configuration that promised Edie,I’m going to tell you a secret.“When you were pulling tacks out of the lounge, I was in the garden. I wanted to clear out a pile of leaves that were mounded over some marginal plants by the pond. I uncovered a glorious border of hostas—they’d died back over the winter, but I could see the potential. I wanted to cut back last year’s leaves that had frozen and rotted to give the new shoots an easier time of it, and so I could get a better look, and that was when I discovered an enormous infestation of slugs.”
“I hate that you said ‘enormous’ so close to the word ‘slugs.’ It makes my hindbrain shudder.”
Cosima gave her a broad grin. “I picked them off one by one, slime trails thick as mozzarella pulling from a slice of pizza. I was merciless, Edie. I gave those slugs no quarter, and as I was doing that, my fingers frozen and stinging, slime all over me, I thought,There you are, Cosima. There you are.”
“I love that your self-discovery story could double as a villain origin story. It’s hot in a way that’s just wrong enough.”
Cosima laughed. “I’m a gardener. And because I’m also Phoebe Frank’s daughter, this means I love everything about it, even the disgusting parts. It means I want to make devastatingly ambitious gardens. I want roses named after me and for people to be jealous. I want to know everything and be someone who gets name-dropped. That’s who I am. I love the Castle’s garden, but it feels like it was my sandbox.”
Edie rubbed her hand over her chest. Her heart felt overfull. “Do you want to know who I am?”
“More than anything.”
“Who I am, I think, is someone who’s not ready to give up on having a legacy.”
“I never thought you were, or ever would be.”
But then Cosima went quiet. Edie held her breath, becauseshe could tell Cosima was thinking, and she wanted to know what she had to say.
“Okay. Here is what I want to tell you,” Cosima said. “Next time, you can’t do it by yourself. Phoebe surrounded herself with people. PFS has thousands of employees. But at the end of the day, she didn’t have anyone to give her legacy to but me. I think legacy has to be a group project.”
Edie nodded. She couldn’t say aloud what her heart wanted.
“Let’s drive to the end of this lane, Edie.”
She put the car in gear, and they drove down the narrowing lane until it turned to gravel and wound around an enormous oak not unlike the one in the field in Harlaxton. As soon as they cleared the shadows of the oak tree, a low-roofed stone cottage came into view, sitting on its own with nothing but grass and scattered rocks around it. There were lights on inside. “One Tree Cottage,” Edie said.
“Very apt. Whoever’s inside must know they have visitors. You should park.”
They hadn’t even gotten out of the car when the Dutch door to the cottage opened and a woman stepped out. She was short, thin, but her posture was ramrod straight, and Edie could see her lean muscles where the sleeves of her chambray shirt were pushed up. She wore a knitted vest and loose pants with wellies. Her hair was cut in a short style reminiscent of an old movie star like Cary Grant. She wore dark-framed glasses. An enormous dog sat at her feet, its huge, square head looking up at her, obviously waiting for her instructions regarding whether or not to eat them.
