I could leave at any time.
I sit at the end of my bed and stare down at the image of Oak. The portrait is done, the book cover in his hands now sketched in, but still I find myself shading in the trees around his face, adding tiny fireflies in the background. I keep my pencil always pressed to the paper, wearing it down, trying to understand what happened. What changed in his eyes.
But there are no answers in the gray pencil marks.
Archer has fallen asleep in the old armchair beside the unlit fireplace, his chin tipped back, mouth open, snoring gently—he sleeps only in short bursts now, jerking awake at the tiniest sound. Quietly I open the front door and step out onto the porch, needing the fresh air, but alsohoping… hoping I’ll see Oak striding up the road, a book in his hand.
Regret in his eyes.
I sink into the old porch swing, my mind churning over every second we spent together, trying to unearth some clue, discover a piece I might have missed. A reason to explain why my heart stings every time I think of him. And why his heart doesn’t seem to feel a thing.
After an hour, the air turning windy and cool, a shadow comes into view out on the road….
I flinch upright.
But when I narrow my gaze through the dim light, I can tell—it’s not Oak.
Mrs. Thierry ambles to a stop at the end of our driveway, her dog, Peebles—a massive Great Dane—tugging at the end of a leash. She lives a half mile up the road in a two-story, Victorian-style home half-shrouded in vines and blackberry bushes that she refuses to cut back. She glares up the driveway, the evening light—shades of orange and raspberry ice cream—melting into the trees behind her, and she looks as if she’s casting some malediction, damning those who live in this house with an evil scourge.
But we’re already the damned.
She mumbles something, spits onto our driveway, then inclines her head so her shaky voice will carry. “You’ll curse us all with those flowers.” Her words are sandpaper and gravel. “Just like old, nasty Fern Goode did the day he moved here.” Mrs. Thierry knows the history of my family as well as anyone, because she’s older than most, and meaner. I also suspect many of the rumors about my family began with her: she loves a good gossip, a tall tale, and I can imagine the stories forming behind her gray eyes. “You’re stirring up things you shouldn’t, letting locals carry around those tulips.”
“They stole them,” I shout back, pointlessly, because maybe it doesn’t matter how they got them, only that the tulips will indeed stir up old, bad magic.
She and I stare at each other for a long moment—knowing that she wants the same thing as me: for the Goodes to leave this townand never come back. But at last she clicks her tongue and turns away, wobbling on up the road. She has a tendency to sway dangerously far toward the center line, cars speeding past, honking. But she is a woman who not even death can touch; she is unshakable, a woman who will surely live far longer than any of us.
“What did Mrs. Thierry want?” Archer asks when I step back into the house. He’s awake, standing in the kitchen, his hand in a mason jar of homemade granola—given to him by a girl with strawberry-red hair and sad blue eyes who left it on our front porch a week ago.
“To remind us how doomed we are.”
He snorts, like he finds this funny, but then his expression drops, as if he knows how true it is, and he falls quiet.
Dark settles over the house, and I lie awake in bed, my heart feeling like shredded paper. I want to seehim, ask him what happened. But I also know it’s better left alone.
Better if I don’t see him again.
I should never have let myself get so close to him in the first place—his lips hovering against mine, soft and careful… but alsocareless. Needful and aching, the desire spinning upward in my chest like the lightning bugs flitting around us. Iwantedhim to kiss me, wanted all of it, wanted every second to shatter and burn apart like a storybook unraveling.
But all thiswantingmakes it impossible to push him away, to ease the twisting ache in the center of my ribs whenever I think of him.
I need to scrub him from my memory. I need to forget.
I need to leave.
A week flits by, and I keep telling myself thattomorrowis the day.
Tomorrow I’ll repack my suitcase, tell my brother goodbye, and walk until I reach the train station in town.
I promise myself that I’m staying only because my brother still seems on edge, because he’s worried someone else will sneak into the garden. And I don’t want to leave him alone.
I vow that by the next sunrise I’ll be long gone.
Still…
I watch the road. I feel a sense of waiting growing heavy against my rib cage.
But Oak doesn’t come to the house—he doesn’t leave books on my windowsill; he doesn’t stroll down Swamp Wells Road under the cover of night. My heart feels knotted and aching and unnatural—and I hate it.
