My knees nearly give out—maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that she knows about Oak. Mrs. Thierry knows nearly everything that happens in this town. Stolen kisses and secret lovers. Girls who run away and promise never to return.
“He’s notmyboy,” I reply.
Mrs. Thierry cackles, drawing her thin lips against her coffee-stained teeth. “?’Course he is. He walks by your house nearly every evening, slows at the end of your driveway, then keeps going.Even a fool can see the broken heart inside that boy’s chest.”
What about my broken heart?I want to scream. What about the sharp edges left behind, the scraps rattling around beneath my ribs? Can she see that? See the blood spilling from my wounds?
“That boy is walking around looking for something he’s lost,” she adds, raising an eyebrow at me.
I glance up the road, toward the county line—in the direction of a home belonging to a boy with sad green eyes and too many lies on his tongue.
Mrs. Thierry watches me like she’s calculating something, trying to see all my damaged insides. “It’s good you’re leaving—it’s time,” she says. And I wonder if she’s ever tried to leave Cutwater, if she’s longed for a different life. “I fell in love with a Goode once,” she says, nodding slowly. “Your great-uncle, Albert Goode. And still… when I look at that house”—she nods behind me—“my heart feels bruised in places that refuse to heal. Your family has never been any good at love. You manage to ruin it for yourselves and everyone around you. Nothing to be done for it.”
I sway a little on my feet. I never knew about Mrs. Thierry and my great-uncle Albert, who I have no memory of. But maybe this is why she wobbles past our house each day, looking like a woman who has been wronged by our family. She made the ill-fated mistake of falling in love with a Goode.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because it’s all I can offer. “I’m sorry my family has taken so much from so many people.”It’s taken everything from me,I think.
Lips pulled in, she squints at me. “Your family is cursed deeper than the soil that grows those wretched flowers—they’re curseddown to the bone.” She tips her eyes closer to me. “Get yourself as far away from this house, this town, as you can.” She turns toward the horizon, the morning sun edging higher through the trees. “You know…” Mrs. Thierry looks back toward the Goode family home. “Locals used to toss coins and tokens into that creek that runs below your house. They feared it, but they also believed it held magic from long ago. That it granted wishes.” She makes a low grumble in the back of her throat. “It was an unlucky happenstance when your ancestor Fern Goode bought this swampy plot of land and built his house over that creek.” She grunts again, nodding toward the line of water meandering toward the house. “Yes, unlucky indeed. But some people are drawn toward bad luck—it calls to them, a hand reaching out for their throat. And your family has paid the price ever since.”
The weight of my whole life sinks into my stomach, and I peer up at the house where I was born. We have been jinxed by love: we chase it, run from it, wish we’d never known it at all. We are tangled up in it—and it always leaves us wounded and alone.
Makes us bitter. Makes us monsters.
But it has tormented this town, too. Those who’ve had the bad luck to call Cutwater home. It has taken pieces of their hearts, ripped from their chests and never given back. Mrs. Thierry has suffered; she is a woman with memories of a man who took her heart but never loved her in return.
And I see her now—I see the sadness held at the edge of her frown. I see what we have done to her.
The tulips. The Goodes. This creek and the swamp.
All of it is to blame.
“You say people always come back to Cutwater after they leave,”I say through my teeth, turning back toward the house. “But not me. When I leave, I’m leaving for good.”
“Curses and folktales are for the Old World, not for this one,” Grandma Georgie used to say when she was still alive, her eyes shimmering like a campfire in the dark. I remember very few things about her: the jingle of her cheap chandelier earrings, the burst of her laugh like a bubble popping in the air, and how she didn’t believe the tulips granted us any enchantment—no unusual attraction, no charm that made us irresistible.
“If there was any magic in those tulips when Fern Goode brought them over the Atlantic, it’s long gone by now.”
She was a skeptic. She thought our family was foolish to tell such stories now, to talk about the tulips as if they had any power over us. And yet Grandma Georgie found herself entangled in more passionate romps and romances than Archer.
She was known to seduce even the hardiest of men in this town, the ones who seemed so sure-footed that no woman could ever pull them astray. But Grandma Georgie was a rarity, a woman who cared not for the consequences of infidelity—she lived with her heart held out in front of her for all to see. A woman who ran toward love with her arms wide open, bellowing with laughter the whole way.
I envy her—even if she was a little mad, a little too far off center to know what was good for her.
But as I stand at my bedroom window, watching the last of the sunset streak pink and golden over the garden, thinking of only one thing—one person—I no longer know what’s true or right or good.
Goode.
I should feel relief, knowing that my freedom is so close. But instead I feel only regret… for everything I’ve left unsaid.
If I could go back. All the way to the beginning. I’d tell myselfnotto fall for him, so recklessly, wildly. I’d tell myself he is no one at all. Not worth staying for, not worth sketching, not worth remembering.
I’d tell myself these lies.
To save myself from this pain.
I close my suitcase and drag it out into the living room, placing it beside the front door.
Thunder tumbles across the sky in the distance, a storm that may reach us or pass us by. I scan the house, taking in the details one last time—old, sagging couch, wood coffee table with candle wax burned into the surface, a rug that should have been tossed out long ago—when Archer appears from the hall. We stare at each other, both of us unsure what to say, but then he crosses the room and wraps his arms around me. I can’t remember the last time my brother and I hugged, and the tears leak from my eyes to his shoulder. He smells like the tulips—a scent that is born into our blood.
