“I don’t envy you,” said a familiar voice from the path.
I glanced back to find Oliver, having returned from wherever he always disappeared to. Today he wore a dark T-shirt,jeans, and those same dirty white sneakers. His hair was a messy mop of blond that he kept raking back with his fingers to keep it out of his eyes.
I sat back on my heels and said, “Would you want to help?”
He scrunched his nose and held up his hands. “Withthesecity hands?”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s a way to fix that.”
“Working? Gross.”
“I was going to say gloves.”
“Ah.”
I pulled up two more waterlogged flowers.
“You know,” he went on, putting his hands in his pockets, “maybe the water’s coming from the other side of the wall.”
“No, Eula said there wasn’t anything over there.”
His brows furrowed. “Of course not. She doesn’t want to think about the greenhouse.”
I dropped the limp flowers and stood. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me she hasn’t told you about it.”
“I mean—Iknowabout the greenhouse.” I abandoned my kneeling pad and hand shovel and moved back through the garden to the path, taking out my phone. I pulled up a map of the garden and zoomed in on where we were. “I just didn’t think it was so close to the other gardens, especially since it was the only thing that caught fire. See? It’s not here.”
He met me at the edge of the path and leaned over to look at the map. “Yeah, that was one of the weird things. I think you can see a little of the charred wall at the back of the Willow Grove, but that’s it. The greenhouse was here,” he added, taking two long fingers and magnifying the map to show me.
On the map, it was simply a space of green, and if he hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have thought twice.
After all, Eulahadsaid nothing was there. Though I remembered the tightness in her voice when she said it. Recognized deep in my bones the avoidance it signified.
“The water’s coming from there,” I murmured, surer than ever.
Henry’s greenhouse.
Cyrus had said that the secret garden had something to do with him. It seemed impossible, but what if the leak was supposed to lead me there?
“Thank you, Oliver, this is perfect,” I said as I looked up from my phone and into his soft brown eyes. He was so close, I could count the specks of gold in them. His eyelashes were long, and there was a beauty mark just below his left eye. Harriett would have scoffed and said that it couldn’t possibly be real and then fixated on it for months. She would have written poetry about it, like she had with Sanchez’s cowlick.
I wished she could’ve met Oliver. That I could’ve asked her what she thought about him, and if my chest just felt full and strange whenever he looked at me because I was infatuated with the attention or if I was really falling. She knew what love felt like. She opined about it.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever known.
“You’re surprising,” he murmured. “You care a lot about this place for someone only here for the summer.”
“I like being thorough.”
“Even if you won’t be here to see the results?”
“That’s always the gamble with a garden.”
“Do you care so much about every garden you tend?”
No, but he didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know how meaningful Lilymoor was to me. That it could trick me into thinking, for a moment, that Harrie was still here. Because for a split second I sometimes saw her out of the corner of my eye, and I could pretend that she was just around the next bend waiting for me. A ghost made of memories. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave quite yet.
