“My best friend loved this place,” I found myself saying. He inclined his head, as if to listen better.
“I think I told you a little about her already. Her name was Harriett.”Was.Such a small word, full of so much history and heartbreak. It felt like an anchor that weighed me down under an ocean of grief. “She was my person. We met freshman year of college in a study group. We bonded over a documentary about this place.”
“‘The Garden of Great Heights,’” he said, recalling the name of it. “I remember when PBS asked to tape that. I was eleven, I think? The crew was here all summer.”
I think, in one of the B-roll shots, I remembered a coppery-headed boy running around in the documentary, extolling every secret with this exuberant glee, and that filled me with a sort of nostalgia I didn’t think I could feel anymore. How strange it was to realize that the world was so much smaller than you thought as a kid. “I loved that documentary. I watched it all the time. My mom was a travel nurse, so I never really stayed long in one place. I never really made friends. Not until I met Harrie in college—I’d never met anyone like her before. She was magical. My polar opposite. Smart, driven, incredibly organized. I think I would’ve lost my headyearsago without her,” I added with a laugh. “I certainly wouldn’t have survived college if she hadn’t kept a leash on my drunk ass.”
“You sound like Oliver,” he lamented. “He wouldn’t have graduated if it weren’t for me.”
“And I’m sure he thanks you every day for it.”
A bittersweet smile spread across his mouth. “We can’t all be perfect.”
“Harrie was. Even when she wasn’t,” I added, “she was.”
Because she refused to fail, and when she did she would say she was justlearning. You never failed if you never gave up, or at least that was her motto. I think that was what felt so tragic about it all—the last year and a half of failure after failure after failure as her body gave up against her will.
I looked up at the sky. It was blue and cloudless. For months, I hated these kinds of skies. Because how could it look so beautiful and so azure and sowideon a day when my best friend had died? It should have been raining. It should have stormed.
Then, I thought, I wouldn’t miss her half as much on the pretty days.
“She died about eleven months ago,” I said. “And I just . . . I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Everyone is beginning to move on. Her fiancé is engaged again. Her dream house sold to a lovely little family with a toddler and a dog. Her books were given to the local library, her manuscript put into a drawer. And here I am, just … standing still. Afraid. The only time we visited here together, we made a promise to come back to Lilymoor in ten years. She’d bring her kids. I’d bring my succulents or whatever. This is that tenth year, and I’m here and …” I pursed my lips to keep them from wobbling. “It’s not fair, you know? What mademelucky enough to be healthy and alive? I feel like I cheated, even though I know there was no way I could. I just … I feel like any good thing I do, or feel, or achieve, I don’t deserve.”
There it was. The deep, terrible truth. I was a coward. I really was.
I squeezed my eyes closed, waiting for his judgment, forhim to tell me that I was silly, and selfish and guilt ridden and broken—all things that I knew to be true, anyway, but would have been shattering coming from him. But as I braced for his words, I didn’t expect the feeling of his fingers lacing through mine instead.
In surprise, I looked down at our joined hands.
Tears filled my eyes, and I blinked rapidly to keep them at bay.
“But . . . kissing you made me feel selfish,” I went on. “Kissing you meant that I was doing something for myself and I’m very bad at doing things for myself. Kissing you—wantingto kiss you—means that I’m a different person than the one Harrie knew when she was alive. It meant that I am still changing, that I am now the SophieafterHarrie, and what if I keep changing and keep changing, so much that I become someone Harrie wouldn’t recognize? Then who is left to show that Harrie was alive? That she left a mark? That she—that she washere?” I blinked the hot tears out of my eyes and then rubbed them away with the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I’m a coward. I like you very much, Cyrus, and I’m afraid that I do.”
“If you’re a coward, then so am I,” he said quietly, like a secret. “I came back to Lilymoor because I thought I was wanted again, but then . . . I said some unforgivable things, and I went to go take a call, but my reception dropped and I was . . . too much of a coward to go back out and face what I’d said. So I stayed here. I guess I fell asleep.”
“I wish we were switched,” I said, blinking back the burning sensation in my eyes. “Youwantto move on. I just want to stay here. If time froze for me I’d be happy.”
He gently reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, cupping my cheek in his warm hand. “Your visits make it easier.”
My mouth wobbled. “Why do you say all the right things?”
“Talent,” he replied, and I croaked a laugh. He wiped the tears out of the edges of my eyes, then pulled me into a hug. His arms were strong, and his body was warm, smelling of lavender and honey and loose soil. As if he was made just for me, and how terrible that he was. “I’m glad it was you who walked through that door,” he whispered. “I’m glad it was you.”
And in those words, I heard a permission I hadn’t given myself in a very long time—to be messy and awful and un-done. To be human. To be hurting.
To be alive.
32
þetta reddast
August came in a roar of sunshine, counting down the days before Lilymoor’s bicentennial.
In the mornings, Wykofski would help me water all of the gardens—since they were almost all open now, it was a much larger chore than it used to be—and then in the afternoons I’d tend to the rampant honeysuckle vines, which I hadfinallyfound were originating from the Central Garden, and landscape a little, until the blue door showed itself, and then I’d slip into the sun-drenched Someday Garden, and sow seeds and lace willow branches into shin-high living fences, and dance around Cyrus and my own feelings. If I pretended they didn’t exist, maybe they wouldn’t.
I brought strawberries for snacks, and we laughed and chatted about our childhoods, and Henry’s grand plans for the gardens. We tried to guess where this garden was in real life, and every day I’d go hunting in that spot for its real location, but I never found it. I did discover quite a few secret corridors, now overgrown, that were shortcuts to different areas of the garden, and I figured this was how the goose got around so quickly.
“Damnit is conniving,” Rus agreed. “I remember when she first came to the manor. She chased Oliver right into the Reservoir.”
