"It has." Iris's voice is quiet. "More than I expected."
The lavender sways around us, waist-high and warm, and the light is doing something ridiculous to her face—turning her gold at the edges, softening all that careful precision until she looks like someone out of one of Grand-mère's stories.
"You look good in this light," I tell her, because apparently I've lost the ability to keep my mouth shut. "Like—I don't know. Like a dream somebody had about a woman in a lavender field."
Iris huffs a laugh, but her cheeks go pink. "That's very poetic, for someone who threatened me with a courgette this afternoon."
"I have layers."
And my heart's doing something inconvenient about the pink in her cheeks, and I don't trust myself to keep standing here saying words likedream, so I do what I always do when a feeling gets too big for me—I find something to do with my hands.
I snap off a stem of lavender and hold it up between us like a wand.
"Grand-mère's rules," I say. "She used to swear that if you write your dreams big enough across the sky, the sky can't help but hand them back to you. You just have to mean it."
Iris eyes the stem. "You want me to write. In the air."
"I want you to write in the air like youmeanit. Big. None of that tasteful little corporate cursive." I sweep the lavender up over my head and drag it across the deepening blue in huge, looping letters. "There. Done. Life-changing wish, cast."
"What did you wish for?"
"A dishwasher that works and one harvest where the tractor doesn't die on me. I'm a woman of vision."
She laughs—really laughs, the surprised kind she keeps trying not to let out—and it goes straight through me.
"Your turn." I pluck another stem and hold it out. "And no fair wishing for good Wi-Fi."
She takes it like it might bite. Lifts it. Hesitates.
"Bigger," I tell her.
"I'm doing it my way."
"Your way is wrong, that's the—"
But she's already lifting her arm, writing something slow and deliberate across the first stars, and I don't catch the whole word, because I'm too busy watching her do it—watching the woman who color-codes her sock drawer paint a secret into the sky.
"What was that?" I ask.
"You'll never know."
"Iris."
"The sky knows." She tips her chin up, insufferably pleased with herself. "That's the whole point. You said so."
So we write our way out of the field—her wishing things she won't tell me, me wishing things I definitely can't—tracing nonsense and secrets across the dark, bumping shoulders, arguing about penmanship, laughing at nothing the way you only do when the nothing is quietly everything.
By the time we reach the terrace, the stem in my fist is a crushed, fragrant ruin, and Iris is flushed and grinning and looks nothing like the woman who crossed her arms at me a week ago.
"Thank you," she says, suddenly quiet. "I don't—do this. Any of it." She turns the broken lavender over in her fingers. "So. Thank you."
"Anytime, Beaumont-Clark."
She goes in first. I stay out a while, listening to the old house settle around her, watching the light bloom gold in her window.
I pour myself a glass of wine and drink it on the terrace, where the last of the light is bleeding out of the sky and the first stars are coming through. The lavender's a dark sea now, purple-grey in the twilight, and somewhere out past the fields an owl keeps asking the same question over and over.
I've still got my stem of lavender, crushed to almost nothing between my fingers. I lift it and write one more word across the dark—the one I wouldn't let myself write in front of her—big, and like I mean it. Then I lower my arm, feel like an idiot, and don't regret it even a little.
