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I got settled as he came up the other side, the wagon leaning toward him.

We rolled out of Willow Lane past a village pretending to sweep or weed their window boxes, my hair ribbons still flying from the sprite turret on my gutter, plus the flag of a very small hostile nation.

Nearly three miles down the road, he brought the wagon to a halt on the Old Bridge. The river ran loud under the planks. A person could stare over the rail if they needed a place to put their eyes, which he seemed to.

“The tea did the walking,” he said.

I turned. He directed his gaze to Turnip’s rump, where Ginger still perched.

“I went around your counter on the tea’s legs. That part I’d take back.” His jaw worked. “The manner of it is what needs to be addressed. I backed you into a wall with no warning and no asking. You should never have to wonder, in your own shop, what a male my size is going to do next. I’d take that back if it was possible. It isn’t. So I’m saying it.”

“Goran—”

“The manner,” he said slowly, “was the tea. The rest was already true. I need to make that plain as well.”

The river went on under us. A pair of melted-dog puddles from the storm still sat in the low field beyond the bridge, steaming. I stared at them like they were fascinating, because my chest had filled up with bees.

“That’s my apology,” he added. “You don’t have to do anything with it.”

“It was my tea,” I said. “My shop. My hands on that tin. You drank what I handed you, trusting me, and if we’re trading apologies, you need to know that mine’s bigger.”

“No.”

“Excuse me, it’s enormous. It’s the biggest apology this county’s ever seen.”

“You brewed me what I always ordered.” His hands stayed easy on the reins but his voice came down hard. “Your craft is straight all the way through, Rain Trevil. Nothing that happened at that wall was your doing except the standing there.”

“Three swallows of tea,” I said, when I could talk. “Burned off in no time, I’d guess. Ogre constitution.”

“That’s about right.”

“So everything after the third heartbeat…” I peeked at his profile. His horn-bases went gold, then deeper gold, the flush I was coming to enjoy too much.

He studied the road, overheated to the hairline.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s a long bridge. We’ll fit more on it another day.”

“Hm,” he said.

Over two years, I’d heard that sound as nothing, yet it had never once been nothing.

We arrived at his property, a stone cottage with a wide porch and a barn twice the size of the house. Fields spread around it, stubby after the harvest, running up the hill behind it. A creek lay along the bottom of the hill with a line of willows. Everything stood plumb and mended and appeared well cared for. Nothing on this land had ever been left to rub the wrong way.

He scooped me up off the bench and swept me down to the ground. My knees wobbled, and his arms tightened around me to hold me steady until I found my feet.

“House,” he said as he left me to heft a couple of crates onto his shoulders from the back of the wagon. He urged me toward the cottage.

The door was ogre-sized. The entire house was ogre-sized. The ceilings went up and up, the table could’ve seated a wedding, and the stove was big enough to take logs the length of my leg. Standing in his kitchen made me feel like a child again, in a world built for somebody much bigger than me.

I was bracing to spend a season on tiptoe when I started noticing what he’d done before I arrived.

A step stool rested by the counter. New wood, the corners rounded soft and sanded smooth. Built at a height that would put my hands level with his countertop when I stood on the second step.

A shelf had been placed on the right wall within my reach. Empty, it waited, the right depth for tea tins.

A hook had been tacked by the door, below and to the right of his coat hook, at my height for whatever I wanted to hang.

And in the walk-in pantry, on the shelf at my eye level, I found a jar of blackberry preserves. Mrs. Honeycake’s, with her wax seal. The same preserves I bought every market day and ate straight off the spoon, a habit I would’ve sworn no living soul had ever witnessed outside of Ginger.