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Karin brought the coffee. She had run out of pepparkakor, and so instead, she put down a plate of raspberry jam cookies. I held them out to Lilja, and she took one.

“They taste like summer,” she said after the first bite.

Alma poured coffee into the cups. “Karin makes all sorts of preserves. Strawberry, blueberry, blackcurrant.”

With my elbow, I poked Helena on my other side. “She might give you a lesson if you ask.”

Helena laughed. “Or I could just buy some jars down at the grocer.”

My uncle sipped his coffee, ignoring our banter the way he always did. “Miss Norling, are you from a farming family too?”

That was about all he knew about Helena—that she was from the country. Alma had told him she had left her village to look for work in town because her parents had too many mouths to feed. A perfectly believable story.

Lilja placed her cup on the saucer, and it seemed to me she took her time with it. “Not farming, no,” she said. “My father was a… he was an artisan of sorts too.”

“What kind?” I asked, and I heard the surprise in my own voice. She had told me she was from a place with no shops.

“He made many things,” Lilja said. “Jewelry, keys, boxes, locks, chests.”

“So a smith?” Alma asked.

Lilja ran the fringes of her mantle through her fingers. Her eyes were on her hand, her lashes dark against her cheeks. “In a way, yes.”

That was beyond peculiar. Why would her father make items when he had no shop?

“Did he sell his goods in a town?” I asked.

“No,” she said with a shake of her head and her eyes still downcast. “He… he kept it all.”

Alma jumped up from her chair. “I entirely forgot. I want to show you something I got in Stockholm.”

She left and returned a moment later with a terracotta pot with a plant. It had the dark, glossy leaves and thorns of a rose. “I want to plant it outside,” she said. “Just where our two houses meet. It’ll climb the wall if we put up a trellis. Wouldn’t it look just charming?”

“You gotta get it in the ground soon,” Helena said. “Frost will come any day.”

At those words, Lilja raised her head and looked to the window. It was faint, and probably I only noticed because of how she seemed to pull my eyes, but I saw how she shivered.

Chapter Eight

On the morning of the seventh day of Lilja working in the store, I joined her behind the counter. I made a show of looking over the orders she had written down this last week. Her notes were precise, legible, correct, and she had spaced out the delivery dates without me asking her.

Next to me, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but she had no need to worry. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing the job better. The store was as orderly and clean as it had ever been.

“You’ve done great,” I said. “I’d like to keep you on if you’d like.”

She smiled the widest smile I had seen on her yet. One that had lost at least half of her usual caution. “I would. Very much.”

“Then I’d like to take you to the general store with me. I need more paint, and it would be practical if you could fetch it for me in the future.”

She nodded. “Of course. I’d like to come.”

“I’ll go tell Helena to keep an eye on the store while we’re gone.”

I found Helena in the workshop. “Keep an ear on the bell? I’ll take Lilja down to Jonsson’s.”

With two fingers to her temple and her eyes on her sewing, she gave me a funny sort of salute. I put on my coat. The rooftops had been white with frost this morning.

When I returned to the store, Lilja had on a pair of Helena’s gloves and her shawl over the mantle, wrapped tightly around her neck. Under she wore another of Helena’s dresses, one in a plum-colored wool and… and what a dunce I was.