"Good morning," I said to her.
She looked up at me with those dark eyes and then looked away, unimpressed but present.
"He said you bite," I told her.
She didn't dignify that with a response.
"I'm going to take this as a good sign," I said, and she trotted ahead of me like she was leading the way.
The main house was bigger than the cottage but not ostentatious—white paint, a wide porch, hanging baskets of something purple and trailing. I could smell coffee from ten feet away and something else underneath it, something that made my stomach growl embarrassingly loud.
Biscuits.
That was biscuits.
I knocked on the screen door.
"It's open," called a voice from inside—warm but brisk, the voice of someone who had never once waited for help and didn't intend to start.
I opened the door.
The kitchen was bright and a little cluttered in the way of kitchens that actually got used—dried herbs hanging from a hook, a stack of mail on the counter, a dog bowl by the back door that probably belonged to Dolly. A woman stood at the stove with her back to me, silver-streaked hair in a braid down her back, wearing jeans and a faded flannel with the sleeves rolled up.
She turned around.
She had Gage's eyes. That same dark, direct quality—the kind that took you in and filed you away before you'd finished introducing yourself. She was maybe sixty, maybe a little past it, and she was beautiful in the way of women who had never once tried to be anything other than exactly what they were.
She looked at me for a long moment.
I stood very still and tried not to nervously ramble.
"Millie," she said. Not a question.
"Yes, ma'am."
“Good. I’m Peggy—and you don’t need to call me ma’am.” Something in her expression shifted—the faintest softening around the eyes. "He said you were pretty." She turned back to the stove. "Sit down. Coffee's on the counter, cups are in the cabinet above it, and I hope you eat biscuits because I made too many."
I let out a breath I'd been holding since the driveway.
"I love biscuits," I said.
"Good," she said. "Then we're already off to a better start than I expected."
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the big wooden table and watched Peggy Holt move around her kitchen the way women who have owned a space for decades move through it—without looking, without hesitating, every reach and turn automatic and sure.
"Cream's on the table," she said, without turning around. "Sugar's in the blue jar."
I helped myself to both.
She smiled over her shoulder. “Sweet girl,” she said. “I’m the same way, though my boys would never tell you that.”
She brought the biscuits to the table in a cast iron skillet, set down a jar of honey and a dish of butter, and then poured her own coffee and sat across from me like we were going to have a meeting.
Maybe we were.
"So," she said.
"So," I said.
