Isla looked up. Twyla looked back with the patient, knowing expression of a woman who had been watching people fall into each other for longer than most civilizations had been standing.
"I told you not to do that," Isla said.
"You told me not to matchmake. I'm not matchmaking. I'm observing." Twyla folded her hands on the table. "You've been lighter this week. Your walk is different. You came through thesquare three times yesterday and each time you looked toward the dock. That's not my doing. That's yours."
"He's leaving soon."
"So?"
"So it doesn't matter what I feel about it. He has a ship, contracts, a life on the water. I will not be the woman who asks a river captain to stay on dry land."
"Nobody asked you to ask him that."
"Then what's the point?"
"The point of what? Feeling something?" Twyla leaned forward. "Isla. You've spent years running from a past you couldn't change. You came here and built a life around not being a danger. Every choice you've made has been shaped by fear. What to feel, where to stand, how close to get. And now you're sitting in my café telling me you're less afraid than you've been in a while, and your first instinct is to ask what the point is."
"The point is that you feel it. The point is that feeling it made your power cleaner and stronger instead of more dangerous. You told me yourself what happened at Corin's meadow. Fifteen minutes. No breaks. No lightning." She picked up her tea. "The point isn't whether he stays. The point is that you stopped being afraid of wanting him to."
Lira reappeared with a plate of the questionable scones and set them on the table between them. "These are the second batch. They're less terrible."
Twyla took one without looking. Isla took one too. It was dense, slightly under-baked, and tasted like butter and something floral.
"Lavender," Lira said, reading her face. "From your garden, actually. Aunt Twyla nicked some last week."
"I borrowed it," Twyla said.
"She nicked it."
It wasn't terrible. She ate a second one while Twyla talked about the spring fair planning, about how the flooding on the lower road had pushed back the setup schedule, about the new honey vendor Corin was supplying from his hives this year. Lira drifted in and out, offering commentary that was ninety percent unfiltered opinion. The café moved around them with the easy rhythm of a place that had been doing this for a long time.
It felt normal. That was the thing she kept coming back to. Sitting here, eating a borrowed-lavender scone, listening to Twyla manage her niece and the spring fair schedule simultaneously, being part of the room instead of observing it from the edges. It felt like belonging without the asterisk she usually attached to the word.
"I've been shaping everything around fear," Isla said to her cup more than to Twyla. "You're right. Every decision. Where to live, how far from town, what to practice, when to stop. All of it has been about what might go wrong."
"And?"
"And I'm tired of it." She looked up. "I want to build something. I don't know what yet. But I want the next decision I make to be about what I'm choosing, not what I'm avoiding."
Twyla studied her across the table.
"That sounds like you actually believe it," Twyla said.
"Maybe I'm getting there."
Isla finished her tea. Twyla refilled it without asking, because that was what Twyla did. They sat for another twenty minutes while the café crowd thinned out and Lira produced a third batch of scones that were genuinely good, and Isla let herself be in the room without monitoring the exits or reading the quality of attention aimed her direction.
When she finally stood to leave, Twyla caught her hand.
"Whatever you decide," she said. "About the captain, about the town, about your power. Make sure it's because you want it. Not because you're afraid of the alternative."
"I will."
"And come back tomorrow. Lira wants your opinion on a lemon curd recipe she's convinced will change the world."
"It will not," Lira called from the kitchen. "But it'll be pretty good."
Isla walked out into the late afternoon. The square was quiet, the shops closing up, the cobblestones throwing long shadows in the angled light. She pulled her jacket closer and walked toward the cottage.
