12
goya
I pulled my hat a little lower over my face to block out the glare of the sun, muttering to myself as I stared at the expanse of wall behind the wildflowers.
I squeezed my eyes shut, imagined the door against the gray stones, and opened them again—
Nothing.
Maybe the door only appeared when it thought I wasn’t expecting it, so I picked up my shovel and pretended to start to leave for the Central Garden again.One, two, three . . .I counted patiently up to ten, held my breath, and spun around—
Nothing.
I felt sillier and sillier.
“I know it was there,” I muttered. “Iknowit was.”
And yet it wasn’t anymore.
Today was Saturday, and while technically I was off on the weekends, I rarely stopped working. I liked tending to the garden, and doing a little bit on my days off kept me from having to do all of it at once. The storm last night blew debris across the garden, so I wandered about cleaning that up, and pulling up evenmorevines in the Hedges. Though, every so often, mymind would wander back to the garden that didn’t exist, and the stranger inside. What if he was still trapped?
It wasn’t like I could tell anyone about it. I’d tried with Eula, but shecertainlythought I had been mistaken. I couldn’t tell Juliette or Wykofski, because I didn’t want my coworkers to think I was nuts, and more importantly, I didn’t want them gossiping to Oliver about how the new head gardener had lost her marbles. While I was allergic to romance, I could see, and he was very, very good-looking.
The image of his caramel eyes, his grin, the coy way he winked—it made me flustered all over again.
It was in moments like this that I missed Harrie most practically. She would’ve immediately believed me, eyes glittering, and asked all about the door, and the garden, and the stranger. She wouldn’t have thought twice, because to Harrie magic was as real as the wind. Ghosts, kismet, fate, invisible strings—she wanted to believe it all.
And she had.
“The best stories are the ones that fill you with wonder. The ones you almost believe,” she had said, curling her arm around mine as we followed a particularly creepy ghost tour in Charleston. The evening had been so cold, our fingers were numb and we couldn’t feel our toes. “There’s an Urdu word for it—goya.”
She never got to sleep that night, covers pulled up to her chin in her bed, swearing that there was something behind the curtain. (There wasn’t. I’d checked three times.) In the end, she crawled into my bed and pulled the pillow over her head, and I woke up the next morning with her cold toes digging into my thigh.
I wished she were here.
But she wasn’t, and I was staring at a blank wall hoping for a door.
By Monday, I still hadn’t found the door, and I was quickly going from confused to disappointed. At least I got to open up the Hedges, despite the vines, which felt like a small triumph when a little kid went darting into the maze with a pterodactyl scream, chased by his nanny.
Around lunchtime, Juliette found me in the Central Garden deadheading the sunflowers to take out my frustrations and asked for me to come inside for a bit. Yafir was in, and apparently it was an emergency.
I took off my dirty boots at the kitchen door and met Juliette in the grand foyer as Oliver wandered in from the kitchen, crunching on a crisp apple. He had made himself scarce since Saturday, and I wondered where he’d gone.
“Oh, hey there, Miss Head Gardener,” he said, and then slid his gaze to her. “You have a friend.”
Juliette blinked at him, clearly unimpressed. “And you are . . . ?”
“Oliver,” I introduced him, and then turned to her. “This is Juliette.”
He snapped his fingers with his free hand. “Jules!I’ve heard about you, too.”
She gave a start at her nickname, and her cheeks flushed a bright pink. “Oh! Like, I hope nothing, um, nothingbad.”
“I’ll never tell,” he replied with a wink to me, and ateanother bite of apple. Juliette looked positively mortified. I was about to chastise him for picking on her when Yafir appeared at the top of the stairs, his face the color of an angry prune. He had a huge mail sack tucked under his arm. “The office!” he ordered in a clipped, no-nonsense voice. “Everyone!”
Oliver pointed to himself.
“Yes! Evenyou!” Yafir paused and narrowed his eyes at Oliver. “Especiallyyou.”
