“A terrible idea, I know,” he supplied, and I agreed with a shrug, “but that’s the thing—the sky was the limit. I’m sure my aunt thinks I want the place more than anything in the world.” He grabbed the napkin from the tray and cleaned his hands. “But I couldn’t want anything less.”
I almost choked on my soda. “Oh.”
He went to take another fry but then thought better of it and sighed. “I don’t want to be stuck here.”
“Aren’t you scared who might inherit it instead?” Iventured. “Or what if she sells it to someone who doesn’t care about Lilymoor?”
Behind us, the teen girls decided to finally leave the table and free it up for a couple to come sit down. The woman had curly hair in an intricate braid that reminded me of Harrie. She combed her fingers through her boyfriend’s curly ashblond hair to put it back in place.
“I admit, I don’t like the idea of her selling it,” he said, frowning. “If that’s the choice, between Lala giving up Lilymoor or me inheriting it … I won’t let her sell it. I’m not a monster.”
“But you don’t want to be responsible for it.”
“No,” he admitted. “At least, not alone.”
I chewed on the straw of my Diet Coke, thinking. “How about Eula’s other great-nephew?”
He snorted. “Right. That’s funny. He’d have to take time away from hisbig important job”—and it was clear he didn’t think it was very big or important at all—“and come back to Lilymoor, and that’ll never happen.”
“I take it you two don’t like each other,” I said, thinking of the letter in my back pocket—the one he’d torn in two.
He shrugged. “We did. Once. We basically grew up together,” he said, though there was a weight there that I didn’t know him well enough to pick at. “I just thought I knew him better. Turns out, I don’t. Not anymore, anyway.” He finished his soda and pushed himself to his feet. “And it doesn’t matter, he’ll never show his face at Lilymoor again. But thank you for lunch,” he added, gathering up our trash and tossing it into the bin. “I appreciate it.”
“I just listened.” I followed him out of the eating area toward his car again. “You paid.”
He barked a laugh. “Still, the company was good.” He closed the car door once I got inside, then rounded to the driver’s side. He leaned over the console, grinning. “You’re fun. You know that?”
My heart fluttered.You’re getting too close, my traitorous common sense warned me, though it was almost drowned out over the bright beating of my heart. The car was quiet, and he was close, and his mouth was right there—and all I could imagine was what could happen.
Harrie would’ve told me to go for it. To chase the moment. To lean into it—
The thrill turned sour, and I leaned back into my seat. “We . . . should probably get back to the house.”
If he was disappointed, he was very good at hiding it. “As you wish,” he replied, and we left. The car ride back to Lilymoor was oddly comfortable.
We chatted about where he’d gone to school—Boston University, with a BA in architectural studies—and how he worked at a firm restoring old houses across the country. He was currently on an extended family leave that, regrettably, still had him scheduled for Zoom meetings with clients all through the summer, so if he ever disappeared, there was a great chance he was holed up in the only coffee shop in town using their superior Wi-Fi. His favorite color was green. He loved to run and once visited New York for a marathon, and most surprisingly, he was single, though he admitted that he had been engaged once a few years ago.
“And at leastmyfiancée had said yes; I heard Cyrus proposed and his girlfriend said no,” he said proudly. Even though he was angry at Eula’s other nephew, the juvenilecompetitiveness lingered. I guessed he couldn’t be perfect. “I think it was on Valentine’s Day.”
I winced. “That’s rough.”
“I’m sure he just shrugged it off. Last I heard, he was married to his work, anyway,” he said as we pulled through the wrought iron gate onto the private drive. The road snaked through the woods up to the house on the cliffs.
Wykofski was out front fixing the faucet when we pulled up around the driveway and parked in front of the fountain. His eyebrows jerked up, disappearing into his green World’s Greatest Goose dad hat. He gave a surreptitious thumbs-up to me after Oliver passed him to go inside and nodded with a grin.
“Get it, girl!” he mouthed, and wiggled his eyebrows.
I wanted to crawl under a rock and die.
14
taarradhin
“Ow!” I yelped, jerking back my gloved hand from the climbing roses.
The Rose Court was a monstrously overgrown thicket of thorns, and I stood by that assessment as I tried to untangle thatstupid vinefrom their limbs. I thought it was just in the Hedges, but now the twisty vines had seeped their way into Eula’s favorite gardens, and I would be damned if it was going to take out the roses, too. So I’d set to work, but now I was regretting that decision with all the scratches on my arms from the endeavor.
I pulled off my glove and watched a droplet of blood well up on my first finger. I stuck it in my mouth and went to sit down on one of the benches. I was trying not to feel aggravated, but the roses simply weren’t being nice, and I couldn’t get my lunch date yesterday with Oliver—wasit a date?—out of my head. Not to mention the strange door, and now the vines, and I still couldn’t figure out why there was so muchwatersitting in the wildflowers—
