“Did I …” My voice was small. “Sign the letter asSophie?”
“You did,” he confirmed in almost a rumble.
The blush on my cheeks was raging now. I buried my head in my hands. “Oh my god.”
“Mm-hmm,” he agreed, and leaned closer still, so our gazes were eye level with each other. My stomach fluttered with flustered butterflies at how close he was, how wild his hair had become between our last few meetings, how dreadfully badly I wanted to take a marker and connect the constellations of his freckles—all of which were dangerous thoughts to be thinking about a man trapped in a garden. “So,” he mused, “what was I supposed to do?”
I thought, as his storm-blue gaze dropped to my mouth, he’d kiss me.
I thought, for a moment, he looked like he wanted to.
I thought, maybe, I wanted him to, too.
But then he leaned away again, wetting his lips with his tongue, and pushed himself to his feet. Was the clover greener suddenly? I blinked, rubbing my eyes. It must’ve been a trick of the light. I pressed my palms against my warm cheeks, hoping they’d cool.
“Back to the drawing board, then,” he said, pushing his fingers through his copper hair, and started to pace back and forth.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I admitted, “aside from handcuffing you to a radiator in the house or something during the party.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” he said dismissively, then added practically, “I’d scream loud enough someone would hear.”
“You do have a funny scream.”
He gave me another deploring look.
I shrugged. “Youdo. And the garden will probably thwart us, anyway.”
He shook his head, turning on his heels to walk back toward me. “No, I don’t think so. Lilymoor isn’t that belligerent. At least not on purpose.” He said it frankly, like someone who knew the garden well. Eulahadsaid that the one person who knew Lilymoor best, aside from Henry, was Rus. “This garden was used for something. I’m sure of it. One of Henry’s half-finished projects.”
“How can you tell?”
He motioned to the entirety of it. “It has his tells. The way he spread out the gardens, the timing of the sprouts that are coming up, the seeds he was going to plant in the basket—even the willow.” His eyebrows furrowed then. “I think he used to talk about this garden. The longer I’m here, the more I remember.”
“You were really close to Henry, weren’t you?”
He stopped pacing, hesitation freezing him to the spot, before he said, shortly, “Yeah. I used to come here every summer as a kid. This place used to be home. Then it wasn’t.”
I stood. “Maybe that has something to—oh.” I sucked in a gasp as my vision twisted. The garden turned hazy—like one of those tritone photos. I lost my balance, but he was quick to catch me. He steadied me against him. The garden spun, but at least he was solid.
“Are you okay?” he asked worriedly.
I blinked, swaying against him, as I tried to clear myvision, but it wasn’t my eyes. It was the garden—stretching and pulling, turning Cyrus double.
“I … I think it’s sunset,” I said, because it was the same thing that had happened on the top of the garden wall before I fell over it. “I think the garden’s telling me to leave.”
“Then you should go,” he said, his voice echoing, a second sooner in one ear than the other. I nodded, taking a step toward the door across the garden, but then he swooped me up in his arms, and carried me the rest of the way. He put me back on my feet by the door, and said, “I think this has something to do with Henry. I don’t know what, though.”
“I’ll look,” I promised, and lurched out the door. The next thing I knew, I was stumbling out into the Central Garden, my knees scraping against the hard pebbled ground, and the deep shadows of dusk stretched across the great oak tree above.
22
komorebi
Root rot had decimated an entire portion of the Wildflower Garden. Luckily it was near the wall where the mysterious leak was so it wasn’t particularly noticeable from the path, but I still felt bad every time I pulled out a violet or an iris and the roots just sloughed off. This was one of the few parts of gardening that I didn’t like—failure, especially when it came from something out of my control. Surprise cold snaps. Flooding. Mites.
The soggy ground squelched under my muddy shoes as I bent to pull up another flower, and another. At least pulling up dead flowers was a stress relief. I kept kicking myself for the letter I sent to Cyrus where I signedmy own name. I’d been in such a rush to put it in the envelope, it must have just been a force of habit. Whenever I thought about it, I remembered the way Rus planted his hand in the clovers between us, the way he leaned in, the way his eyes settled on my mouth.
I must have been mistaken. I had to be.
