He scoffed. “He’s stuck in a garden, too, I guess?”
“No, but you can be stuck in different ways.”
“Like you’re stuck helping me?”
“Lucky me. I get stuck with the nephew who is too rude, and too tall, and too—too—ginger.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Tooginger?” he echoed in disbelief.
I ignored him. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s not completely selfless,” I said. “I’m doing this for Harrie, too. We made a promise that we couldn’t keep. So I want to keep my promise to you, and if I can get you out of this place, then maybe that means I can save something after all—something other than flowers.” I shifted on the bench uncomfortably. “And maybe if I find you, I . . . I won’t be stuck anymore, either.”
His face softened, and the venom that was in his voice a moment ago vanished. “Who’s Harrie?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but the words got caught up in my throat. I had talked about her without even meaning to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said her name aloud to a stranger, having kept her bottled up for so long, she felt like a secret.
Who was Harrie?
She was fries with vinegar and cotton candy stuck to the roof of your mouth. She was sour lemonade and bright laughs and romance novels with spines cracked at the sex scenes. She was good, and loud, and larger-than-life, so that when she left, she took all the air out of the room, too.
“She’s . . . she was . . .”
Was.
She was.
The grief came up so fast and so strong, I couldn’t tamp it down like I normally did. Hot tears burned at the edges of myeyes. Ohno, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. I raked the heels of my hands over my eyes, but it didn’t matter.
He already saw.
Howembarrassing.
I thought about fleeing the garden so he couldn’t see my ugly, tear-streaked face, but suddenly his arms came up, and he pulled me into a hug. It was tight and encompassing. Secure. I couldn’t remember the last time I was hugged, or the last time someone let me cry on their shoulder. I pressed my face into his chest, hating the way I cried ugly, sloppy tears. Harrie always said that my body was wound so tight that when I finally snapped, it was like a dam bursting. And he simply held me together, his arms wrapped around me, letting me empty all of my heart out in big, gulping wails.
He didn’t tell me how sorry he was for my loss, or for my tears, and it was a relief that he didn’t tell me that it was okay, either. He simply let me cry until there wasn’t anything left, hugging me in such a strangely safe and warm way that I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.
After a while, he rubbed the tears on my cheeks away with his thumbs, cupping my face in his hands. “My socks,” he whispered, as if it was a secret, “are from Dollar Tree.”
24
esprit de l’escalier
As I carried the watering can up the stairs to Eula’s bedroom, I sorted through my feelings from the secret garden. After crying in front of Rus the other evening, I’d escaped almost immediately without even coming up with a plan, but luckily the door showed itself again yesterday, and we decided to get to work almost immediately. He would implement the ideas inside the garden, and I would try to figure out where the heck Henry put it. I found Cyrus exactly where I’d left him the day before, sitting at the stone bench with Henry’s journal, having only just gotten to the end of it by the time I returned.
Time worked in the strangest way in the garden. While it’d been an entire day for me—a day of fending Damnit away with a watering hose—it had been maybe an hour for him.Maybe.It was as if the garden itself was displaced from time entirely.
He had glanced up at me over his round glasses, and he looked so disastrously handsome I immediately worried that I had too much dirt under my nails, which was something I’d never cared about before. Harrie was always the one whofawned over men in glasses. I’d never understood it. Not until that moment, as he pinned me to the spot over the frames.
“There’s not much to go by,” he said by way of greeting, and I immediately decided he probably didn’t even notice the dirt under my nails, and quite frankly, it didn’t matter.
I went over to him, my shadow falling across him and the journal, and leaned forward a little to look at it, albeit upside down. “We have less than a month to figure it out.”
“Lucky us,” he agreed, licking his thumb, and flipping the page. “I think the garden might be somewhere on the eastern side. At least, by the dimensions.” Then he frowned and asked, “Do you think you could rent a drone and find it that way?”
“I’ve already looked on Google Maps. No luck,” I replied. “You don’t by chance remember Henry ever saying where it was, do you?”
“Sadly no.”
“Well, that sucks.” I sighed. “A month, then.”
