I . . . didn’t know what to say to that.
“Besides,” he went on, folding his arms over his chest again and cutting his eyes away, “I fear you are exactly his type.”
As I stood there in my dirty coveralls, shoulders pink and sun hat tipped back on my head and not looking theleastbit flattering, my mouth dropped open silently. He must be joking. “I’m . . .what?”
He planted his hand on the small of my back and steered me toward the door. As he did, he bent toward me from behind and whispered into my ear, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sophie.” Then he guided me out the door, and before I had the where-withal to turn around and demand an answer, the door had shut and the sun sank below the tree-lined horizon, and the secret garden was gone.
Oliver’s type?He must have been mistaken. I was a woman with perpetual dirt under her nails, who smelled of freshly turned soil and sweat, who cared more about flowers than almost any person I could name—
I glanced down at my dirty hands, at my stained coveralls and work boots.
He had to be mistaken.
Though the next morning I woke up with his voice in my ear still, murmuring in that low, delicious voice,I’ll see you tomorrow, Sophie.
My heart fluttered. It was, decidedly,notindigestion.
But Rus was so very off-limits, not only because he wasrelated to my employer, but because he was stuck in a timeless garden, and he’d just pushed me toward Oliver. And that shock carried me through the rest of the evening. I decided that Rus was just being nice. But then why did I feel so—so—frustratedat his suggestion?
As I arrived at Eula’s room, I shoved my tender thoughts to the back of my head and knocked on the open door. “Good morning, I’m here to water your plants. I’ve decided to mix the water with some grow nutrition, too, just to make sure they’re healthy and all.”
Eula was sitting up in a high-back chair in the far corner of the room, reading an Ann Nichols book—the latest and last one, apparently. She put her bookmark in and looked at me over her round glasses. They reminded me very much of the glasses Rus had on in the garden, except his had a scratch in the top corner of the left lens.
“Ah,” said Eula, “my savior! Thank you very much, dear. I hear clearing out the Willow Grove is going well?”
“We found a colony of voles, but Wykofski’s in the process of relocating them,” I said, deciding not to go into themethodof Wykofski’s relocation process. He may or may not have rented a vole costume and decided to serenade them with Billy Joel (who he wasconvincedwas a family of voles operating a fleshy mech suit). I refused to ask questions. As long as he got the job done, that’s all that mattered.
“Delightful. And the lawn itself?”
“Surprisingly green and healthy, though we’re going to treat it a bit to make sure,” I said, watering her pothos, and then the snake plant.
“Good, good. And … how is the wall?”
The wallwas, I suspected, the scarred portion of the Willow Grove that was charred by the greenhouse fire. A few meters of it had to be knocked out for the fire crew to get to the greenhouse itself, which was probably why it burned down almost completely, but nature had overtaken it so thoroughly that if I hadn’t known the wall had been knocked down there, I would’ve guessed the thicket of decade-old trees was purposeful.
“No one will notice, I don’t think. If we want to repair it, we’ll have to dig all this up, so I’m hesitant to . . .”
Her shoulders sagged with relief. “No, no. It feels . . . fitting,” she added with the echo of a smile. “The fire stole so much. It’s nice to know that the garden healed itself regardless. I wish we were half as resilient.”
I often wished that, too.
“I wish it’d never happened, obviously, but I wish more that I had handled it differently,” she went on, setting her book down on the end table beside her, and poured herself a cup of tea from the floral teapot there. “Hindsight is always a curse, dear.”
I thought about my last conversation with Harrie, the coldness of her fingers, the soft and hazy whisper of her words. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I had said, when I could have said anything else—everything else. That I loved her. That I would miss her. That I already did. But I kept kicking the can down the road, thinking that if I put it off, if I refused to acknowledge the end, it’d never come.
“Sophie . . .” she’d said, as if she wanted to say something else, but she was so weak, and her words were too heavy.
“Tomorrow,” I had repeated.
And that tomorrow never came.
I blinked, surprised at the tears that burned in my eyes. “Sorry, I should get back to work.” I excused myself quickly and headed down the hall to give a receipt to Yafir for the mulch I’d bought for the Wildflower Garden.
Shake it off, I told myself, wiping under my eyes. I hadn’t thought about that last day in so long—I often refused to let myself. It was a mistake this time. I was just tired and stressed.
That was all.
Halfway to the office, I quickly came to regret even coming up here this morning, because Yafir made a strangled noise in his throat as he stormed out into the hall, jabbing a finger behind him. “That—that blondjockis ransacking my office!” he cried. “He’s tearing it apart!”
