“Amazing!” I high-fived him.
Oliver finished helping Juliette clean up her papers and said, “Please don’t ever say a lawn is hot again.”
“She’s lookin’ real sexy,” Wykofski went on, giving him the okay sign.
He scowled. “I’m not nearly awake enough for this,” he decided, and left for his room again.
Juliette gave Wykofski a tired look. “You really should stop scaring him away.”
“What? He didn’t even look at the lawn before judgin’ her!”
“You know what I mean.”
He rolled his eyes. “He’s gonna have to get used to us if he’s gonna be the one inheriting the estate,” he said, and it was the first time any of us had spoken the possibility aloud. “So I’m just gonna ease him into the madness.”
“If he decides to keep it,” Juliette muttered.
Wykofski flapped his hand at her. “Shh! Don’t speak that into existence! I like my job.”
“I like mine, too,” she agreed.
I also liked mine, but that didn’t matter. I had less than a month to go until the bicentennial, and I was no closer to finding the Someday Garden.
For the next few days, the weather turned out to be beautiful and sunny, so I used that time to do some gardening chores—deadheading, weeding, and the like—while I looked for the door and tried to puzzle out where it could be.
I had found uninhabitedspaces, sure. There had been a few on the outskirts of the estate, past the Willow Grove, and on the other side of the Rose Court, one wedged between the Hedges and the Wildflowers, and a peculiar-shaped space in the Central Garden, but every one of those held only weeds, or disguised a water pump for the Reservoir, or was home to a family of chipmunks. The reality of that was heavy—heavier than I wanted.
I feared Rus had gotten the easier job.
When the door appeared an hour before sunset, I went to visit him in the garden. He had moved on from the gazebo and had started gardening in the flower beds, but in just a fewdays, the garden had transformed so much I barely recognized it. There was wisteria climbing across the willows, and rose bushes starting to bloom, and daffodils and daisies and delphiniums waking up from the ground. Rus was trying to decide which seeds to plant in one of the beds surrounding the gazebo.
“Maybe some asters and cosmos? Something that’s easy to flower,” he said, leafing through the brown paper packets, names scrawled across them in Henry’s long and loopy script, “though maybe star jasmine will work better? And we can fill in the path to the willow with some creeping thyme?” He motioned to the stones in the path. “I think that’d look really nice.”
“You seem happy,” I mused, eyeing the blooming rose bushes and wisteria.
He schooled his face. “What? No. I’m just bored and Ishouldbe working. I’m wasting time,” he decided. His mouth twisted. “Nonbillable at that.”
Maybe he could have lied if the garden didn’t look—well, if it didn’t look likethis. “Time is more than just money, you know.”
He shrugged. “I’ve learned that time keeps me accountable. Keeps me from being reckless. There’s order to it. I like order.”
Or was he simply afraid of who he’d be if he grew wild? He was very much like this garden himself—unattended, though with a little care, maybe something more. After all, to me he didn’t seem like the kind of cold, detached man he pretended to be.
“I think you’re lying,” I muttered, more to myself than to him, but he heard it anyway.
His eyebrows jerked up. “Oh?”
I doubled down. “I think you’re lying.”
Patiently, he closed the journal and stuck it in his back pocket, turning his undivided attention to me instead. He folded his arms over his chest. “Go on.”
Look around you, I wanted to say, but he’d just wave the blooms off as Lilymoor’s magic, having nothing to do with him.
“You try to be apathetic, but when you get down to it, you’re not. You can’t be.”
“I think my client’s adversaries would say differently—”
“But that’s not you, is it? It’s the person you’re trying to be. That’s Cyrus Beck. But Rus is . . . you’re passionate and you care, and, sure, you keep reminding me that you’re wasting your time, but it sounds to me like you keep on saying it to remindyourselfthat you are. I don’t think you believe it.” I searched his face, and the raw surprise was warring with an emotion I couldn’t name. “I don’t think you ever believed it.”
