And it was good and terrible and wild. Changing and growing and becoming, again and again, as we shucked off our leaves and burrowed our roots and reached for the sky. What a glorious, golden thing to be alive. What a wonderful, awful gift it was to leave things behind.
I’d lived so much of my life trying to keep moving forward, I forgot to pick up the bits people left behind and add them to the fathomless hole in my chest. In my mad dash to run, I’d packed too light. I forgot to carry them with me.
The sun sank lower, and no matter how much I wished for this moment to never end—to last forever—nothing did. That was one thing I knew too well as a gardener. Nothing lasted, especially not anything beautiful.
But nothing bad lasted forever, either.
37
saudade
It was the day before the bicentennial celebration, and I was up before dawn. I took out the worn brochure with a map of Lilymoor that I’d stolen from Juliette’s desk weeks ago. Systematically, I’d marked off each area of the gardens where I looked for the door, and in places where the map was slightly off, I double-checked it with the blueprints of the estate so I wasn’t missing another greenhouse-sized area. I knew I’d covered every inch of the estate and then some. But as the birds woke shouting, I was out there again, walking the grounds with the precision of a search party. As the sun dragged itself fully into the sky, I was at my wit’s end. How could I miss that huge willow tree, even if it was behind a wall?
What if the garden didn’t actually exist, and I’d wasted all this time for nothing?
“It has to besomewhere,” I told myself, marking off the Hedges. As I made my way back toward the Central Garden, exhausted and prepared to sink onto a bench, movement near the second-story window caught my eye. At first, I thought it was Eula, but then I caught the top of a blond bob ducking down behind the balcony railing again.
Juliette? What was she doing in her hiding spot?
That couldn’t be good.
Folding up my brochure, I stuck it into my back pocket and decided, for Juliette’s sanity and for mine, to take a break to go see what she was doing up there. Inside, Yafir and Oliver were looking for her, but I told them I didn’t know where she was and quietly slipped over to the balcony outside Oliver’s window, which was a bold move, considering.
“Juliette?” I called.
She looked at me in alarm and pressed her finger to her lips. “Shh! Close the window!”
I climbed out and shimmied the guest bedroom window closed. “Is there a reason you’re hiding?”
“I’m not hiding,” she replied, busying herself with her phone, sitting on one of the stools. She was mostdefinitelyhiding.
“Is it Oliver?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Is it that obvious?”
I didn’t have the energy to lie. “Yes, it definitely is.”
She dropped her phone into her lap with a cringey groan and buried her face in her hands.
I quirked an eyebrow.
“I think I have a crush,” she lamented.
I had figured, but hearing it—well. “On Oliver?”
She burrowed her head into her hands. “It’sbad, Sunny! It’s so bad!”
“It’s definitely not that,” I replied, climbing out the rest of the way to join her. “He’s really good-looking.”
“You think so?”
I nodded.
She hesitated. “But aren’t you and he . . . ?”
I quickly shut that down. “No. I mean, maybe at first, but no. No, nothing is going on between me and Oliver.”
Relief rounded her shoulders. “Oh—oh, good. Because I was worried …” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I mean, well, you’ve been so happy lately and disappearing … and what if you’d been disappearing with Oliver? And so I got it in my head that I again fell for the wrong guy …”
