Noemi has gone very still.
"The man with the card," she says. "Dark hair, slicked back? Smile like he practices it in a mirror?"
The back of my neck prickles. "You've seen him."
"He came to my shop. Early spring." She reaches into the pocket of her skirt. Noemi's pockets, like mine, hold everything. Her hand comes out with a small ivory rectangle, clean-edged and barely worn. "He wanted to know who held my lease. I told him nothing. But I kept the card, because I keep everything." She sets it on the table, face up, next to Arabella's letter.
Lord Princeton Voss. Voss Textiles.
The four of us look at it.
"Well," Lyra says at last. "That's not the worst luck you've ever heard of."
"No," I say. "It's not luck at all."
Arabella breaks a piece of shortbread and still doesn't eat it. "So what do we do? He hasn't broken any law that I can see. Letters are legal. Offers are legal. My landlord can sell to whoever he likes."
"I don't know yet." I turn the card over and over. "But I think it's time we figure out what's happening and stop it."
"This deserves a toast," Lyra says. She gets up and pulls four steins. She sets them down, sits, and raises hers.
"To Main Street," she says.
"To Main Street," we answer, and we drink. It isn't a plan. But it's the four of us on one side of something. Plans can start there.
The party breaks up early.Nobody has the heart for gossip after that, not even Lyra, and we say our goodnights on the tavern step in the lamplight.
Noemi lingers.
"Walk me home?" she asks. She says it lightly, but her hand is tight on her shawl, and Noemi has walked herself home past midnight for years. "I'll give you that pot of fabric stiffener you ordered. Save you the trip tomorrow?"
I frown. "The fabric stiffener isn't ready until Thursday. You told me Tuesday."
"Lissy." She looks at me pleadingly. "Walk me home."
So I walk her home. We take the two blocks down the emptying street, past shuttered windows and the fountain. Noemi keeps her arm linked through mine the whole way and talks about nothing: a customer who wanted a love potion for a cat, the price of heartswort. I let her, because that's what friends do.
At her shop, she unlocks the door and doesn't go in.
"Come see the garden?" she says. "It's the best time to see why I can't leave."
She leads me around the side, through the narrow gap between her shop and the cobbler's next door, and unlatches a gate I've walked past a thousand times without thinking about it.
I stop two steps in.
I've known Noemi for twenty years. I've been in her shop a thousand times, and I have never been back here. How did I miss this?
Then again, maybe I didn't. This place isn't hidden. It's private. There's a difference.
The garden runs deeper than the shop itself, walled on all sides, and it's awake. Half the beds glow. Not brightly, nothing you'd see from the street, just a low shine coming off certain leaves as though they've kept some sunlight from the day. A row of night-blooming plants has opened along the back wall, their white flowers the size of my two hands together.
Something in the far corner turns toward us when the gate clicks shut. It turns like a face. I might be terrified if Noemi weren't looking at it like an old friend.
"That's the wardroot," Noemi says, following my stare. "Don't mind her. She does that to everyone."
"Her?" My voice comes out as a creak.
"My grandmother planted her the year I was born." Noemi walks the center path, and the glowing beds brighten as she passes. She stops by the white flowers and touches one. "These are moon-trumpets. They only open for the person who waters them. If I left, they'd close. After a year, maybe two, they'd become ordinary vines and never open for me again."
