Page 28 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

So, I took a bite. We ate the pie, one plate, two forks, in front of four witnesses and a jukebox, her fork fencing mine off the last blob of whipped cream while the table pretended to talk about something else. If you had told me a year ago that my favorite hour of the entire fall would happen in a booth at Holloway’s, being laughed at, sharing a dessert with a woman who’d made him promise not to fall in love with her—I would have said you had the wrong man.

But somewhere between the pretzels and the pie, sitting in the warmth with her knee against mine and my sister’s whole scheme glowing around us like the amber lights, I stopped pretending I didn’t know what this was.

She walked out with me at the end of it. The others peeled off in the lot with a chorus of goodnights and one long look apiece, and then it was Elizabeth and me under the awning with the rain coming down silver past the neon, her keys in her hand, neither of us moving toward our vehicles.

“About last night,” she said, quieter now, the performance set down with the crowd gone. “You didn’t say anything. In there. You could’ve; it would’ve been a good story—Elizabeth Starling, festival queen, crying in a pumpkin patch. A total stress fest.”

“Wasn’t mine to tell.”

She looked at me a long moment through the neon-pink rain light, and her face was open in a way she seldom let it be indoors, in front of people, in the light.

“Thank you,” she said. “For not mentioning anything. And for sitting in the mud with me. I don’t think I said it last night.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“You sat down,” I said. “You didn’t get up and go inside, and you didn’t tell me to leave. I knew what that meant.” I looked out at the rain coming off the awning. “I’ve been the one out in the dark, Elizabeth. I know exactly what it’s worth to have somebody just sit there and not make you talk about it.”

She went still for a second. Then she smiled, and for a second the awning and the rain made a room around us, and there it was again—that strand of hair, the one that had come loose in the pub and stuck to her cheek, damp now from the mist blowing in past the neon. I’d spent the whole evening not moving it. Sitting on my hands, near enough to do it a dozen times, and not doing it, because there’d been a table full of people and no good reason and every reason.

There was no table now.

I reached out and tucked it back behind her ear. Slow. One knuckle grazing the cool of her cheek on the way, careful, the way I do everything—and I felt her go completely still under it, felt the breath she’d been about to take just stop, her eyes coming up to mine and holding there, wide and dark in the pink light, all the ready jokes gone out of them. For a moment neither of us said anything. She looked at me like she was seeing some new fact about me and rearranging everything else to fit it.

I thought about closing the distance. I watched her think about it too, and neither of us did—not yet, not out of cowardice this time but out of something more like patience, like knowing the season was long and there was no sense rushing what was already, unmistakably, on its way.

“Goodnight, Matt,” she said, and her voice came out a half-step lower than before. She walked backward toward her hatchback, keys spinning once around her finger, her eyes not leaving mine until she had to turn.

“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”

I drove home through the rain and let myself into my dark house, and for once it didn’t feel like a guard post on an empty building. It felt temporary. It felt like a place a man waits, between the good part and the next good part.

I lay awake a while, being terrified about that, and somewhere in the dark the terror quietly changed costume and became something I was even more afraid to name.

Hope, probably. It had been so long I forgot what it felt like.

Chapter 11

Elizabeth

The farm had finally tipped fully over into the season. It was full fall, all autumn, so freaking gorgeous I could hardly stand it. The maples on the ridge had gone past red into that deep wine color they get right before they let go of their leaves, the mornings came in white with frost that didn’t always burn off anymore, and the air down by the stand was thick with the smell of the cider press running daylight to dark. We’d hung the café lights on the gazebo and tested them one evening, the whole structure flaring gold against the early dark, and half the town had slowed their cars on the county road to look. Festival weather. The good kind, the kind I’d have bottled and sold if I could, except the whole farm was already mortgaged against a number with November tenth on it, so mostly I tried not to think about that and ran my contestants instead.

The costume round is my favorite part of the whole festival, and I will defend that position against all comers, because there is no faster way to learn the truth about a man than to hand him a costume and watch what he does with his dignity.

Some men fight it. And some men, the rare ones, surrender to it completely and become, for one evening, exactly as ridiculous as joy requires, and those are the men this town takes into its heart and never lets go of.

I had a strong suspicion about which kind Matt Hartford was going to turn out to be, and I was about to find out, because we were holed up in the back room of the farm stand, which is where the festival’s costume fitting happened.

The stand sat where the lane met the road, the first thing you saw turning in off the highway and the last thing you passed leaving—a long, low building my great-grandfather had thrown together out of cedar that had silvered over the decades, with a deep covered porch across the front and a Dutch door whose top half stood open from first pick to last frost.

In season, the porch was a still life of the whole farm. Crates of pumpkins and pie squash stacked three high, mums in their nursery pots, baskets of the season’s apples, strings of dried corn nailed to the posts, and the long window counter where we sold it all, with the honey lined up behind the glass in rows. It smelled the way it had smelled my entire life, of cedar and sweet rot and cold apples and the dust that lives in burlap. Behind the selling floor was the back room, low-ceilinged and crowded, half storage and half everything else—shelving to the rafters stacked with empty baskets and seed trays and the accumulated debris of a hundred Octobers, a wood counter scarred from a century of use, a space heater that lied about its abilities, and the rolling rack of festival costumes that came out of storage every fall like old friends nobody had the heart to retire.

Gwen’s office was through the far door. It was the warmest room on the farm that wasn’t a kitchen, and the most private, which was either very convenient or a genuine problem, depending on who you’d shut the door with.

I had shut the door with Matt Hartford. And now he was standing in the middle of all that cedar and burlap-dust while I advanced on him with a garment bag and the unholy glee of a woman about to test a hypothesis.

“No,” Matt said, looking at the garment bag.

“You haven’t seen it.”