Page 51 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

So I stayed there, in my mother’s arms, in the lamplight, longer than I’ve let anyone hold me since I was little. Her cardigan smelled of her perfume and tea and the cold off the fields. My breathing slowed until it matched hers, some old rhythm my body remembered from before I had words for anything, and at some point I stopped crying without noticing I’d stopped, and neither of us let go.

Through the window, out on the dark porch step, Matt’s pumpkin glowed, grinning its wild grin at the farm like it meant to stand guard all night.

And something rose in me then, that felt almost like grief—which should have made no sense, while being held that close, and feeling so safe. Except maybe it made perfect sense. Maybe you have to get warm before you can feel how long you’ve been cold.

I had been cold for years. I had called it strength, and worn it like a coat, and been so proud of how it fit.

My mother rocked me a little, humming something with no tune to it, and I let the warmth in—all the way in, down to the oldest, numbest places—and began, at last, to thaw.

Chapter 21

Elizabeth

The morning after the carving round, the Stop & Go smelled like coffee and Donna’s green chili burritos and the cold that comes in each time the door opens, and I was running the early rush on four hours of sleep and a porch kiss I had replayed so many times the tape was wearing thin.

It was that blue-dark hour before the sun commits. The mill guys came through to fill their thermoses with coffee. June came in for her cocoa and gave me a look so knowing I actually blushed and stammered over my words. And then, right on time, the patrol car slid in past the pumps, headlights sweeping the cider display, and Matt Hartford came through my door in full uniform, and absolutely nothing to buy.

He did a lap. I watched him do it, biting down on a smile, ringing up the mill guys. He inspected the motor oil like a man with strong opinions about viscosity. He straightened the gum rack, which is what his hands do when the rest of him is working up to something. And that was the whole story, right there in his hands—busy, deliberate, buying time, a man circling a thing he’d come in to say and not yet ready to say it. I knew this man now. I could read the nerves under the calm, and reading them, knowing he’d rehearsed something on the drive over, sent a low warm thrill through me that I did an admirable job of hiding while I made change. Then the store emptied out, the door chimed shut, and he came up to my counter and set down one packet of gum I have never once seen him chew.

“Morning,” he said.

“Officer.” I scanned the gum with great ceremony. “Big purchase. Special occasion?”

“Friday,” he said. He stated it, like he’d been practicing the word on the drive over, which, knowing him, he probably had. “Have dinner with me. My place. I’ll cook.”

I stopped with his gum in my hand.

His place. He’ll cook. Two small sentences, and they knocked the breath clean out of my chest, because I understood exactly what he was handing me. Not a night out—a way in. Into the house he let no one see, into the one thing he did purely for himself, into the private squared-away world of Matt Hartford. He was asking me to sit at his table and eat something he’d made with his own hands, and for a man that guarded, that was about as close to I’m yours as a packet of gum and a Friday could get. It landed warm and enormous, and I had to bite down hard on my own delight. Behind the pass-through I heard Aunt Donna go suspiciously still, all ears.

“You cook?”

“I cook.” Level. Certain. A man reporting a fact the public was not yet ready for. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet, Starling. I have a specialty. It has a waiting list.” The corner of his mouth tipped. “I’m offering you a table.”

“A waiting list.”

“Becca’s been on it her whole life. You’d be jumping the line.”

I was grinning like an idiot by then, no way around it, the register open and forgotten between us. He took his gum and his receipt like official paperwork, and then he leaned in over my counter, dropped his voice so Donna couldn’t hear it, and finished me off entirely.

“Wear the green sweater. You’re gorgeous in green.”

And then he was gone, out into the blue morning, the door chiming behind him, and I stood there face turning red while the patrol car pulled away.

Donna came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, set a burrito on my counter, and pushed it at me with one finger.

“Eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Didn’t ask. Eat. You’ll want your strength for Friday,” she teased.

“It’s dinner, Donna.” My face was doing something I could not get it to stop doing. “It’s just dinner.”

“Mm-hmm.” She headed back for her griddle. “That’s why the man sat out there at pump two rehearsing into his steering wheel for five whole minutes before he came in. I watched him do it. Lips moving and everything. Just dinner, my ass.” And then, over the first hiss of the next batch, not even pretending she hadn’t heard every word of it, “Don’t question it. Wear the green sweater, hon. Man knows what he likes. And he’s right. Green is your color.”

The one mercy in the whole morning was that Becca was off. If she’d been behind that counter for the gum purchase, and the specialty, and the sweater request, I would never have heard the end of it—no one in Sweetbriar would have—and the teasing would have been the survivable part. It’s the gloating that would have finished me. She’d have taken credit like she personally set us up, and the worst of it is she’d have a case. She’s the one who filled out his entry form.

Friday took its sweet time coming. I worked the maze gate two nights running, restocked the cider stand twice, and I did not think about him constantly—but if you believe that I have a corn maze to sell you.