Page 6 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

She was conscious. Conscious, I repeated in a loud internal voice—conscious, talking, complaining, which on the Iris Starling scale of medical emergencies meant we were at maybe a four.

She said it was nothing. She said she’d stood up too fast, never mind that she’d been standing for an hour. She said, while I steered her toward my car with my heart going like a rabbit, that she didn’t need a hospital; she needed dinner, and I said, “Great news, I brought burritos. They’re in the dirt back there; we’ll grab them on the way,” because apparently I do bits during emergencies. Good to know. New data.

I got her in the passenger seat. I buckled her in like she was one of my sister Gwen’s kids—Gwen had three, and buckling them was a contact sport—and Grandma let me, and that scared me more than the stumble, because Iris Starling does not let you do anything.

I called my mother, and she met us at the end of the lane, climbing into the back seat with her face arranged into the calm one, the one I’d inherited from the hard-headed, stubborn Starling women who preceded me, and I pulled out onto the road toward Sweetbriar General with the sun going down red behind the hills like the whole town was blushing about something.

“You’re both being dramatic,” Grandma said. “I have pumpkins to check. I still have to tend to the bees.”

“The pumpkins will keep,” Mom said.

“It’s the bees I’d worry about,” I joked. “They knew before we did. You said so yourself this morning. Probably they’re unionizing.”

Grandma laughed, a small one, and patted my hand on the gearshift, and her hand was cold, and I kept both of mine on the wheel after that so nobody would see that they were shaking.

Fall is my favorite season. I tell everyone that. I tell them it’s the smell and the light and the kettle corn, and that’s all true.

But here’s the part I don’t say at the register. I love fall because it’s proof that an ending can be the most beautiful thing in the whole year. Everything letting go at once, and doing it in gold.

I just never thought to ask what that would mean in a season when I wasn’t ready to let go of anything.

Chapter 2

Matt

My house made one sound in the morning, and it was the coffee maker.

I’d lived there nine years. Three-bedroom on Alder Street, bought at a foreclosure price, fixed up one room at a time on day-off labor until everything in it worked, closed, latched, and drained the way it was supposed to. The gutters were clean. The smoke detectors were synchronized.

I drank a cup standing at the counter, looking out the window at a backyard I kept mowed for nobody, and then I went to work, because I was on shift, and that was the entire plan.

The shift was quiet the way late summer shifts are quiet. No school zone traffic, which was nice; a fender tap on Main; no injuries; just two drivers who’d known each other for forty years and wanted me to settle a dispute that turned out to predate the fender. A call about a suspicious individual on Cedar that turned out to be a scarecrow, which I documented with a straight face because Mrs. Pruitt was my kindergarten teacher and I respected her too much to laugh before I was back in the cruiser.

Quiet was good. Quiet meant the town was fine. I’d spent my whole career trying to keep this town quiet and most of my life before that trying to keep one corner of it quiet above all, and now the corner was handled and the town was fine and I drove my loops and clocked my mirrors and could not shake the feeling, lately, that I was a guard posted on a building everybody else had moved out of.

I didn’t use to think like that. I knew exactly when it started, too, which is the worst part of being trained to notice things. You can’t even lie to yourself with any professionalism.

It started twenty-six days ago, on a dance floor, with a question.

I wasn’t going to think about the question. Thinking about the question was not productive. What I thought about instead, briefly, at every red light, in a way I had decided didn’t count, was the eleven days it had been since I’d had a reason to stop at the Stop & Go while Elizabeth Starling was on shift, and the half a second yesterday when her fingers had been warm against mine around a coffee cup, and the way she’d said fall does things to people like it was a private joke between the two of us.

And my sister. I thought about my sister, who had stood two feet away from that exchange pretending to stock gum, and then asked me—with a smile I have known and feared since she was six years old—whether I had any plans this fall. Anything fun.

I’d run the word through everything I had on the way out. Fun. Becca didn’t deploy questions like that at random. She had a hidden meaning, and her face when she said it meant she was planning something.

So when I came back from my loop at eleven and found her sitting in the chair beside my desk at the station, holding a manila folder and beaming at me, I was not surprised. Concerned, yes. Surprised, no. She’d been waved straight through the front, obviously—the chief was Cade Barrett, Levi’s brother, which meant my sister had married into my own chain of command, and the shift chart of the Sweetbriar Police Department was now also her family tree. Cade’s office door stood open down the hall. He had not stopped her.

“Hi,” she said.

“No.” I hung my keys on the hook by the monitor, sat down, and gave the folder the look I give unattended bags.

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“I know it’s in a folder. You brought a folder. People don’t bring good news in folders.”

“This is a great folder.” She set it on my desk, squared it to the edge with a sly grin—she did that to needle me; she has known about me and right angles since childhood—and folded her hands on top of it like a loan officer. “How was your morning?”

“Becca.”