Page 81 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The crowd came apart into noise. Somebody clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger me. Jude shook my hand looking genuinely delighted to have lost. I stood there in the gazebo lights not entirely sure how my legs still worked, and June was already crossing the little stage with the sash draped over both hands, dropping it over my head and settling it against my shoulder like she’d done it every year of her life instead of for the first time.

“Harvest Promise,” she said, low, just to me, handing off the microphone. “You know the tradition. Whatever you want to say to this town, now’s when you say it.” And then, softer, with a grin she couldn’t quite keep professional, “Don’t waste it, Hartford.”

I stood there under the lights with a sash across my chest and a microphone in my hand and could not, for a second, make any of it feel real. Two months ago my sister had entered my name in a contest to shake me loose from the man I’d bolted myself into, and I’d meant to sign a form and be done with it, and instead here I was—winning, of all things, in front of the whole town, my heart going like I’d run the length of the maze, my face hot under the string lights, the sash sitting absurd and impossible against my chest.

And I hadn’t gotten here by myself. That was the thing that hit me under all the noise, sudden and enormous. I couldn’t have stood on this stage a season ago if you’d paid me, and the only reason I could stand on it now was a woman who’d handed me a pot and a set of index cards and sat across a table teaching a stone-faced cop how to be funny, how to be foolish, how to let a crowd see him. She’d believed I had it in me before I did. She’d been patient with me the way nobody had ever bothered to be, and somewhere between the pie round and here, it had worked. She’d changed me. I was standing up in the light because Elizabeth Starling had spent a whole fall coaxing me out of the dark.

So I looked for her. Past the clapping and the whistling, past every single person I’d sworn my adult life to protect and serve and never once let close, I went looking for the one face that made any of this mean anything—because whatever I said next, I was only really saying it to her, and I needed to know she was there to hear it.

Her midnight blue dress caught the light every time she moved, and she was looking straight at me with her arms crossed over her chest like she was bracing for whatever I was about to do with this microphone, and I understood, looking at her, that I had exactly one shot at doing this right, in front of the only witnesses that would ever matter to either one of us again.

“I’ve been given a microphone,” I said, “which most of you will agree is not historically a good idea.” That got a laugh, nervous and warm. “I’m not going to stand up here and thank the Starlings for putting this whole thing on. You all know they did, and you all know how good a job of it they do every single year. I’ve got one thing I need to say tonight, and I’m going to say it, even if it means making a fool of myself in front of every person I’ve ever given a parking ticket to.”

I looked at her the whole time. I didn’t let myself look away, not once, not even when my nerve nearly failed me halfway through a sentence.

“At the beginning of the season, a woman sat on this very gazebo rail, stuck her hand out for a handshake, and told me, and I’m quoting her directly here, ‘promise me you won’t fall in love with me, Officer Hartford, saves us both the paperwork.’” A ripple went through the crowd, half of them already turning to find her, and I watched her go very still at the edge of the light. “I want it on the record, in front of this entire town, that I have broken that promise completely. Thoroughly. Without a single regret. I fell for her somewhere around the third rehearsal, and I have been falling since, every single day, faster than I know how to file a report on.”

The crowd had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet right before it realizes it’s about to witness something it’ll talk about at every dinner table in Sweetbriar for a decade.

“She is the funniest person I have ever met, and she gives her humor and light away freely, to anyone who needs it.” I had rehearsed exactly none of this in the mirror, and every word of it was arriving on its own, truer than anything I’d have planned. “It’s a kindness she hands out on purpose, over and over, to make everyone around her feel lighter, and I don’t think this town has ever once stopped to notice how much work that actually is. I noticed. I spent a whole season noticing.”

My voice caught, and I let it. “She wrote me two minutes of material that made this whole crowd howl, and then she stood in the wings and almost cried because she was proud of me, and I have never in my life had anyone be proud of me like that, out loud, in public, on purpose. She has run this whole festival almost single-handed all season—a hundred years of family tradition, resting on her shoulders this year same as it rested on every Starling woman before her—and made every single one of you feel like it was the best one yet, and I watched her do it, and I fell in love with her the entire time.”

I had to stop and breathe, because saying it out loud, finally, after all this time only saying it inside my own head at two in the morning felt like setting down something I’d been holding so long, I’d forgotten it had a weight at all. “I love her. I love you, Elizabeth Anne Starling, completely, permanently. And I’m saying it with every single one of you standing here to hear it, because she has more than earned a promise made where everyone can hear it, instead of one more thing done quietly where it doesn’t cost anybody anything.”

Nobody in that crowd was breathing either, as far as I could tell.

“That’s my Harvest Promise,” I said, and my voice had gone rough all the way through. “I promise to keep falling for her, every day, for as long as she’ll let me.”

For one full second, nothing happened. The whole festival held its breath together, every last one of us, waiting.

Then the crowd began to move.

Nobody told the crowd to move, but they did anyway, everybody stepping aside at once like they’d rehearsed it, until a clean bright aisle opened up straight through the middle of them, everyone falling back on either side. At the far end of it stood Elizabeth in her pretty blue dress, both hands pressed over her mouth. Then her hands came down. Then she was walking.

She came down that aisle like she’d been born walking toward exactly this, fast, faster, the crowd murmuring and turning to watch her go, somebody’s low whistle, somebody else laughing out loud with pure delight, and I came down off the gazebo steps to meet her because I could not have stood still one more second if my life had depended on it.

She didn’t say anything. She got both hands into the front of my jacket, fisted the fabric like she meant to never let go of it again, and pulled me down, and I kissed her right there in front of that whole crowd, wearing the sash under the gazebo lights with every neighbor close enough to see, and June somewhere behind us, phone held high over her head to get the shot, already narrating live to however many thousand strangers were watching this happen on a screen somewhere—told you, TOLD you, I am never doing content this good again in my entire life—over the blood pounding in my own ears. It went deep and slow, no rush left in either of us despite every reason in the world to hurry, her hands sliding up into my hair, mine finding the small of her back and pulling her the rest of the way in, and the whole loud world went somewhere else for exactly as long as we needed it to.

Somewhere behind us the band, who had clearly been waiting on exactly this cue their entire careers, struck up something bright and quick, and the crowd erupted into noise and stomping and a general abandonment of dignity, and people were grabbing each other’s hands and spinning onto the dance floor, and somewhere I heard my sister let out a whoop that was probably heard clear across town.

Elizabeth pulled back just far enough to look up at me, breathless, her forehead against mine, and she was laughing and crying at the same time in a way that broke apart the last of whatever had been holding me together since I had to walk away from her.

“You,” she said, “just gave this whole town something better than I ever could have written for you.”

“I had a good teacher.”

Her hands were still fisted in my jacket, and she looked up at me, eyes wet and bright and entirely unguarded for maybe the first time since I’d known her, no joke standing ready behind it. “I love you too, Matt. In case that wasn’t already extremely obvious.”

“It was not obvious. I had genuine concerns.”

“Liar.” She kissed me again, quick, fierce, like she couldn’t help it, and then buried her face against my shoulder, still laughing, still shaking, and I stood there in the middle of all that noise and held on to her like she was the only solid thing left standing in Sweetbriar, which, as far as I was concerned, she was.

Chapter 35

Elizabeth

We were still tangled up together, my hands fisted in his jacket and his forehead against mine, when the crowd closed in around us both.