Page 23 of Wild Thorns

"Do you always just appear?"

"I was in the area." His hands were in his pockets, his pace matching mine without apparent effort. "I thought you might like to see the old part of town. It's historically interesting."

"Historically interesting." I couldn't keep the smile from my voice. "Is that Eli-speak for 'I want to give you a tour, but I'm pretending it's about architecture'?"

He glanced at me sideways, and I caught the edge of a smile beneath his usual composure. "Maybe."

"Lead the way, then. I'm a sucker for architecture."

We walked in comfortable silence for a few minutes. There was something different about being with Eli, a quality of quiet that didn't feel like absence. When Callum was silent, it felt heavy, charged with things unsaid, electricity building before a strike. When Eli was silent, it felt peaceful. Like he was simply comfortable existing beside me without the need to fill every moment with words.

I found myself relaxing into it, letting my shoulders drop from where they'd crept up toward my ears. My therapist in Atlanta had talked about this, the way trauma lived in the body, the constant low-grade tension of waiting for something bad to happen. With Eli, that tension eased.

I didn't know why. I just knew it did.

The route he took wound through streets I hadn't explored, past buildings that had clearly been standing since before the Civil War. Their facades were weathered but maintained, the kind of careful preservation that spoke of old money and older pride. The streets here were narrower, shaded by oaks draped in Spanish moss, the light filtering through in golden-green patterns that shifted with every breeze.

He pointed things out as we walked: the original general store, now a café with a hand-painted sign. The church where the founding families had worshipped, its white steeple sharp against the deepening blue of the sky. The courthouse with its distinctive ironwork, those same strange symbols I'd seen on the fences throughout town.

I paused at the ironwork, studying it. The symbols seemed to move in my peripheral vision, shifting like something alive, though when I looked directly at them they were perfectly still. Cold metal. Unchanging.

"You know a lot about this place," I said.

"I'm the family archivist." He said it matter-of-factly, like it was a normal job description. "Someone has to keep track of where we've been. What we've done. What we've... learned."

The pause before learned felt deliberate. Like he'd chosen the word carefully from several options.

"That sounds like it comes with responsibility."

"It does." He adjusted his glasses, that thinking tell I was learning to read. "Our family has a long history. Longer than most people realize. Keeping that history accurate and accessible matters more than you might think."

"Accessible to whom?"

He looked at me then, really looked, and there was something in his expression I couldn't read. His eyes, gray in some lights, silver in others, seemed to catch the fading sun and hold it.

"To the people who need to understand it."

Before I could push further, we'd reached the courthouse, and he was pointing at the ironwork.

"The Thornwood crest," he said. "The founding family. Our ancestors, technically. The line's been continuous for more than a thousand years. Settling in this area almost three hundred years ago."

"Those symbols." I traced one with my finger, not quite touching the metal. It seemed to hum faintly, like a tuning fork struck at a frequency just below hearing. "What do they mean?"

"Protection." He watched my hand hover near the ironwork. "At least, that's what the historical records say. The Thornwoods were very concerned with protecting their territory. Their people."

"From what?"

He was quiet for a moment. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, or something that sounded like a dog. The sound echoed strangely, bouncing off the old buildings.

"Envy is an age-old affliction. What you have will always be the object of another’s desire," he said finally. "Even if all you had was your life, how far would you go to protect that?"

The hair rose on my arms. Not threatening, Eli never felt threatening, but heavy with implication. Like we were standing on the edge of something, and he was deciding whether to push me over or pull me back.

"You talk about your family like you're guarding something," I said.

"Do I?"

"You all do. You, Jasper, Callum. Every conversation feels like there's another conversation happening underneath it. One I'm not invited to."