Page 23 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Why the old ones?”

She blinked. “Sorry?”

“The old varieties.” He was watching her, not the garden. “Why not replace them with something that performs better? You said yourself these have been neglected for twenty years.”

It wasn’t a challenge. She had heard that question with an edge on it plenty of times, and the edge always meant convince me not to do the expensive obvious thing. His had no edge at all, and he wanted the answer.

“Because the old ones were bred for scent and toughness, not for looking perfect in a catalog,” she said slowly. “Even with a lot of attention, the modern ones are gorgeous for about ten years and then they sulk. These have already proved they’ll survive anything. Including me.” She nudged a cleared cane with her boot. “And because whoever planted this garden chose these. Ripping them out and starting over would be—” She stopped.

“Would be what?”

“It’d be throwing away the whole point of the place.” She met his eyes. “You don’t restore something by replacing it with a nicer version. Then it’s just a new thing.”

His whole face changed, and warm gold burned in his grey eyes for one startling second. She stared, and then he blinked and it was gone so quickly that she wondered if she’d imagined it.

“My mother designed most of this,” he said. “There was a small garden here originally and she built on that.”

Her stomach dropped. “Oh.” She looked at the mess of the garden again, with completely different eyes. “Garrick. I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t know it was⁠—”

“You didn’t need to know.” He crouched at the edge of the cleared bed, bringing himself closer to her level, and spread one enormous clawed hand over the old stone edging she’d uncovered. “She designed it the year I was born. There used to be a bench here.” He nodded at nothing, at a gap in the ruin where she supposed a bench had once been. “She’d sit here in the evenings. My father built her the gazebo.”

The one she’d been fighting all morning. The one she’d been about to recommend they demolish.

“I can save the gazebo,” she said quickly. “It’s rotten, but I can copy it. Same shape, same⁠—”

“No.” He shook his head. “Rebuild it properly. She’d have preferred it sound over sentimental.” The corner of his mouth moved. “She used to complain it wobbled.”

She laughed before she could stop herself, and after a second the flat line of his mouth softened into an answering smile.

“When did she die?” she asked.

“When I was eighteen.” He said it with no emotion at all. “It was fast, once it started. After that my father—” He stopped, and his hand flexed against the stone. “Everything changed. The house. The grounds. Him. He stopped keeping any of it up. Stopped keeping himself up. He let it all go, because she wasn’t in it.”

The garden went very quiet around them. A bird worked at something in the ivy. Down the hill, past the wall, she could hear the ordinary sounds of the town going about its morning.

“My husband died when Toby was ten months old,” she said.

She hadn’t meant to tell him. It came out anyway, because she couldn’t leave him standing there alone with his sorrow.

He looked at her.

“Car accident. Nobody’s fault, which somehow made it worse, because there was nobody to be angry at.” She turned the glove over in her hands. “We weren’t… It wasn’t a great love story. We were friends. Good friends. Toby was a surprise and we decided to be a family about it. But he was a good man, and Toby should’ve had him, and he doesn’t.” She shrugged, aiming for lightness and not quite making it. “After, I stayed with his parents in Charleston. For Toby’s sake. Grandparents, stability, all of that.”

“For how long?”

“Almost four years.” She heard the old tightness come into her voice and couldn’t do anything about it. “They were never unkind. That’s the thing I can’t even complain about properly. They were perfectly polite the entire time they were letting me know I wasn’t quite what they’d have chosen.”

He didn’t say anything soothing. He didn’t say I’m sure they really loved you, or they meant well, the way people always did, in the way that made her feel she’d whined about nothing. He just watched her with those steady eyes, actually hearing what she’d said, and she had to look down at the glove for a moment.

“Give me the cane,” he said.

“What?”

“The bramble.” He nodded at the tangle she’d been losing to before he arrived. “You’ve got about six roots left in that anchor. It’ll take you an hour. Let me do it.”

She should say no. She’d built a whole small business on saying no to exactly this, to the wealthy man who assumed she needed rescuing and wanted the satisfaction of solving her problem for her. She opened her mouth to say it.

“It’s not a favor,” he said, before she could. “I want to know if I can pull it. You said it’s been winning a long time.”