Page 75 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“When?”

“I don’t know yet. Soon, maybe.”

“I liked when she was here.” He considered his cereal. “She smells like the airplane store.”

She wanted to laugh and something in her chest wouldn’t let her. He liked when she was here. He should like it. The woman who left prospectuses on tables also read Toby three stories in a row, and knew he was afraid of the vacuum, and loved him. Genuinely. She loved him the way she had loved Jefferson, and Toby was all of Jefferson there was left. Maris could hate the manipulation of wealth. She couldn’t hate the grandmother. And Toby only had the grandmother. Someday he’d be old enough to understand the trap, and he’d have to figure it out himself.

“Eat,” she said. “We’re late.”

She dropped him at the school gate. Dot seized him by the sleeve and towed him towards the sandpit with the world-shattering news that her baby sister had learned to make a raspberry sound. Sara raised a hand from the door. Toby went in without a backward look. She stood at the gate a moment anyway.

She didn’t want to go home to the quiet cottage and the prospectus. She turned the other way instead, down towards Main Street, and the comfort of Fairhaven Falls.

Java Joy was warm and loud and smelled of scorched sugar. Elara had the machine going full roar and slid Maris her coffee before she’d finished asking, because Maris had the same thing every time and Elara had learned it in less than a week. No one in Charleston had managed it in five years.

“On the house,” Elara said. “You look like somebody who had in-laws.”

“That obvious?”

“Honey, the whole town watched them not eat Rona’s fried pickles at the festival. It’s basically local news.” She was already turning to the next order. “Go sit in the sun and take some deep breaths. You’ll feel better.”

She carried the cup down Main Street towards the square, past the familiar stores. Posy was rearranging the window of Second Chance and waved at her. Grondar ducked out of the general store with a sack of flour over each arm, his shoulders filling the doorway. He gave her a rumbling morning, Maris, that she would have sworn made the pavement vibrate.

She reached the square and sat on the low wall by the fountain, under the minotaur statue of Houston’s great-something-grandfather. She drank her coffee and watched the ducks bully each other around the pond, and loved the place so much it hurt.

That was when the anger hit her. She’d spent the whole visit waiting to be angry at Lawton’s indulgent smile, or Cornelia’s just a splash for you, but none of it was cruel enough to cause that spark.

But this time she thought about the offer, turning it over the way she’d turned it over a hundred times, and finally realized what was missing. Everything on that table had been about what Toby gained. School. Cousins. His father’s people. Security. A house in his name. A future. And she’d felt the good sense of it pulling at her. From the moment Cornelia set the prospectus down to the moment they drove away, not one person in the room had entered a single figure on the other side of the ledger.

No one had considered the four greenhouses. The cold frames she’d built herself out of salvaged windows, on her knees in the frost. The propagation benches. The long back run of ridge natives she’d hiked out one careful division at a time, with a trowel and a bucket and a permit. A summer of blistered heels, and plants that did not exist in a Charleston nursery and could not be shipped and would die in a city yard. Hardy Stock, a business she’d built out of nothing and Flora’s phone call. Her life. Her actual life.

It wasn’t malice. That was what finally ignited the rage. If Cornelia had sneered at the nursery, Maris could have set her jaw and dug in. But Cornelia hadn’t sneered. Nobody had. It simply had not occurred to any of them—not to Lawton, not to Cornelia, not even to the version of herself who had sat there nodding—that her work was a real thing, a thing that could be lost. To them it was a hobby she’d taken up in the mountains while they weren’t looking. Something she’d naturally set down for something serious. A splash of milk. Easily poured out.

She’d nearly done it. She’d nearly done the arithmetic their way and come out the far side agreeing that weighed against a good school, she had nothing.

“Well. Finally.”

Flora materialized on the wall beside her, bright as a warning sign in a fluorescent orange tracksuit with FRESHLY SQUEEZED across the chest.

“Finally what?”

“The mad. Been waiting on it for two days.” Flora patted her knee with a small green hand. “You’ve been drooping around like a wet dishrag since those two rolled in. It was getting on my nerves.”

“I’m fine, Flora.”

“You’re finally not fine, which is a big improvement.” Flora squinted at the quarreling ducks. “You want my advice, and don’t tell me you don’t. That woman gave you a fine offer, but that’s what makes it dangerous. It’s easy to turn down a bad offer. A good one’ll talk you clean out of your life, and never raise its voice doing it.”

She didn’t even bother to ask how Flora knew about the offer.

“You did the sums her way,” Flora added mildly, which meant she was about to hit a sore spot. “You put the boy on one side and yourself on the other and you looked at how small your side was. But you’re not supposed to be on the other side of the boy, dear. You’re supposed to be standing next to him.”

Maris looked at her.

“Mm.” Flora jumped down off the wall as if she were twenty instead of whatever mysterious age she actually was. “There’s a fella lives about four hundred yards that way who figured out something hard this week and didn’t tell you either. You two are a matched set of martyrs and it’s exhausting.” She squeezed Maris’s shoulder with surprising strength. “Go home. Get mad the rest of the way. Then do something quiet about it, because the quiet ones usually win in the end.” And she was gone before Maris could blink.

She walked home the long way, still angry, and ran into Aidan coming out of the sheriff’s office with a rolled tube of maps under one arm.

“Hey, garden lady.” He fell in beside her, grinning. “Survived the visiting dignitaries?”