Page 76 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Barely.”

“You’ll be happy to know that there’s temporary exclusion fencing all around your lilies. Staked and flagged so nobody’s boots go near them while the surveyors are up on the ridge. I signed off on it Tuesday. Garrick paid for it himself.” He shook his head. “Eric said he put his own neck on the line, too.”

She slowed. “His own neck how?”

“You didn’t—” Aidan stopped, and had the grace to look embarrassed. “Huh. He didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what, Aidan?”

“The board wouldn’t agree. Thought it was too risky to suggest moving the site. They figured he’d talk the client off the ridge, the client would hate the new site, and Stonehaven would lose the job and the client both in one move.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So they let him go to Palisade on one condition. If the numbers at the new site don’t hold, it’s not the firm that eats it. It’s him. His money, his name, his personal loss.” Aidan shook his head again. “Which is why there’s a wet patch of moss in the woods with a fence around it that cost about what I paid for my truck. Not that my truck cost much, but still. All for⁠—”

“All for a flower.”

The voice came from behind them, dry and amused. A gnome she half knew from the co-op had said it, obviously baffled. All that fuss for a flower. He went on down the street, chuckling to himself.

The gnome looked at a fenced seep and saw a silly expensive fuss over a flower. Cornelia looked at a greenhouse and saw a hobby. But one male in this town had looked at the same flower, and the same greenhouses, and understood without being told that they were her whole life. He’d understood it so completely that he was willing to take the loss personally rather than let a bulldozer crash through it. And he’d never said a single word to her about it.

She had nearly let herself be talked out of her life. And four hundred yards away a gargoyle was willing to sacrifice part of his life to save something important to her without her even asking.

“You okay?” Aidan said.

“He’s under this morning,” she said. “He told me last night he was going.”

“He does that when he’s chewing on something.” Aidan looked at her sideways. “You want me to⁠—”

“No.” She was already heading towards the gate that stood open now, because he’d opened it for her and for Toby weeks ago. “No. But thank you, Aidan. Really.”

She found him in the conservatory.

The first time she’d ever seen him like this she’d panicked. She’d found him on a bench in the overgrown garden, grey and hard and not breathing, and cold to the marrow. She’d had her hand on his neck when he opened his eyes. He’d told her that he wasn’t gone when he was in the stone, just very distant. She knew the difference now, the way she knew his breathing in the dark. This was not death. This was rest.

He sat where the morning light came through the glass, wings folded, head slightly bowed, grey and vast and utterly still. She put her hand on his stone arm.

Cool. Not dead-cool. She had known that much since the afternoon she sat and read beside him in this room. Cool as a river rock in the shade, with something under it going so slow it was almost nothing. She had felt it that day and set it aside without looking at it, the way she had set aside four greenhouses. She looked at it now. It was not almost nothing. It was him, down deep inside the stone.

She sat down on the cool tile beside him, her back against the great curve of his wings, and pulled her knees up. She only found the courage to speak because he couldn’t answer. He had told her that he could hear from inside the stone, and she was counting on it. He could hear her, but he couldn’t turn his head and look at her with those gold-flaring eyes, or say one word back. He would stay silent, and she could say what she needed to say, and not have to survive being watched while she did it.

“I turned it down,” she told him. “The offer. I decided about ten minutes ago, on a wall by the duck pond, and you’re the first one I’ve told, and you can’t say a word back, which is apparently the only way I can get it out.” Her voice cracked and she let it. “I nearly took it, Garrick. I want you to know that. I sat at that table and I nearly did the sums the way she wanted me to, and it scared me how much sense it made.”

The still grey form said nothing. Morning sunlight drifted over him.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She placed her palm against his cool arm. “I’m staying. Me and Toby. We’re staying here. And I need you to know that before you know it, because I don’t think I can say it to your face yet—not all of it. But I can say I love you to a rock.” A shaky laugh. “So. I’m staying. And it terrifies me, because the last time I let myself belong somewhere I was seven years old and it turned out the somewhere didn’t want me. Every day since then I’ve kept a bag packed in the back of my head. And I don’t want to anymore. That’s the part that’s frightening. Not the leaving. The unpacking.”

She leaned her head back against him and shut her eyes and stayed there a while in the sunlit quiet. Eventually she would have to say all of it to him awake.

“You put yourself on the line to protect those lilies,” she said softly. “You didn’t even tell me. You beautiful impossible stone-headed man.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “We are going to have to talk about that.”

Then she got up, and touched the top of his bowed head once, the way she’d smooth Toby’s hair, and went to write a letter.

She wrote it at her kitchen table with the Ashby prospectus pushed to one side, in her best handwriting, on the good paper. Cornelia would notice the paper. Maris wanted her to.

Dear Cornelia, she wrote, and then she did exactly what she’d watched Cornelia do for six years and finally understood, sitting on a wall by a fountain that morning. You never raised your voice. You were unfailingly gracious. You thanked, and you agreed, and you declined so beautifully that the person you’d just refused went away feeling they’d been done a kindness.

She thanked them for the offer, and meant it, and said so. She wrote that she knew what it had cost them to open their family and their home so wide. She wrote that Toby was lucky past measure in his grandparents. That was true too.

Then, gently, with no edge anyone could point to, she declined.

She wrote that Toby’s life was here now. His school and his friends, and Dot’s baby sister who’d learned to make a raspberry noise, and the ridge behind the town where the rare things grew, and the male he wanted wings like. Then she wrote that her work was here, the business she’d built and would not set down—and she let that sentence sit in the middle of the page, plain and unapologetic. A figure entered at last on the other side of the ledger, where no one had thought to put it.