Chapter 1

Briar

My name is Briar Harlow. I've been in love with Callum Crane for five harvests. Tonight I found out he's marrying my sister.

I'd been sitting at Frost River for maybe twenty minutes when it happened, just me and the dark and the sound of the water, which was the usual setup when I needed to think. The road out here doesn't have a name. Dead-ends at the riverbank, half a mile past the last turnoff, and nobody uses it except me. I'd been coming here since I was sixteen. It was the one place in Varne where I could do something stupid without an audience.

Tonight's stupid thing was apparently reading my phone.

The notification came through from the Varne community board—the same one that announced road closures and lost dogs and the apple festival schedule every year. I almost swiped it away.

CRANE FAMILY ANNOUNCEMENT — Callum Crane and Isolde Harlow to wed, Apple Festival weekend, October.

I read it once. Then again. Then I put the phone face-down on the tank and stared at the river for a while.

Five years. I had three full journals at home, front to back, every corner used. That's what five years of chasing someone who kept telling you that you didn't fit looked like from the inside. From the outside I assume it looked like exactly what everyone in Varne had always thought about Briar Harlow: too much, too obvious, not quite right.

He said it enough times that I really should have listened.

You don't fit here, Briar.

This isn't how things are done.

You never—

My phone started ringing.

I looked at the screen. Emrys Crane. Of course it was.

I picked up because I didn't have a good reason not to. "What."

"Just checking." His voice was easy, the way it always was, like he'd been expecting this call to go fine. "You saw the announcement."

"Yes."

"And you're sitting at Frost River right now."

I didn't answer that.

"Okay," he said. "So you're sitting at Frost River. Are you good?"

"I'm great, Emrys. Really great."

"Yeah, you sound great." A pause. I could hear what sounded like background noise—The Burrow, probably, the faint scrape of a chair. "So I've been thinking."

"Please don't."

"Hear me out," he said. "You want to do something about this. And I have a problem."

"Your problem is the last thing I care about right now."

"My problem," he continued, like I hadn't said anything, "is that my mother has about six different harvest events planned between now and October and she expects me at all of them. The orchard showcase. The family dinner. The—honestly I stopped listening after the second one." Another pause. "I need an excuse."

I had no idea where this was going and I said so.

"Same day," he said. "Same venue, if I can get it. You and me."

I actually laughed. It came out wrong—too short, too sharp—but it was the first time I'd made any sound like it in the past half hour. "You're asking me to marry you."

"I'm asking you to solve both our problems at once."

"Emrys, I don't have a problem. I have a—" I stopped. "This is a terrible idea."

"Probably," he agreed easily. "But think about it. You show up on the same day, at the same place, in a dress. You walk away clean. Nobody gets to say you fell apart over it, because you didn't—you moved on so fast you lapped him." He let that sit for a second. "And I don't have to go to the harvest dinner."

"So the upside for you is skipping a family dinner."

"The upside for me is several family dinners, actually. And the showcase. Don't undersell it."

I looked out at the river. The water was moving the way it always did—steadily, not caring, running along the back edge of Harlow land and Crane land both without any opinion about either of us. I'd always liked that about it.

"I'm going to go talk to him," I said.

A beat. "That's a bad idea."

"I know."

"Briar—"

"I'll think about it," I said, and hung up.

I sat there another minute with the phone in my hand. Emrys Crane, who I'd known my whole life as the person on the edges of things—Callum's younger brother, the one who fixed engines and avoided obligations and showed up in places you didn't expect. Proposing we get married to settle a scheduling conflict.

It was the most ridiculous thing anyone had said to me in years.

I put the phone away and kicked the bike on.

The Crane estate was forty minutes if I took the main road. I didn't take the main road. I opened it up on the back route through the hills and pushed the engine until the cold was pulling tears from the corners of my eyes whether I wanted them there or not, until the only things that existed were the road and the speed and the smell of pine coming off the hillside.

I got there in twenty-five minutes.

Stone wall. Iron gate. The same oak trees that looked exactly the same as they had every other time I'd come here, which was more times than I'd like to count.

The upstairs window was lit.

His office. Still on.

I cut the engine and sat there with the bike ticking underneath me, looking up at that light. I thought about Emrys's voice on the phone, how easy he'd sounded, like the whole thing was obvious. I thought about three journals. I thought about the word fits, and how many ways I'd heard it used to mean that I didn't.

The gate was unlocked. It usually was.

I got off the bike and walked through it.