Chapter 9

Briar

Two days before the wedding, I packed.

Not everything. Just the things I actually needed—clothes, my kit, the notebooks I worked from, the reference samples I'd been building for two years. The stuff that had to come with me versus the stuff that could stay in boxes in a room I wasn't going to be sleeping in anymore.

Emrys's farm was twenty minutes from here. We'd agreed I'd move in the day before the wedding so there was no morning rush on the actual day. It was a practical decision. That was the only kind we made.

I went through the room methodically, which was easier than thinking about it.

Before I zipped the bag, I checked the front pocket. My grandmother's notebook was in there—I'd put it in the night I agreed to the wedding, and it had stayed there since. I pressed my hand against it once through the fabric, then zipped the bag shut.

I was zipping the bag when someone knocked.

Isolde was in the doorway with a small tin of shortbread, the kind from the bakery in town that cost more than it should. She was wearing a soft cream sweater and her hair was down and she looked exactly the way she always looked when she wanted something—warm and approachable and like she'd just happened to stop by.

Her engagement ring caught the light when she shifted the tin from one hand to the other.

"I thought we could talk," she said. "Before everything tomorrow."

I looked at her.

"We're still sisters," she said. "Whatever else is happening. That doesn't change."

I stood in the doorway and waited to feel something about that—anger, or maybe the older thing underneath the anger that I'd carried around for most of my life without a good name for it. But I didn't feel much of anything. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

"Take the cookies with you," I said.

I closed the door.

I heard her stand there for a moment. Then I heard her walk away down the hall.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my bag at my feet and didn't move for a while.

I thought about five years. Not Callum specifically—not his face or the things he'd said—but the shape of it. What it had looked like from my end. All the times I'd positioned myself slightly wrong, tried a little too hard, bent in a direction that didn't come naturally because I'd decided it was the direction I needed to go. The specific feeling of reaching for something and coming up short and then reaching again anyway.

I'd spent a long time telling myself that counted for something. That it said something about who I was.

I wasn't sure it said anything except that I'd been doing it wrong.

At some point I lay down on top of the covers without meaning to. I didn't sleep but I wasn't fully awake either. The room got dark and I didn't turn the light on.

Eventually my alarm went off at five-thirty.

I got up, washed my face, put on the clothes I'd set aside the night before. I picked up my bag. I looked around the room once—the empty shelf where the notebooks had been, the crate under the bed, the window that looked out over the east orchard.

I went downstairs carefully. My knee had been improving but mornings were still stiff, and the stairs were narrow enough that I kept one hand on the wall.

The house was quiet. My parents' door was closed.

I went out the front door. Emrys's truck was already at the gate.

He was leaning against the driver's side door with a thermos in one hand and a second one in the other, which meant he'd made coffee before driving over here, which meant he'd gotten up earlier than necessary to do that.

I walked over and he handed me the second thermos.

"It's terrible," he said.

I opened it. The smell alone confirmed this. I took a sip anyway. It was bad in a specific way, slightly burnt, slightly too strong, the kind of coffee that came out of a machine that needed descaling.

I drank the whole thing on the way to the truck.

We put my bag in the back and got in. He started the engine and pulled onto the road, heading toward Frost River and the far edge of town where his farm was.

Varne was quiet at six in the morning. Low fog sitting on the fields, the hills barely visible through it. The apple trees along the road were full and heavy, a few weeks past peak on the early varieties, right in the window on everything else. A good harvest, if it got picked on time.

His farm came into view after the bridge.

He turned into the drive and pulled up in front of the old stone house. It looked the same as it always did—solid, slightly in need of paint in a few places, a half-finished repair project visible around the left side of the building where he'd been working on the foundation.

He cut the engine.

"Ready?" he said.

I looked out at the house. The fog was starting to lift. Through it I could see the edge of the property, the outbuildings, the line of fence posts he'd been replacing one by one over the past month.

"Yeah," I said.

I meant it. That was the part that surprised me.