Well Met(51)

“Rooty?” I snorted. “Is that even a word?”

She grinned back. “I have no idea. Maybe? You know what I mean.”

I did. And while April wanted the anonymity of a big city, I wanted those roots. A home. A place where I belonged, with people who knew me, loved me, and wanted me around. It was the kind of life I thought I had been building with Jake, until he’d yanked those roots out of the ground and took them with him when he left.

For the first time, I considered staying in Willow Creek after the summer was over. Putting those roots down here. The bookstore café was coming together, and Chris seemed happy with our progress so far. The people from Faire had started to see me as less of a stranger in town and more of a friend, so now people said hi to me at the bank and the grocery store. Weirdness with Simon notwithstanding, I hadn’t felt this comfortable somewhere in a long time. Which only made me realize how uncomfortable I’d been the last year or so that Jake and I were together.

It had taken me some time to realize it, but maybe getting dumped by a successful, upwardly mobile attorney was the best thing that could have happened to me.

April waved goodbye on her way out, and a few seconds later the front door closed behind her. I sipped some more coffee and listened to her SUV start up. Then I listened to it idle in the driveway for about a minute and a half. Then it shut off, and while I took another sip of coffee the front door opened again.

“Goddammit.” That was all April said, and all she needed to say. I pushed my mug away and went out to the living room, where she leaned against the front door, her head bowed and her hair obscuring her face. I stepped into my flip-flops by the door and took the keys from her hand.

“It’s okay.” I threw an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned her head against mine for a long moment. I squeezed her shoulder and pressed a kiss into her hair. “Come on, let’s get you to work.”

“Goddammit.” This time the tone was a flat sigh, but she didn’t argue.

I didn’t mind being chauffeur for a little while longer. I liked being needed. It made me feel like I was necessary. Part of something. Rooty.



* * *



? ? ?

Twenty-seven.

The number kept echoing in my head for no good reason, ever since Mitch had mentioned it on Sunday morning.

Twenty-seven.

Simon’s age. And Mitch’s too. But something else. I let it roll around in the back of my mind while I went through my regular week of non-Faire-related activities. Now that we were into week three a routine had set in, and my life was split neatly down the middle between the weekend and the week. Faire and mundane. Bodice and jeans. Tavern wench and bookstore. And while Chris and I took a little time on Tuesday morning to catch each other up on our weekend spent as our alter egos, for the most part those two distinct parts of my life didn’t intersect. Once Faire ended on Sunday night, I went back to being April’s chauffeur and Chris’s barista/social media guru/bookstore minion until the next Saturday morning. So as I got busy with my weekday bookstore life, it was easy to let everything having to do with Faire fade into the background, and forget about one life while living the other.

But the number twenty-seven stayed in my head, and it wouldn’t go away.

The number made me sad, I realized on Thursday afternoon. Something associated with grief, which made no sense, since Mitch was the most cheerful person in the world. And how could numbers be sad? At that point, I was tired of thinking about it, and hoped I’d either figure it out soon or forget about it altogether.

It all came together the next Saturday, in a place I’d almost forgotten about.

It had turned into a hot summer, so when Saturday dawned unseasonably clear and cool, we all rejoiced. My skirts didn’t feel as heavy that day, and even my bodice felt less oppressive. That morning I took the long way out of the Hollow, wandering down some side lanes I didn’t get to see much of during Faire, enjoying the early-morning sunshine. A few weeks back, these lanes had wound through empty woods, and now they were full of activity. Vendors were setting up their booths for the day. I window-shopped as I walked by, contemplating a pendant for my costume. Or a hand-tooled leather belt pouch, like the one I’d gotten Cait—okay, nicer than the one I’d gotten Cait. Maybe it was for the best I didn’t come this way very often. April didn’t ask me to contribute, but Chris didn’t pay me all that much. I wasn’t exactly swimming in cash.

Thinking about how empty the woods had looked without the vendors sparked a memory of running into Simon back here. The memory collided with the number twenty-seven in my head, and now I knew what I needed to see.

It took longer than I expected to find the young tree with the memorial plaque to Simon’s brother—the lanes looked so different with the Faire set up around it—and when I did, I found crouching down to be problematic in this outfit. Instead I sat on the ground—thankfully the rain we’d gotten earlier in the week had dried by now, so my skirts wouldn’t get muddy. It was almost like I was at a cemetery, and I wanted to say something. But I’d never met Sean Graham, and I didn’t know what was going on between Simon and me, so I brushed the leaves away from the plaque and sat in contemplative silence.

“I think I understand.” My voice was small, a secret whispered between me and a man who had died years ago.

“Understand what?”