Page 3 of Where the Roses Bloom
“You always do this,” he said again, like I was the one being crazy. “You throw a fit and bail instead of working shit out.”
I stepped past him, duffel bumping my hip.
“I begged you to work shit out, Carter. For years.”
He grabbed my arm—not hard, not bruising, juststupid. Just desperate. I froze and looked down at his hand.
His voice dipped. “Please, Willow. Don’t do this. We can figure it out.”
He was being nice right now…but I knew that could change. He’d shoved me more than a few times, and my college friends had told me it would escalate. I didn’t have those friends anymore; he’d told me they weren’t real friends, and I’d believed him.
So I gently, carefully pulled away, making him take his hand off me.
Like peeling off a leech.
“You already did,” I said.
And then I walked out.
And now I was here.
Stalled out on the edge of a road I didn’t recognize, somewhere past Savannah, the woods pressing in on me.
I blinked at the dashboard like maybe I could will it back to life. Turned the key again. Nothing.
My forehead hit the steering wheel.
And I cried.
Not loud, not sudden—just the slow, exhausted kind that spills out when your soul is too tired to keep up appearances. I cried until my head throbbed and the windows fogged and the last trace of Charlotte bled out of my system.
Eventually, I curled up in the driver’s seat with a blanket from the trunk. My whole life was in that car—herbal tinctures, dog-eared notebooks, a chipped mug wrapped in a scarf. One last vial of moon oil. A red thread.
The pillow from my old apartment still smelled like rosemary and regret.
I didn’t pray. I didn’t whisper to the trees.
I just closed my eyes and hoped—like always—that something, somewhere, would give me a sign that my life wasn’t over.
CHAPTER 2
Rhett
There wassomebody pulled over at the end of my driveway.
I noticed it through the trees that morning—just a flash of color at first, a pale green car where there shouldn’t have been one. It was tucked in just past the curve in the long driveway, where the oak trees thinned out and the gravel shoulder turned soft.
I had no ideawhyit was there…most folks didn’t come down this way unless they meant to, let alone pull into the long drive up to the old Ward House.
So why the hell was there someone parked there?
It was early, sun still low enough to set everything glowing. I’d gone out first thing to trim the edge of the blackberry vines from the fence line, sweating already even though it wasn’t past eight. I popped the occasional berry in my mouth, glancing over at the car every so often to see if anyone got out—probably some drunk kid eager to see the haunted house…
…until an hour passed, and the carstillhadn’t moved.
I took a closer look as I sipped coffee on the porch, head cocked, brow furrowed. Old VW Bug…faded paint. A bumper sticker peeling off the back window, some hippie shit from the looks of it. The car wouldn’t have been out of place in town, but I didn’t recognize it.
Which meant it was out of place—because I knew everyone who lived in Willow Grove, and my brother serviced all their cars.
