Page 68 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
I nod, biting my lip. His hands are so warm, cradling my own as I process everything he’s told me. Everything about Matthieu now slots into place, the puzzle pieces clicking quietly. I can see the full picture now, the sadness he’s dragged around with him. The hope. And in a way, the frost tale is true. This man I met as the frost formed will leave as it thaws. He’ll break my heart and take it with him when he goes.
“Did you ever intend to stay?” I ask softly.
“I hoped, in time, I might be able to leave Henri behind, especially as you became sure about staying, but...” He sighs. “Lookat what I’ve done. And putting you in danger... that cannot happen again. Ever. Carrie, I have to leave. I have to figure this out in my own way, in my own time. I don’t think I’ll ever find Henri’s body or any answers about why he left that morning, and I have to make my peace with that.”
I nod quickly, sniffing back tears. “You’ll be haunted until you come to terms with his death.”
“Yes,” he says softly.
I brush a tear away, then another, not able to look at him. How can I hold this against him? But equally, how can I convince him to stay if every corner of Woodsmoke reminds him of what he’s lost?
“Do you want me to visit you again here? Or is it better if—if—”
“We say goodbye now?”
I don’t trust myself to speak.
“I don’t want to say goodbye. I love you. This winter together, what we have...” He swallows. “I want to say I’ll be back, but I need time.”
I stifle a small sob, but nod and move closer, leaning in so I’m resting beside him, my head beside his. His fingers stay entwined in mine, and we lie there together as the hospital moves around us, as lives begin and lives end, talking about the cottage and ice-skating and our midnights. We talk until I see he is growing tired. I watch his eyes close and the world drift away from him. Then I press a kiss to his cheek, wishing our lives could have been different. Wishing Woodsmoke, my home, my anchor, wasn’t the one thing standing between us.
Wishing more than anything that he didn’t have the burden of this ghost.
“Goodbye,” I whisper, turning away and feeling my fragile heart begin to crack.
Chapter 52
Jess
“I want to go home now” are the first words Carrie says when she leaves Matthieu’s side. Her face, already wrecked from the cold night she spent on the mountain, swells with more tears as Jess wheels her back to her room. “Can you speak to the doctor? Get them to speed up with their final checks and get me discharged? I need to go and see Cora and Howard, go and check on them in the ward Howard’s in. I shouldn’t stay here. I need to pull myself together, be strong for them...”
“Sure,” Jess says, glancing quickly back at Matthieu, asleep on the hospital bed. His features are just as wrecked, just as hollowed out. As though the mountain took and took from him, leaving nothing else for him to give. She doesn’t know what Carrie has found in this man over the winter. Jess doesn’t know him at all. She’s never seen Carrie devastated, not in all the years they grew up together.
But... she’s missed the last decade. That’s ten years of cracked hearts, of misery and grief and loneliness. Guilt holds a blade to her chest, slowly sinking between her ribs. Suppressing her own feelings, the nausea grows in her belly. But she chooses to be the friend she should have been all along. “Whatever you need.”
“Should I have come back? I don’t know anymore. I thought, I guess I thought, he was the one. That it all suddenly made sense. The cottage, the wildflowers... it was like Ivy left it all there for me to find.”
“And he’s not... the one?”
“He’s leaving.”
“Shit.”
Carrie’s breath stutters in her chest, and she quietly cries, pressing her fingers into her eyes. No one looks at either of them, no one bothers with them as Jess wheels Carrie slowly along the fluorescent-lit corridors, trying to figure out what to say.
“I can’t go with him. Not after this winter, not after finding what I’ve been missing all these years. Roots. A home. But he—he wouldn’t want me to anyway.”
“You’re meant to stay, Carrie,” Jess says, stopping suddenly. She walks around to the front of the wheelchair and kneels down before her. After a brief hesitation, she reaches across, gripping Carrie’s hands in hers. They’re cold, so much colder than her own, but a faint thrill goes through her, a connection she hasn’t felt in too long. She steadies herself, looking down at their hands, then up into Carrie’s eyes. She suppresses a wave of mourning for the woman she never saw Carrie grow into. “You’re meant to stay. In fact, you should never have left. It’s the biggest regret of my life, letting you go like that. Not speaking to you, not trying harder to search for you.”
“You... searched for me?”
Jess’s nose wrinkles. “Online mostly. Just every now and then. Ivy told me once you were in St. Ives, renting a cottage, and I went to go and find you. I guess I was beginning to think that you didn’t care anymore, that you had moved on. But I didn’t move on. Not ever. I know it seemed that way, but I was scared, Carrie. And guilty.” Jess shakes her head. “It’s amazing what guilt will do.
“So I told Tom I wanted a few days to myself, to be by the sea. I caught the train, checked into a B&B, and the whole time I kept telling myself I should turn back. But I couldn’t stop myself. I... I had to see you.” She clears her throat, looking down at theirhands again. “On the second morning I saw you across the beach, batting away a seagull, laughing with some guy over cones of ice cream. It was... I couldn’t breathe. I remember just standing there, watching you like some kind of ghost. I imagined myself going over, talking to you, but that little strip of sand seemed impossible to cross. Anyway, you just wandered off with him after a while, and I didn’t follow.”
Carrie frowns, quiet for a moment. “That might have been Ian.”
“Might have been?”
