Page 7 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
A change, a shift in the way the air flows around me. And when I look up, my eyes crash into his across the square. I falter, and the pounding of my heart lurching in my chest echoes through every inch of me. The ground tilts.
“Tom,” I whisper, that one syllable carrying the old weight of a broken, restless heart.
He’s got his hood up, half obscuring his features, but I’d know him anywhere. I’d know him as a child, as a middle-aged man, as an elderly man walking the winding road toward death. There are some people you just know that way. And as though he heard my whisper across the pavement and the wide, cobblestoned square, he takes a step toward me. But there’s a child, a small, insistent little girl tugging on his hand, pulling him back. With another sickening, aching lurch, I realize that this child must be his. His and Jess’s. I heard they got together after I left, but even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t call Jess. I couldn’t write to her. She didn’t feel like mine anymore, she felt like another person entirely. And this man, this man I knew as a boy, is all hers now. A stranger.
I can’t be here.
I run. I run as fast as I can, weighed down with the paint and the drill and everything else. I lumber all the way to my car, parked on a side street, dump all the supplies onto the backseat, and then sit in the driver’s seat taking gulp after gulp of frigid air.
Twenty minutes pass before I feel able to drive. The tremors in my hands rattle and rattle, forcing me to turn inward. To relive the last few moments of our parting, when I ripped my world apart to save his. I haven’t had a panic attack since the months leading up to the day I left. After leaving Woodsmoke behind, the attacks vanished too. Until now, I guess.
The engine turns over twice, three times, before the low rumble starts. The hail has stopped, leaving pockets of ice in the corners of the pavement shining like tiny marbles. The clouds still linger, though, pressing down on Woodsmoke, reminding us that winter is here. And the snow, the endless cold, will arrive with a finger snap soon enough.
It’s not until I’m on the road and turning out of town that Iremember the last thing on my list. Tea bags. And somehow, forgetting that one item, that simple, everyday thing, is what sends me plummeting over the edge.
When I return to the cottage, there’s another bunch of wildflowers on the doorstep. For a beat, I just stare at them. I purse my lips, frustration building in my temples, and think about all the stories, the superstitions woven through Woodsmoke. About Cora and the book and her warnings. My heart thuds faster and faster, drumming up a tempest. I don’t know if it’s fear or anger or something in between, but I pick up those flowers and hurl them into the frost.
I slam the door to the cottage in my wake. It’s not just about the wildflowers. Or the fear of who orwhatmight be leaving them on the doorstep. It’s everything. It’s this crumbling cottage, it’s being back here. It’s the hole in my heart I’ve carried for a decade, wanting so desperately to fill it with a home that didn’t seem to belong to me. I lean against the front door, gazing at the hallway. I should go back upstairs and carry on stripping wallpaper. That’s what I should do.
But I have that feeling again. Like I’m being watched. Tested. Like every move I make is being weighed and measured.
I take a deep, shuddering breath, expelling my fear and frustration, and turn to open the front door. I bend down and carefully gather up the stems of the discarded wildflowers, making sure none of the buds are damaged. Then I go into the cottage, pull one of Ivy’s old enamel jugs down from a shelf, and fill it with water. Looking at the flowers sitting in that jug on the farmhouse table, I can’t help feeling like I’m losing. Like my homecoming is a test, and I’m failing so far. Like I’m cursed, cursed to never belong here. Like the mountains are filled with fury that I left.
I rummage in the drawers, then pull out an old tub with ablend of rock salt and dried lavender buds inside. Peeling back the lid, I inhale the delicate fragrance, then carry the tub to the front door. Carefully, slowly, I pour the contents of the tub along the threshold. Along the windowsills outside. I close the lid, look up at the mountains, and squint, eyeing the path that winds up through the trees.
I can’t ignore the stories here, not like some people in town try to. I can’t ignore the signs or the warnings. I’m back in Woodsmoke, even just for the winter, and the old rules exist for a reason.
Chapter 6
Jess
He knows.
Jess realizes before Tom is even home. She knows before he leaps up the steps that lead to their front door, tugging Elodie in his wake. And when he throws the door open, letting it crack back on its hinges, her whole body runs cold.
Hescrubs his hands down his face, his eyes wild and unfocused. She’d forgotten how he is around her. How he can unravel so easily. She’d forgotten this whole other side to the man she loves, the side that was there before she loved him, before Carrie left and they found their way to each other the year after. Jess’s thoughts fracture and blur. Does he still care about Carrie? Is this just shock? Or... or...
Jess busies herself with Elodie, taking off her shoes, hanging up her coat. Her brown curls are plastered to her skin, her face a wide moon as her eyes dart to him. Her father. The man she has never seen in this state. As though he’s rolled in a patch of nettle leaves and the spines have burrowed in deep, right to his very soul.
“Tom...” Jess sighs, frowning down at Elodie, who still hasn’t said a word. Jess notices the green paint tingeing her hands. Tom picked her up from school and took her straight into town for a treat. She can smell the chocolate on Elodie’s breath as she leads her into the bathroom, then turns on the tap, and pumps the soap into her pudgy little hands.
“There were hailstones, Mummy,” Elodie whispers, dryingher hands on the towel on the back of the bathroom door. “I don’t think Daddy liked them. I didn’t like them either.”
Jess swallows, staring down at her daughter. She’s not ready to face what lies beyond the bathroom door. She thought she had exorcised those demons long ago. “Were they big?”
“Kind of like skittles?” Elodie says, considering. “Bigger than Coco Pops. I like the snow better.”
“It’s just winter beginning early, sweetheart. There’ll be proper snow soon,” Jess says, opening the bathroom door. Elodie starts her usual tinny tirade about another girl at school, about her shoes pinching her toes and how it’sso unfairthat she’s allowed only one hour of TV time when her friend Gus gets two whole hours. But Jess isn’t listening. Her focus is on Tom, standing next to the sofa, hovering over his mobile phone. It irritates her when he just hovers like that, and she wants to tell him to sit down on the damn sofa. But there’s a charge in the air, in the silence that streams from him in waves. It plumes outward, like a cloud, engulfing her and their life together. She coughs, turning away, needing to form a plan, needing to dosomething...
“Are you, er... going out later still? The pub, was it?” she asks Tom carefully as she moves into the kitchen and reaches into the fridge for the ingredients for dinner. Her hands, automatically closing around the onion, the tomatoes, the mince, need to stay busy. She wants to make a Bolognese sauce from scratch. She needs this house to smell like a home. Liketheirhome, the one they’ve built together. Then maybe Tom will snap back to himself. She needs him to make a joke, to wink at her and trick a grin from her lips. She needs him to be the Tom she fell in love with, the nineteen-year-old with the too-long hair who played bass in a band in the cramped back room of their favorite bar on the edge of town. The Tom she met up with on every universitybreak, the one she couldn’t stay away from. Who turned out to be less of a fling and more of a permanent fixture after she finished her degree.
Or maybe she’s just fooling herself.
“I... after dinner? Are you okay to put Els to bed?” he asks, distraction dragging out every syllable as he pockets his phone. He blinks at her owlishly, as though just remembering who she is. And the choices he made.
“Sure,” Jess says, her tone a touch too high and pitchy. She flicks on the kettle, needing the familiar comfort of her favorite mug warming her hands against this sudden winter chill. He’s not being himself. “Be back before ten, though? That series is starting, you know the one—”
“What? Oh yeah. Yes. Of course.” He lunges toward the staircase, still wearing his boots. Jess winces when he doesn’t take them off, picturing the germs and dirt trailing their way up the stairs. She makes a mental note to steam-mop later. Her hands are already itching to snatch up a cloth and the disinfectant, to balance a reprimand on her tongue to shoot in Tom’s direction. But it dies in her throat. Suddenly, she’s treading on eggshells again. Wondering when he’ll say her name, the name of his childhood sweetheart. The girl he offered his heart to before he offered it to Jess.
