Page 63 of Of Potions and Honey
“How long until that happens?”
“About a month or so.”
“Hm.” Kayden looked a little dubious. “So what’s our window of time, then? This won’t last forever.”
“Probably at least a few weeks, considering the amount.” Mira winced. “It better, that wiped out the rest of my savings. I’ll be eating radishes for the rest of the month.”
Kayden chuckled. “You’re always welcome for dinner, you know that, right?”
“Thanks.” Mira managed a weak smile. “Let’s hope that won’t be necessary. Once this is in the wells, we should be able to expose them, and hopefully after that our water issues will stop being a thing.”
Hopefully. There were so many ways this plan had the potential to fail. They’d tried to make sure that it wouldn’t, but with nature, there was rarely any certainty. They’d just have to hope that nothing went wrong between now and when the well water would be saturated enough to serve as proof.
“That would be splendid indeed.” Kayden turned around and whistled for Poppy. “Come on, you menace!” He went to untie Archimedes while Mira clambered onto the front seat. “Let’s go and wait, then.”
There was a certain feeling of déjà-vu about those following weeks. Once again Mira was reduced to waiting, and this time, there was nothing else to do, at least as far as solving their parrot problem went. Mira tried to occupy herself with all the other somewhat pressing issues in her life, but it was difficult not to constantly think about all the what-ifs. What if it failed? What if it worked but Golden River wasn’t at fault after all? What if she did have to sell the house, or worse, got it foreclosed because she couldn’t keep up with her payments?
What if all she had done in those past few months turned out to have been for nothing, and all that was waiting in her futurewas selling scratchy sweaters until she the day she dropped dead on the shop floor?
The idea was more than a little bit soul-crushing.
So Mira tried her best to focus on other things. Running the shop became a daily adventure of trying to get enough water for a restock and scrounging up enough spare change for ingredients. In a gesture Mira hadn’t expected and very much felt like she didn’t deserve, Yoni let her have the basics on credit, which nearly made her bawl her eyes out in the greenhouse. Marigold spent a few confused minutes trying to climb on Mira’s shoulder until she managed to calm herself down again.
I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. You’ll take this, and you’ll keep doing your best, or I will be so mad.
That sounded sufficiently threatening to get Mira to accept, and return to the shop todo her bestto keep this dream alive, for now.
Two weeks after her and Kayden’s trip to the spring, something new entered her daily routine. A pump of water, a drop of lavender essence – and waiting for those tense few seconds to see if the water would change. Pump, drop, wait; pump, drop, wait – for almost two weeks, she then had a lavender-flavoured glass of water to go with her morning tea.
Until one morning, it happened, and Mira nearly dropped the glass.
“It worked!” She stared at the prettiest glass of water she’d ever seen. “We did it!”
With a grin on her face and heedless of the fact that she was till wearing a pyjama, she slipped into her boots, grabbed the glass, and ran across the street.
Two minutes, insistent knocking, and some muffled swearing from inside later, Yoni opened the door, squinting into the early morning light. She looked a lot less put together than Mira was used to. A lot softer. Though her tone was anything but.
“Tell me you have a good reason for this racket.”
Mira shoved the glass at her. “Yoni, it worked!”
The squint became wide-eyed surprise. “It did?” Yoni quickly opened the door and stepped aside. “Come in.”
She didn’t wait for Mira to take off her boots, but hurried into the kitchen. Mira heard the gurgling of her pump. When she followed after Yoni, she’d just put a glass on the counter and was gently pushing Marigold away.
“No, that’s not for you. Yours is on the floor.”
“Mreep!”
Mira chuckled. “The floor? How rude.”
Instantly, Marigold abandoned her attempt to stick her head into the glass, jumped off the counter, and sauntered over for her share of attention, which Mira happily gave her. Yoni went and took a bottle out of a cabinet.
“Let’s see then.”
A drop added, a few moments of silence. A sharp exhale when they watched the water turn pink.
“It worked.” Yoni leaned against the counter. “We’ve got it.”
