Cover

Dedication

For everyone who wishes they could remember and to those who would give anything to forget. And, especially, for Nick.

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Yarrow’s Founding Families

Chapter 1

Addison

Yarrow, Kentucky, was big enough that you didn’t know everyone, but small enough that it felt like everyone knew you. For Addison Haywood, it wasn’t just a feeling. The entire town of Yarrow did know her. Just like they’d known her mother and her grandmother and each generation of Haywood women as far back as anyone could remember.

For years, the people of Yarrow would bring their heartache to the cottage at the edge of town, where a Haywood would take one look at them and see the pain that had sprouted from their hearts—the yellow carnation petals of disappointment, a petunia hinting at resentment, the trailing leaves of a willow revealing a sadness, soft and deep. All one had to do was ask, and a Haywood would uproot the suffering from their heart and ease their sorrow.

The Haywoods would then take that pain out the back door, bury their hands beneath the soil, and offer it to the earth. The more pain their shadow garden took, the more it thrived. Though summer had come, the garden produced cabbage and greens in abundance, as if the oppressive heat didn’t touch them. Even in winter, as frost gripped the rest of the land, within the shadow garden, peppers bloomed, blackberries fattened on the vine, and sunflowers opened wide beneath the snow.

But not every pain required magic to be remedied. Sometimes a simple cup of tea would do, and so, twenty-five years ago, Irene Haywood opened Lavender & Lemon Balm. In the tea shop, the Haywoods paired nonmagical plants’ inherent properties with each customer’s needs. Chamomile for anxiety. Valerian for insomnia. Lemon balm for sadness. Then they’d look to the tea leaves left at the bottom of the cup for insight into their customers’ lives and share what the universe had to offer.

Of course, when a cup of tea wasn’t enough, the Haywood magic was there to help—and it would be, as long as each generation had a Haywood born with that magic.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

At age twenty-four, Addison should’ve been well established with the family gift, but after one disastrous incident, she couldn’t be trusted to go digging around in anyone’s heart without her mother or her grams at her side.

She’d worked in her mother’s tea shop less and less since then, every moment spent inside its doors a reminder that she couldn’t offer her neighbors the healing they sought without risking taking more than she should. These days, Addison had to have a very good reason to visit her mother at work.