That night, Nate was supposed to have stopped by to help me close up before taking me to dinner. It was our first night alone in almost a month. I’d bought a little special something for the occasion and couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when I stripped down to it.

We’d had no time for each other in the weeks leading up to the ribbon cutting. It had just been me and Clem and—

Irene paused and shook her head as she tried to put the pieces together, but she just couldn’t remember any of the summer after that night.

“Please spare me the details about your lingerie purchases,” Addison said, breaking Irene’s concentration.

“This is my story. I’ll tell it how I want to tell it.”

I looked out over the town square as I locked the door. Backyard roosters crowed the sun into the sky, and hounds woke the moon with their songs. Fireflies broke up the gloom from the Bonner bourbon distillery—their light just enough to chase away the darkness that clung to windows and walls and branches like soot, a thin dusting of shadow.

Clem came up beside me and flipped the Open sign to Closed. She’d ditched her black leather jacket as soon as the humidity had settled in, and she had on her favorite Cranberries T-shirt. We’d gotten it together at a concert in the fall.

I forced my worry over the tea leaves away. It probably wasn’t even my own fear anyway. Just that morning, I’d healed a young mother’s anxiety over her son being slow to start walking, and until I could get home and give the emotions to the shadow garden, they’d sit right in the center of my chest, putting down roots in my heart as if the anxiety I’d taken from her was my own. It had to be that.

“Our first day on the books,” Clem said.

I turned and leaned the back of my head against the glass. “We did it.”

Though Clem wasn’t family, she might as well have been. We’d been best friends since we were kids, and opening a tea shop together had been our dream, as fewer and fewer people were showing up at my mother’s door, choosing instead to give their darkest memories up at the annual bourbon festival, rather than heal slowly over time, their suffering eased by Haywood magic.

Clem looped her arm through mine.

“Honestly, I didn’t think we’d pull this off until our thirties,” Clem said.

“All of our dreams are coming true,” I said.

“Some might say you’ve peaked.” Clem grinned and looked at the Bonner-family diamond on my left hand. “Speaking of which, wasn’t Nate supposed to be here an hour ago?”

I looked at the shop’s answering machine. There were no new messages.