“I guess we’ll just have to change that.” His easy smile almost undid her as he leaned in and kissed her again.

Chapter 21

Kaden

Kaden had not returned to Yarrow looking to fall for a woman, yet here he was, on Irene’s couch, wrapped in a quilt from her bed as she slept only a few rooms away, the memory of her lips on his still fresh as he wondered at this thing growing between them. He’d never been one for omens and fortunes, but he found himself going back to the leaves in his cup. That fern, the sign of magic he’d been so sure would bring him answers—yet in the end, it hadn’t been magic that brought him home at all, but a stranger who’d had a little too much to drink.

Irene had said the reading suggested a chance at love. All his life it had been hard for Kaden to let anyone in. He didn’t want to become his father or his mother, and that’s why, he always tried to tell himself, it was better if he didn’t have a family at all. It was easier to avoid romance than take the chance at messing someone up the way his family had ruined one another.

But Irene had seen through him. She’d risked losing a memory to help him. Even after all that, he still couldn’t calm his racing thoughts. He needed fresh air, so he stood from the couch. He slowed at the sound of a creaking floorboard overhead. After a few seconds of silence, he continued toward the back door and out into the night.

The moon bathed the shadow garden in silver light. Kaden followed the path away from the house, bricks warm and rough against his feet. Eventually, he stepped onto soil and found himself beneath a row of sunflowers, blooms turned toward him as though he shone like the sun.

He blinked, rubbed at his eyes. He’d thought one of the hollyhock plants had done that earlier. He wondered if this, too, was part of the shadow garden magic.

He lay back on a cleared patch of earth and stared at the moon overhead, letting his mind wander to Irene. Her hair like a slant of sunlight. Her freckles like a scattering of soil. Her eyes the green-gold of new spring leaves. She was a garden come to life.

He wondered if he could make a home in Yarrow. With his father gone, there might, finally, be a place for him here. But he didn’t know if he wanted to live anywhere near his mother and brother.

As he turned the thought over in his mind, something tickled his skin. He glanced down expecting another beetle, but instead a strawberry vine had crept across the dirt toward him. He sat up and blinked, not sure if he was seeing clearly.