Soon, their food came out, plate after chipped plate. There were crowder peas, golden cornbread, and fried trout laced with needle-thin bones. Cold watermelon, which Cole told Willow to sprinkle with salt.
“What?” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Do you trust me?”
She looked at him. She smiled. Then she sprinkled her watermelon with salt, and dang, if it didn’t make the sweetness even sweeter.
The room hummed with low voices, clinking glass, and the occasional thunk of a chair leg on the warped wooden floor. A little girl in cutoffs and a tank top stuck a quarter into the jukebox, and it kicked out a warbly version of “You Are My Sunshine.”
Willow lifted her bottle of Cheerwine in a toast. “This is nice.”
“Told you,” Cole said.
Willow laughed. The Cheerwinewasexcellent; she was on her third bottle. “This,” she said, gesturing around them, “the food, the music—everything.”
Cole leaned back, the metal chair creaking beneath him. “Even the company?”
“Wow. Look at you, begging for compliments.”
He grinned. “Is that a yes?”
She searched for an appropriate retort, then changed her mind. “Sure,” she said, more playful than sardonic. “Even the company.”
Over a shared piece of lemon icebox pie, Cole asked Willow about her lifebefore. Before Hemridge and all the rest.
“Tell me about the Braselton sisters,” he said. “What was it like growing up in that grand house of yours?”
The question should have felt dangerous. He already called her “princess,” for heaven’s sake. But the Cheerwine had loosened something in her chest. The waitress had gotten friendlier as day turned to dusk and dusk swept into evening, and the most recent round she’d brought them tasted tangier and made her throat burn.
“Sour mash,” the waitress had said with a wink.
It was more than the alcohol, though. Willow liked Cole, and she knew that the window of time in which she could get to know him—and let him know her—was rapidly closing.
“Three little girls in a house too big for them,” she said finally. “My sisters and I... I don’t know. We love each other. But we’re not close the way sisters are supposed to be, I think.”
“Supposed-to-be’s have a habit of misbehaving,” Cole observed.
“Yeah. Maybe. Juniper is amazing. Sweet, funny, loves stories almost as much as I do. But she’s eight years younger than me. That’s a pretty big gap.”
She sipped her drink. “Ash is sixteen andverycompetitive. Not that she needs to be. She’s always been the clever one. I, on the other hand...”
“Let me guess. You were the wild one,” Cole said.
“The troubled one,” she corrected. She stared at the table. “The one who saw things that weren’t there.”
A breeze blew through the little restaurant and made the screen door bang.
Cole glanced toward it, then back at her. He swiveled his lower body and stretched his legs out long. “I used to think it was a curse,” he said. “Feeling too much. Sensing patterns that other people didn’t. Knowing there was more to the world than what most people see.”
There was a sadness behind his words. Willow guessed he was thinking of Micah, his little brother who’d disappeared, and the duskwyrm that had taken his place.
“Maybe . . . in Eryth . . .” she said tentatively.
“You’ll find the Lost Souls who slipped through the cracks?” Cole asked wryly.
He didn’t have to say it like that. Willow pressed her lips together and wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
“Sorry,” Cole said, shaking his head. “But that’s not why you’re going anyway. You’re not looking for those who are lost. You’re looking for Serrin.” To his credit, he kept both malice and mockery out of his tone. “Would you tell me more about him? I’d like to understand.”
