CHAPTER 3
A Buttonhook
Represents friendships slipping back into place.
As Violet Quigley’s hand stilled on the garden gate, she began to wonder what she was more afraid of: that everything had changed or nothing at all.
Over the past few months, she’d found herself slipping away from the regular rhythm of the day and into delicately crafted fantasies that took on the texture of tea biscuits and cinnamon scones. Like the dough that she used to knead every evening, she’d folded memories of the shop into her daydreams and let them grow to the point where she suspected they’d begun to stretch beyond reasonable possibility.
What if she walked through the door and realized her recollections were too laced with nostalgia to have ever been real in the first place?
Worse yet, there was the chance that everything was just as Violet remembered, but she’d changed too much to fit back into the steady heartbeat of the shop.
The previous year, she’d stood on the other side of this very gate with her valise dangling in one hand and the iron handle grasped in the other. She’d even been wearing the same woolen coat to ward off the harsh Chicago winds, the one that Emil had given her when they’d realized that autumn had shifted into winter while they were tucked away in his wagon. Though the scene looked nearly identical to the one that had unfolded before, Violet’s chest tightened at just how different she felt from the woman who’d closed the garden gate behind her, ready to walk toward her dreams instead of away from them.
But that thought brought along a fragile daisy chain of other concerns that she’d done her best to stay one step ahead of during her journey back home, and so, instead of lingering in the alleyway and letting her worries catch up with her, Violet threw open the latch and stepped into the garden, where the scent of witch hazel and winter jasmine instantly melted away the troubles of the present and ushered her into the warmth of the past.
For a few moments, Violet stood on the pebbled pathway with her eyes closed and let herself pull back the decades until she was a little girl again, discovering how near she could step to the alleyway without anyone noticing.
As the scent of freshly turned earth grew stronger, so did the sounds of her childhood. She could almost hear the pages of Beatrix’s book turning as the breeze caught the paper, and beyond that the murmur of Anne’s voice as she pointed to signs tethered to the comfort of safe havens. And beyond that still, the rustling of the rough apron that her mother had always worn while working in the flower beds, her laughter faint but so familiar that, for a moment, Violet forgot to breathe.
By the time the sunlight had thawed Violet’s chilled cheeks, she was ready to open her eyes once more, and the noises thathad somehow slipped beyond the careful confines of the past faded away, leaving her firmly in the present.
Drawing in a shaky lavenderlaced breath, Violet took a step toward the house, wondering what it would feel like to turn the knob of the back door and discover what awaited her.
But someone else got there first.
“Violet!” Anne cried, her voice carrying through the garden as she embraced her sister with such force that she nearly knocked them both to the ground.
Before they could topple into the nearest bed of primroses, Anne wrapped her arms around Violet’s waist and steadied her, her laughter so strong that Violet could feel it echoing against her own chest.
And in that instant, Violet knew that the most important parts of her past had remained exactly as she needed them to be.
Not one to be left out of a celebration, the house threw open all the shutters and began to snap them back and forth, as if it were clapping.
“Shh,” Anne hissed as she waved her arms up at the house. “You’ll frighten the customers!”
The house heard the smile that cut the edge off her warning, though, and started to bang all the pots and pans, which turned the heads of a few ladies in the front parlor, who wondered what kind of chaos was unfolding in the kitchen.
“Well, this certainly hasn’t changed a bit,” Violet laughed as she tightened her hold around Anne’s waist and grinned at the house.
“Come inside before it brings down the rafters,” Anne insisted as she led her sister toward the door. “Or decides to add another room to the third floor.”
But when they stepped through the threshold, Violet could already hear the boards groaning above and saw the herb bundles that hung along the wall shake ever so slightly, bothtelltale signs that the house was trying to stretch beyond its current limits. No doubt, when she and Anne walked up the staircase, they’d find a room that hadn’t been there before, with a bouquet of sweet violets resting on a freshly laundered pillow.
Though the house’s sense of excitement hadn’t ebbed during her absence, as Violet finally started to take stock of her surroundings, she realized that not everything had stayed the same.
“What’s happened to my kitchen?!” Violet cried as she turned about the room, her eyes darting from one alteration to the next until they finally settled on a familiar sight, the oak dining table where she and her sisters had spent hours discussing the details of the day to come over steaming cups of English breakfast tea and plates towering with iced buns that smelled of browned butter and nutmeg when you tore them in two. Evidentially, the house had taken one glance at the scratches carved into the wooden surface and realized that some imperfections were worth keeping just the way they were.
“I tried to stop it,” Anne sighed, throwing her hands in the air as if she were speaking about a rambunctious border collie who couldn’t be kept from jumping on the furniture. “But the house grew overly confident after its work in the front parlor and started adding an inch or two here and there when I wasn’t paying attention. Before I knew it, we had this.”
Anne swept her hand around the kitchen, which looked like something that had spilled forth from the garden. Wide windows had grown out of the plaster and were thrown open so that tendrils of the plants rooted outside snuck in and wove their way around the tea tins and cookbooks that rested along the shelves. Sprigs of lavender and thyme now dangled just within reach of the stovetop, waiting to be plucked by hurried hands and filling the entire room with the scent of spring fading gracefully into summer. The ceilings were also at least six inches higher,drawing in a sense of openness that shed light on the corners of the room that had once been shadowed and exposing the more practical touches the house had seen fit to make: a double oven that shone with a fresh layer of polish, cabinets that proudly displayed stacks of dishes with the same crescent moon that winked at passersby from the sign outside the shop, and a new basket with a few less scratch marks waiting next to the hearth for Tabitha’s arrival, though at the moment, the cat was nowhere to be seen.
“Don’t you like it?” Anne asked, a nervous note sneaking into her voice as she realized Violet might have hoped to step into the same home that she’d left behind.
“I do, actually,” Violet said, surprised to find that she truly meant it. “It’s only fair that the house has its chance to grow as well.”
At that, Violet felt the boards beneath her boots rattling with what she could only assume was agreement.
