Not wanting to date Joel didn’t give her license to be a jerk. She would have to make her rudeness up to him somehow.
“He told me to tell you he’ll see you in Montreal. Something about your tour?”
Oh no.“What day is it?”
Maisie wiped her hands on her white frilly apron and moved towards the calendar on the wall in the kitchen. “October sixth.”
The day before her opening night.
Emeline’s blood spiked. “I have to go.”
Maisie reached for her hand, lacing her fingers through Emeline’s. The smell of flour and cooked sugar wafted off her skin.
“When will you be back?”
She and Maisie had discussed Pa’s care while making dinner the other night. While Emeline was on tour Maisie would come twice a day to check in on Pa, and when Emeline was done traveling she’d figure out the best way to keep him in his house.
“Three weeks,” said Emeline. “As soon as my tour is over.”
In her bedroom, she packed up the few things she’d brought with her, then grabbed her phone from where she’d left it charging on the bedside table. If she could make it to Montreal tonight, she’d have all of tomorrow to go over her set.
But in order to drive the seven hours back to the city, adding an extra hour or two sitting in traffic, she needed to leave now.
Never in her life had she longed fornormalmore. Emeline wanted her apartment full of roommates she barely spoke to. She wanted the lights and the noise and the crowds of the city. She wanted to be up onstage, stringing together chords and turning them into songs, fueled by the audience behind the lights. Their claps and stomps proving that she was, in fact, right where she was supposed to be.
Thatwas her life.
She needed to get back to it.
Forget the woods and the curse and the Wood King. Forget the Vile, who hated the sight of her and wanted her dead. And most of all, forget Hawthorne—who’d betrayed her.
The thought made her want to cry.
After hugging both Maisie and Pa, Emeline slung her bag over her shoulder, grabbed her keys, and got into her car.
She was pulling out of the driveway when Tom wandered up the dirt path from Eshe and Abel’s farm, a bushel of yellow apples hoisted in his arms. Seconds, it looked like, from their bruised surfaces. Likely for Maisie’s apple strudel. At the sight of Emeline, Tom’s brown eyes crinkled, and he lifted his chin in greeting.
Her chest twinged.
I have to tell him about Rose.
It would break his heart.
The thought of it, how it would change things between them, opened a hole in her chest.
It can wait,she decided, not wanting to ruin things yet.Until I finish touring.
She didn’t stop the car. Only waved to Tom, watching him disappear in the rearview mirror as she turned onto the main road, heading towards the highway.
JUST BEFORE CROSSING THEQuebec border, Emeline stopped to fill up on gas. As she stood at the pump, with the nozzle in, something fell out of her back pocket and onto the pavement behind her.
Thinking it was her phone, she turned to pick it up.
It wasn’t her phone; it was the slender book Hawthorne had given her before she left.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Emeline eyed it warily, then picked it up, still pumping. She’d first noticed this book at his house on the night he made her dinner. Curious despite herself, Emeline thumbed through the pages.
