Honey in Her Veins

by Ruth McKell

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

A "deliciously atmospheric" (Sydney J. Shields) cottagecore fantasy about a man with a monster in his head who reunites with his first love to find mythical honey in the woods of Appalachia, perfect for fans of Adrienne Young and Alix E. Harrow.

Arthur Connoway desperately wants to free himself from the monster inhabiting his mind. Instead, he is rapidly losing control of it following his mother’s death. In a last-ditch effort to feel whole again—and to lay his mother’s memory to rest—Arthur decides to return to the quiet bee farm he once called home, hoping their sacred honey can heal him in more ways than one.

Eight years ago, Eva Moreau's flora magic caused a terrible accident, harming her father in the process. Now, she’s desperate to find a way to heal him, but her attempts only seem to do the opposite. If she could just learn to control her magic, she might be able to save her father and leave the past behind.

When Arthur returns to town looking for absolution, Eva once again loses control of her magic, putting everyone she loves in danger. Together, the pair decides to trek to the source of her family’s magic to find a cure for both Arthur and her father. But there’s a mysterious ghost haunting the forest, and it won’t let Arthur and Eva leave the woods without confronting the secrets of their past...

Release date: April 7, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 432

Sample

Eva plucked a thorax from the water bucket and set it in a bowl of corpses.

They’d finished pulling honey from the northwest apiary yesterday. Most of it went to the extractor, but misfit chunks like these were submerged in water overnight to let the honey slough off, exposing the naked, uncapped comb floating on top. Eva could boil those down and tin them into beeswax candles, salves, and lip balms.

Nothing, however, sold like raw honeycomb. This late in the summer, bottles of the sticky, sugared medicine practically flew off their shelves.

Eva understood. Twenty-five years of keeping the bees with her father and older sister, and still she thrilled each time she sank her teeth into those warm, dripping cells. There was a strangely primal allure to that hint of spice among the sweet, pollen and enzymes sliding down her tongue.

It was hard, when paired with one of the teas in their Honey Shoppe, not to call that magic. Tourists came from miles around for a taste of the honeyman’s bottled summertime and a sachet of herbs they fully believed would rid them of their ailments. Dad shrugged off their wilder beliefs, always saying that nature was magic enough.

He didn’t disclose his somewhat enchanted green thumb, or his habit of collecting rare and mysterious flowers far up the mountain. Nor did he mention his magical daughter, whose greenhouse was brimming with herbs and florals Eva had cultivated to heal and cure.

“It’s not too late, you know.”

Eva watched Izzy swirl her finger in the water bucket across from her. “To do what, exactly?”

“Literally anything.” Izzy flicked a little water at her. “It’s Friday night, and we’re here.” When Eva snorted, her sister leaned closer. “Come on. This’ll keep. Let’s go dancing.”

“At Dawson’s?”

If social gatherings with people who’d picked on her in high school were really the lifeblood of small towns, Eva preferred social anemia. She hated crowds. They made her feel like a bug stretched under a microscope.

Besides, the town’s nightclub was literally the worst place for Izzy to be.

“We can find a sober bar down the mountain,” Izzy urged. “It’ll be fun!”

Eva loved her sister, but she’d rather die than willingly subject herself to a night of painful pickup lines and some dry-humping stranger on a dark dance floor.

“I think I’m good here, Iz.”

Izzy rolled her eyes, which Eva pretended not to see. Let the sheriff take her dancing.

When she’d cleared all the torn wings and insect parts from the dirty honeycomb, Eva turned the bowl out onto a swath of cheesecloth, then swiped her wet fingers over the back of her neck. This summer was a scorcher.

The door to the workshop creaked open, spilling in a shaft of apricot sunset light as Dad stepped in, ducking Goliath shoulders under the door’s lintel. Eva’s eyes fell to the vee of her father’s shirt, where the brunt end of scar tissue and tree root lifted his flesh. The skin split at his sternum, a stubborn sapling pushing through a fistful of viscera and bone. Soft green moss spread over his chest, peeking from beneath the well-worn flannel of his shirt.

Every day, he got a little harder to look at.

“I thought you had an appointment,” Eva said.

Dad grunted and shook his head.

The roots of his sapling had burrowed deeper with every passing year, webbing his thoracic cavity into a mesh of wilderness and man. Eva usually tried to hide her worry. Dad and Izzy already treated her like glass ready to break. But her fears lay fallow beneath the surface.

“You rescheduled?” she prodded.

“No.” Dad tightened a grimace and sat across from her. “No more appointments.”

Eva’s heart skipped. She didn’t miss the guilty look that flashed across Izzy’s face, or the way her sister’s eyes dropped to the bucket in front of her.

She knew.

Dad must have seen Eva’s face fall, because his expression softened. “There’s nothing more Dr. Rosen can do, honeybee.”

“But—”

“I’m tired of tests,” Dad said. He flicked one of the fluttering leaves. “I’m not going anymore.”

Eva’s mind spun. There had to be something Dr. Rosen hadn’t tried. Some angle they hadn’t considered.

“Hey.” Izzy took her hand. “It’s gonna be okay. Right, Dad?”

Eva squeezed her eyes tight. Glass, again. The pity made her stomach twist.

And made her magic bloom.

At her sudden onslaught of emotion, her gift flung itself wide, finding its mark in a burlap sack leaning against the wall. Eva’s palms warmed as bright green stalks carved their way out of the fabric and the pungent smell of onions filled the room.

She swallowed hard. Focus. She couldn’t lose control when Dad was so close. Her gift could make the roots of his tree push even deeper into his chest. What if they pierced a lung, or slipped into an aortic valve?

Or, or, or.

There were endless possible nightmares, and she’d gone over them all in her head a thousand times.

Breath tight in her lungs, Eva locked away her fear. She couldn’t let them see her like this. Brittle. Breakable. Dad had taught her once that she could be more than the storms in her head. Now she had to be. She forced a slow exhale and pictured her anchor: a blue sky full of clouds, slowly clearing.

Izzy squeezed her hand again. That, too, was grounding, even though it hurt to think that her sister had known about her father’s decision and had chosen to keep the truth from Eva.

“I want to show you something.” Dad plucked a roll of newspaper from his back pocket and held it out. Eva stiffly accepted it. They weren’t done talking about this, but she knew if she pushed now, he’d only bar the door further.

Later, when he wasn’t so visibly stressed, she’d bring up Dr. Rosen again.

Dad opened the newspaper to the obituaries. As Eva scanned the line of names, brows furrowed, a honeybee landed on her knuckles.

Connoway.

Heat shot to her spine. Eva sucked in a hard breath, suddenly taut as a bow. No. Not that name. Not his name.

She pulled back, reading again.

Charlotte Connoway.

Relief dulled her panic. The mother, then. Not the son.

It wasn’t a local newspaper but something that must have been sent to him. She hadn’t realized that Charlotte Connoway had put down roots after so many years of flitting from place to place.

When Eva thrust the newspaper back at her father, the bee flew away. Eva hated the flush up her neck, hated the gentle way both of them looked at her. I am not fragile. She wanted to scream it.

Instead, she bit the inside of her cheek, where they couldn’t see her bleed. Dad took the crinkled sheet and smoothed it out. “Lottie called me about her illness last month,” he said.

Surprise hooked Eva’s ribs. He hadn’t told her that.

“She wanted to come to visit herself, but”—his voice cracked—“she couldn’t travel, in the end.”

“Oh.”

The resounding silence told Eva she’d said the wrong thing, and awkwardness stirred between the three of them, thick as molasses. Eva should comfort her father. Yes. No matter her own distaste for the woman, Dad had cared for Charlotte.

For whatever reason.

Eva turned to her sister, desperate for someone to better guide this conversation. Eva hadn’t known Charlotte, not really. If anything, the tidbits she’d gleaned from her former friendship with Charlotte’s son, Arthur, had turned her bitter toward the enigmatic woman.

Izzy was sharing a strange look with their father, her eyebrows slightly raised. “Dad,” she said. “We don’t have to do this now.”

Eva looked between her father and sister. “Do what now?” She didn’t want to be walked around, talked around, as though she were a bomb that might go off. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Dad reassured. “I’m simply fulfilling a promise.”

Eva swallowed. “You’re going to her funeral?” she guessed. That would be difficult. It was hard enough to get him down the mountain for his checkups. Eva didn’t know how far he could travel.

“Not exactly.”

Dread gnawed inside her. Something wasn’t right. Eva stood, but her father was an absolute bear of a man, and even on her feet, she didn’t meet him eye to eye. “Tell me.”

See me. Let me be strong in your eyes.

Dad crooked an unconvincing smile. “She’s coming here.”

Eva blinked. “What?”

“Well, not her, obviously,” Izzy cut in.

“Right.” Dad stumbled slightly over the correction. “Her ashes are being delivered. I promised Lottie we’d scatter them on the farm. Tell the bees she’s gone, like we did with your mom. Remember?”

Eva nodded, a knot in her throat as she clicked together what he wasn’t saying. Someone had to bring those ashes back to these mountains. Someone Charlotte had trusted.

There’s a strange kind of knowing that comes just before a storm. Pressure crowds between your ears. Old joints ache. The air grows wet and mineral. Eva held her breath so tight her lungs began to burn, that knowing drawing back into her mind the very storm clouds she’d tried so hard to shove away.

“Who?” she rasped.

Izzy furrowed her brows. “What?”

And maybe Eva was glass after all, because the question she pushed to the front of her lips made something in her crack.

“Who’s bringing the ashes?”

I still think you should have shaved the beard. You look like a muskrat.”

I cranked down the van’s window and let the breeze sift through my fingers. Appalachia was sweltering, a humid and unbearable heat from which my broken AC offered no relief. Slick with sweat and beyond the point of exhaustion, I had no patience for the monster’s vanity.

“This isn’t about me,” it scoffed. “Don’t you wonder what she’ll think of you after all these years?”

“No.” I flexed my grip on the steering wheel, eyes skipping to the royal-blue urn strapped into my passenger seat.

I did not wonder, and I did not care. This was not a social call.

A glowing saffron sunset reached its fingers between the sentinel pine and birch hugging the ditch. Despite my insistence, memories of the last time I’d driven down this very road flooded in. They tasted as bittersweet as the last dregs of an over-steeped cup of tea.

“Do you think she’ll like your new tattoos?”

Instinctively, I touched the inside of my forearm where one of the sleeves of ink began. What had started as an act of defiance had metamorphosed into armor with every new design. Little black songbirds flew up my skin, the arc of a wing shading the scar beneath. Woodland details filled in the gaps between the varied species of birds and a curl of honeycomb rounding my left biceps.

The latter had been an impulse, really. A nostalgic dig of the knife that suddenly felt far too exposing. My face went hot.

“I do love it when you pine.”

I felt the monster tug our lips into a smirk and quickly rubbed the expression off with the back of my hand. “I’m not pining,” I muttered. I simply hadn’t expected coming back to feel like some kind of confession. I was a roll of film in a vat of chemicals, exposed too soon to the light. I was—

“Pining,” the monster singsonged.

I scowled.

Too soon, we rolled through the town of Audrey’s single, blinking stoplight. I kept my eyes forward, unwilling to risk being recognized. Old worn-out buildings in charming pastel lemon and cornflower blue blurred through my periphery. The café. The school. The Honey Shoppe. I told myself the landmarks couldn’t bruise if I didn’t look too long.

My knuckles whitened as we drove past a pale chapel that was chipping old paint. Weeds climbed up its siding, and a harsh whistle drew my attention to the hole in the roof, where a clutter of dark birds circled overhead. My inhale sharpened to a blade.

Starlings.

While clever, their greedy and invasive nature too often disrupted the local ecosystem with their habit of driving other birds out of their nests. Farmers hated starlings, but my mother had loved them, charmed by their astounding gift for mimicry.

The monster let me stew in my thoughts until we turned off Main Street. We were getting close. I could practically taste the wax in the air, and outside, the road licked a black asphalt tongue around the edge of the Walkers’ pear orchards.

Déjà vu wrapped around me, thickening with every passing minute. I hadn’t driven this road in years, but my body remembered. Time, it seemed, wasn’t enough to patch the wound this place had carved in me.

“You have such a flair for the dramatic,” the monster complimented. I rolled my shoulders reflexively—an old habit that never succeeded in shaking its voice out of my head.

My stomach growled. After opening the glove box, I fished through the mess of honey sticks until I found a speckled cinnamon, then popped one end open with my teeth.

I knew I should cry for her. She was my mother, after all. I should have cried weeks ago. Instead, nausea twisted my empty stomach over in knots. My appetite had fled the moment I got the call that she was gone. If that was grief, I sure as hell didn’t know how to digest it.

But I could still choke down honey.

“I could help, if you’d let me.”

“No.” I didn’t want the monster’s help. It had made such offers before, and they always ended in disaster. Whenever the monster gave in to its own strange appetite, I ended up with the tail of a squirrel between my fingers, or fish scales under my nails. I didn’t need another animal husk staring at me dead-eyed and accusing. I knew the monster’s work was wretched. Maybe even wicked. But I was worse, for letting it use me, letting it take.

“It doesn’t have to be like that. We could—”

A loud pop jolted us both, stalling a surely horrific proposal. The cab lurched up and down, the van sagging violently to the right. “Shit!” I tapped the brakes and eased onto the road’s narrow shoulder. Dust bloomed skyward where the wheel dug into the naked soil until the Volkswagen ground to a standstill.

I sat back, frustration heating my skin. This was the last fucking thing I needed today.

Stepping out into the ocean of heat, I rounded the van, crouched before the ruined tire, and ran my fingertips over the rubber tread until I hit a nail.

“You’re kidding,” I muttered.

If Fate was laughing at me, it sounded an awful lot like the whir of cicadas.

“Do we have a spare?”

“It’s a mess.” One more item on a never-ending list of things I’d broken and never repaired.

“So… we walk?”

I didn’t answer, nor did I fight when the monster turned my head to the wall of textured evergreens hugging the side of the road. Dandelions speckled the ditch in sunny pops of yellow and wishing fluff. Beneath us, rootscapes stretched to wrap the edge of a warren just out of sight. The monster salivated, tuning our senses to the rolling tha-dump of a rabbit’s heartbeat, the mammal glow of life pulsing like a toothache behind my gums.

“You skipped breakfast,” it noted.

I shuddered. We shared too much, our edges too often blurring together. Sometimes I dreamed of surrender. I could disappear into that cool, relaxing space in my head where I stopped feeling everything so acutely. It would be so easy to give up control. A relief, even, to loosen my grip and let the monster—

“Stop it,” I snapped.

It flicked a tongue against my spine. “Just a taste?”

I opened my mouth to refuse, then all but choked at the sudden outpouring of life flooding my senses. I looked down to find my hand wrapped around a clump of milkweed.

“Oops.”

I snatched it back too late to stop the monster’s death-touch. The pink flower heads had wilted to a brown crisp. Relief eased my pounding headache, and I shoved to my feet, the taste of petals still slicking the back of my teeth.

“It’s okay,” the monster soothed.

I was shaking as I yanked open the passenger door. We’d stolen the life out of those weeds with a single touch. Flesh to flesh, dust to dust.

Nothing about that was okay.

It was too hot to leave my equipment in the van, so I tucked the urn under one arm and slung my camera bag over the other shoulder. The bag was Mom’s. She’d picked it from a tourist stand at Four Corners the winter we drove west and filled our film rolls with Arizona’s red horizons. The pattern of blue and orange fibers on the bag had faded, like everything between us. It was the only thing of hers I’d inherited that didn’t hurt. I locked the door and left the van behind, the sweet chemical scent of her perfume washing over me.

We couldn’t be more than a quarter mile from the farm. Every step felt heavy under the dark-eyed stares of wild sunflowers growing in the ditch. When I closed my eyes, I pictured the sunflower dress Eva Moreau had worn one bird-watching morning.

The day she’d kissed me.

I exhaled and pushed the memory away.

The word cottage did a mighty injustice to the structure ahead of me. Its stone base held solid chestnut walls and a porch that had never sagged a day in its life. At the crest of its gables, a ribbon of smoke seeped from a stone chimney. Beside it stood the workshop where I’d learned how to uncap honeycomb and run frames through an extractor before pouring the honey into jars to sell.

From where I stood at the bend in the road, the greenhouse was behind the cottage, slightly obscured from view, as was the hill leading down to one of the Moreaus’ six apiaries. The dying sun soaked the glass in rose-gold light. I stalled in my tracks, struck by the sight.

A hollow of yearning widened in my chest.

I’m not afraid of dead things, Arthur.

I should have gone straight to the front door and knocked. Instead, I took a step off the path, toward the greenhouse, unaware that I was rubbing my honeycomb tattoo until I was nearly at the door.

There was no one inside, as far as I could tell. Greenbrier swathed the walls, a carpet of moss creeping from the outer wall over the doorjamb. When I reached out to touch the handle, the monster stepped in, stalling our hand midway.

“What are you doing, little death-touch?”

The maw of yearning in my chest opened a little wider. “I just want to see.”

This wasn’t the plan. I’d only meant to pop in, deliver Mom’s ashes to her damn honeyman, then get the hell out of here. This little glass house was dangerous.

The monster’s disapproval swelled as I shook off its hold and turned the knob, pushing the old door open on creaking hinges. My nose filled: vegetal with summer smells and rich, wild herbs.

My eyes fluttered, and for a moment, I was seventeen again.

Then the door to the workshop burst open.

I jerked back, startled, as a short woman flew like a gale across the yard, her long braid snapping behind her in the wind. Another—taller, with raven-dark hair—followed close behind, her heels sinking into the grass in punching steps. “Eva,” she panted. “Would you calm down?”

My heart gave a painful lurch of recognition.

“You want me to be calm?”

Even without the flood of wildflowers spilling from her shoes, I would have known the warm rasp of Eva Moreau’s voice anywhere. In a blindfold. In the dark.

“This is what not pining looks like?”

The monster was right. I’d spent the entire drive here raising a shield in preparation for this very moment. There was no reason to open old wounds. This wasn’t a homecoming, and I was the furthest possible thing from a prodigal.

But I hadn’t steeled myself for this: the blaze of her, shooting like a fallen star across the garden. Furious. Formidable.

I needed to get a grip. This was fine. I was fine.

“You’re sweating.”

Neither woman had looked back toward the greenhouse, where I stood, still holding my mother’s remains.

“Could you slow down? Hold on. Let me just…” Izzy growled and ripped her high heels off her feet, flinging them to one side.

“I don’t want to hear it, Iz.” Eva tossed a glower over her shoulder.

And froze.

When our eyes connected, the overbearing heat of the day took on a different shape. Instead of clinging to my skin, a flush of awareness, of aching recognition, sank right through to the core of me.

Izzy stumbled into her sister, who caught her before she could fall, then brushed past her, stomping toward me. Bewildered, Izzy spun, seeking the source of her sister’s abrupt change in demeanor.

“Ah.” Izzy’s voice went soft with sudden understanding, but I had eyes only for the woman charging toward me like a bull, cheeks flushed. A nauseating wave of wrongness flooded my senses.

I shouldn’t have come back.

Instinctively, I took a step back but stumbled, tripping over a rock. Air rushed from my lungs in surprise, and I hit the ground tailbone first, the urn slipping out of my grasp. It shattered on the stepping stones, spraying ashes across my cheek.

Eva came to an abrupt halt in front of me. “You,” she whispered, the pain in her voice like a striking bullet.

A memory flashed before me. In it, Eva was smiling as she coaxed my glove off finger by finger. I could still recall the first brush of her skin against mine, could still see the parting of her lips as she asked me the most dangerous question of all:

You trust me?

Beyond, someone else stepped out of the workshop, casting an enormous shadow across the lawn. I rolled to one side, panting with the effort it took to ignore my aching tailbone, and pushed to my knees, where I began anxiously scooping up ashes before the wind could blow them away.

But the urn, now completely shattered, could no longer hold them.

“Arthur?”

In her mouth, my name sounded almost delicate, the syllables preserved like a flower in a book. My throat went hard with grief. On my knees, with my hands still cupping the ashes, I felt suddenly like a supplicant come to beg her forgiveness.

I shoved to my feet and tossed my head to one side to get a stray lock out of my eyes, stacking my spine with a confidence I didn’t feel.

“Hey, bee girl.”

You.” Eva stepped back, her voice thickening with sudden emotion. Accusation filled her eyes as she raised her finger and thrust it in my direction. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Something squeezed inside my chest, and I opened my mouth to speak, only to choke on dead air.

Luckily for me, Izzy swooped in before the awkwardness could grow. “Impeccable timing, Fairy,” she chirped. “We were just talking about your arrival.”

My eyes zipped from her face back to Eva’s, a question budding on my lips, when the size of the figure that had stepped from the workshop registered in my mind. My pulse leapt in recognition. There was only one man on this mountain as impossibly large as he. I hadn’t been sure when I’d dialed if the number was still accurate, and part of me had hoped it would ring and ring, that I’d never have to hear his voice again.

But Jack had picked up right away.

Doubt tugged at me. This was a mistake. How could I walk back in after all this time? I couldn’t face them. Not now. Maybe not ever.

It wasn’t too late to just turn around and go. Mom’s ashes had been delivered.

“In the loosest sense of the word,” the monster chirped.

I gritted my teeth in annoyance.

At first, I’d thought to ignore Mom’s last request and send her ashes through the mail, which had only convinced the monster that I must have been deep in the throes of grief. Driven by a desire to curb my self-destructive tendencies, it had… changed. Grown bolder. The monster had forced me to sleep, dreamless. It had tried to force me to eat to keep up my strength, but despite the gnawing in my belly, everything made my stomach churn.

When the monster had started hunting again, I’d caved to Mom’s wishes, and had set a course for Audrey, Pennsylvania, desperate to do whatever it took to soothe the beast into submission.

To prove I was fine.

“Arthur.” It wasn’t a question that fell from Jack’s lips, rather a confirmation. The monster cemented our feet where we stood, preventing me from acting on the impulse to run. Jack stepped from the shadows of the workshop into view.

I froze, my mouth parting in shock. The sight of him stole my breath.

What was I looking at?

A tangle of branches fluttered with leaves. A tree. A tree in his—No, that… that wasn’t possible.

But denying it did nothing to change what I saw. Where there once had been only a seed, now a whole sapling was lodged in the honeyman’s chest.

I gaped, aware of my rudeness but unable to stop.

The monster’s wonderment filled our mind. “Is that an aspen?”

The question nauseated me. We’d left the farm before we understood what we’d seen growing inside of Jack. For years, I’d tried to forget and move past that night, but the monster’s curiosity had festered deep inside me.

“I know, Fairy. First time’s a shocker.” Izzy took a step toward me and plucked her shoes from the grass. “You’re welcome to come in—”

“No.” Eva’s stout refusal drew all our attention to where she stood, ramrod straight and twisting the end of her shirt around her finger. Waterweeds spilled from beneath her shoes. “He’s not.”

“Honeybee,” Jack intoned softly, reaching for his younger daughter. Eva stepped back. “Wait!”

But Eva didn’t wait. She ripped her gaze away from me and bolted down the path. Jack grimaced.

“That could have gone better,” I said weakly.

Izzy shrugged. “Could have gone a lot worse, honestly.”

I’d expected a fight. Eva had never shied away from conflict before. Even angry, she had always been warmth. A burn or a balm. She had never frozen me out.

“Is that Lottie?” Jack quietly asked.

I nodded. “Yes, sir.” Guilt washed over me as I took in the shattered blue urn.

Jack winced.

I’d imagined this moment many times during my drive, but none of my mental rehearsals had featured me spilling my dead mother’s ashes onto the honeyman’s sacred soil. Maybe that was a sign. I was stupid to think the monster would give a damn about her last request. Stupid to think coming here would stop it from donning me like a fucking glove.

Stupid to hope for relief.

Silence heavied the air with awkwardness, until Izzy cleared her throat. “Tea?”

I swallowed hard, searching for a protest. They didn’t have to do that. Play the host. Pretend. We didn’t have to be fine.

“Tea,” Jack agreed with a nod.

It made the hollow in my belly twist. I couldn’t help it. Everything in this family circled back to honey and tea, tea and honey. Jack told me once that healing started with a simmering pot and a spoonful of gold. In this house, tea was a love language all its own, and it spoke when words and other medicines failed.

I crossed on stiff legs to the cottage’s front door, stealing glances back to the winding aspen lodged in Jack Moreau’s chest. My hands still cupped the ashes I’d scooped off the stepping stones, the breeze teasing away a wisp of the dark cremains.

Our approach startled a trio of gray-and-white kittens out from beneath the bushes. They dashed across the yard and out of sight.

After all this time, coming back should’ve felt like an intrusion. Instead, the second I stepped into the mudroom, the knot between my shoulders eased. The creaks of the floorboards were a song I didn’t expect to recall, the nicks in the wallpaper worn into my memory. I hesitated on the trick step a moment before I realized I still knew it was there.

I didn’t expect that, for the house to be so deeply ingrained. But I guess time couldn’t steal everything. I’d first found the Moreaus the way a cocklebur found the knit of a sock, too eager to stick where I didn’t belong. A weed like that—like me—was hard to pluck out, no matter how long I’d been away from home.

This wasn’t home.

I couldn’t forget that. No matter how familiar and inviting, the cottage and the family within weren’t mine anymore.

Izzy threw a sharp glance over her shoulder and guided me into the kitchen. I tried not to care when she bolted the lock. Of course, they didn’t want anyone from town to know I was here after everything that had happened.

“You hungry?” Izzy glanced out the window as she spoke, clearly trying to be gracious in light of Eva’s sudden flight.

“No, thank you.” But even as I said it, my eyes flicked to the honeypot on the top shelf. Not the one Jack kept hidden in the vent but the everyday pot I’d dipped into time and time again, to slather on toast or stir into tea.

Sometimes I dreamt of it. On bad days, their honey had been one of the only things I could stomach. My summer here had ruined me for other honey. I’d tried other brands and farms, but nothing compared.

I’d spent the last eight years chasing the way it had made me feel. Warm. Alive.

“Why not ask to ta. . .