The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Two

The walk to the garden took four minutes. It felt longer than the six years that had come before it.

Theo didn't say anything until they were past the house, past the range of any window Camille might be standing at, and Nora used the silence to catalog every way the property had changed, because it was easier than cataloging every way he hadn't.

"The maze first," he said finally. "Or the water garden. Your call."

"You're asking me to pick."

"I'm trying to be professional."

"You're doing a terrible job of it."

That got something out of him, not quite a laugh, but the ghost of one, gone almost before it landed. She remembered that sound. She used to be very good at getting it out of him, back when it was easy, back when getting Theo Castellan to almost laugh didn't come with six years of consequences attached.

"Maze," she said, because the alternative was standing still in this driveway a second longer, feeling the particular vertigo of a place that had frozen exactly where they'd left it.

They walked. The hedges rose up on either side as they got close, wild and towering, nothing like the tidy geometric walls they'd once been. Nora ran a hand along the leaves without meaning to, an old habit, checking the health of a plant the way other people checked their phones, and found the boxwood underneath the overgrowth still strong, still alive, just abandoned.

"Nobody's touched this in years," she said.

"Nobody's touched most of the property in years." Theo's voice had gone careful, the way people talk about things they're not ready to talk about yet. "After my father died, I didn't. He stopped. Started differently. "I didn't come back here much. Camille wanted the party here. Said it had 'character.'"

"It has neglect. That's different from character, but it can be fixed."

"Can it."

It wasn't really a question, and Nora didn't answer it like one. She stepped into the mouth of the maze instead, into the cool green tunnel of it, and felt six years fold up like a piece of paper.

She knew this maze with her body before her mind caught up knew that the third turn went left, that there used to be a gap in the hedge just past the halfway point where you could cut through if you didn't mind getting scratched, and that the center held a stone bench with someone's initials carved so deep into the arm they'd probably outlast the stone itself.

"Careful," Theo said behind her, close enough that she felt it more than heard it. "Some of the paths have collapsed. I haven't had it surveyed."

"I know where I'm going."

"Nora"

"I know where I'm going, Theo." She said it sharper than she meant to and didn't take it back, because six years of not saying things sharply enough was exactly the problem, wasn't it? "I could walk this maze blind. You know that."

He went quiet behind her. She kept walking left at the third turn, exactly like she remembered, the hedge close enough on either side to brush her shoulders, and didn't look back to see whatever was happening on his face, because she didn't trust herself to keep walking if she did.

The center of the maze was smaller than she remembered. Everything from childhood always was. The bench sat exactly where it had always sat, moss-covered now, one corner sunk slightly into the ground, and there she didn't have to look for it; she'd have found it with her eyes closed, the initials.

N.V. + T.C.

Carved by a pocketknife Theo had stolen from his father's desk the summer they were seventeen, into stone that had clearly not cared, in six years, that the two people who'd carved it were no longer speaking.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. A bird moved somewhere in the hedge above them. Somewhere past the maze walls, faint, she could hear the ocean doing what it had always done, indifferent to all of it.

"I thought about having it removed," Theo said quietly. "After."

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know." He wasn't looking at the initials. He was looking at her, and it took everything she had not to notice that, not to let it land somewhere it had no business landing. "Same reason I didn't touch the rest of the garden, probably."

"Which is?"

He didn't answer right away. Nora watched him choose his next words the way she used to watch him choose the next line in a blueprint: careful, deliberate, like precision could make up for everything he wasn't saying outright.

"You should probably know," he said finally, "before you agree to keep this job. Camille didn't hire the historical society's referral by accident."

Something cold moved through Nora's chest.

"What does that mean?"

"It means she asked for you specifically, by name." Theo's jaw tightened, the way it used to when he was working through a problem he didn't like the shape of. "I didn't find that out until this morning. About twenty minutes before you pulled up the drive."

Nora stood very still in the center of the maze, in front of a bench with both their names carved into it, and felt the ground under the whole conversation shift sideways.

"Why would your fiancée," she said slowly, "go out of her way to hire the woman you almost married?"

Theo didn't have an answer.

That, more than anything else that had happened since she'd pulled through the gates, was what finally scared her.