The brass bell above the door of Bitterroot and Bloom gave a single, clear chime, the sound thin and bright against the hush of the shop. Margot paused on the threshold, one hand still resting on the worn wooden frame, and let her eyes adjust to the dim interior.
Glass jars lined every shelf, catching what little light filtered through the front window. Dried herbs hung in fragrant bundles from the ceiling beams, their stems crackling faintly as a draft stirred them. The air held a complex perfume: lavender, certainly, but layered beneath it were rosemary, thyme, something resinous that clung to the back of the throat, and the bright citrus note of lemon balm. It smelled, Margot thought, like a garden pressed between the pages of an old book.
She had walked past this shop three times since arriving in town. Each time, the facade had seemed to shift in some indefinable way, as though the building could not quite decide what it wanted to be. Today it presented itself as an apothecary from another century, all dark wood and gilt lettering on the window.
A young voice came from somewhere behind the counter.
"He took the back way. He always does when he knows someone is waiting."
Margot blinked. A girl of perhaps eight or nine stood on a wooden stool behind the register, her chin barely clearing the countertop. She had Wesley Barlow's angular jaw and her grandmother's sharp, curious eyes, though Margot had not yet met the woman. A name tag on her apron read Nell in careful block letters.
"Pardon?" Margot said.
"Daddy. Wesley. He's out back, checking the root cellar." Nell gestured vaguely toward a doorway curtained with strings of dried flowers. "He said if you came in, I should tell you he'll be right quick. But I think he lied, because the root cellar always takes longer than he thinks."
Margot stepped fully inside and let the door swing closed behind her. The bell chimed once more, softer this time, as if it had decided not to make a fuss.
"Thank you. I'm Margot Ellingham."
"I know." Nell hopped down from the stool with a competence that suggested frequent practice. "Grandma Nell told me about you. She said you moved into the lavender house. She said the woman who used to live there had your eyes."
Margot's hand found the strap of her satchel and held it. The leather was soft from years of use, a familiar pressure against her palm.
"I haven't met your grandmother yet," Margot said carefully.
"She's upstairs." Nell pointed toward a narrow staircase tucked into the corner, its banister worn smooth by decades of hands. "She's resting, but she doesn't like when I say that. She says she's listening to the house settle. She says houses this old talk all the time if you pay attention."
Margot followed the girl's gaze upward. A landing was barely visible at the top of the stairs, lost in shadow. Somewhere up there, a floorboard creaked, the sound slow and deliberate, as though someone had shifted their weight on purpose.
"I can call her down," Nell offered, already moving toward the foot of the stairs. "She'll want to meet you. She told me last week that someone was coming who needed to know things."
"What things?"
Nell stopped on the third step and turned back. In the dim light filtering through the shop window, her face was solemn and far too old for her years.
"The kind of things that live in attics," she said simply.
Before Margot could respond, a voice drifted down from the upper floor. It was warm and a little rough at the edges, the voice of someone who had spent a long life speaking plainly.
"Nell Barlow, if you are inventing mysteries again, I will come down there and take that name tag off your apron."
"It's not inventing, Grandma Nell. It's Mrs. Ellingham. She came in."
A pause. Then the sound of footsteps, heavier than Nell's, making their measured way down the stairs. The strings of dried flowers swayed in the disturbed stillness.
Margot waited. She had learned, over the months of settling the estate, that some moments required stillness. Her grandmother Cordelia had been a woman who believed that patience was a form of attention, and Margot had inherited the habit along with the lavender fields.
The woman who emerged at the base of the staircase was smaller than Margot had expected. She moved with care, one hand trailing along the banister, her silver hair pinned back in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a lavender cardigan that had been mended at the elbows so many times the patches had developed their own geography. Her eyes, when they found Margot, were pale gray and extraordinarily steady.
"Margot Ellingham," the woman said. Not a question. A recognition.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Come closer, child. My eyes aren't what they were, but I can still see well enough to know what I am looking at."
Margot stepped forward until she stood within arm's reach. The scent of dried lavender rose from the woman's cardigan, mingling with the shop's atmosphere until the two became indistinguishable. Nell had retreated behind the counter, her elbows propped on the wooden surface, watching with unabashed curiosity.
The older woman studied Margot's face for a long moment. Her gaze moved from Margot's brow to her cheekbones to the corners of her mouth, lingering there as though reading something written in a familiar hand.
"You have her eyes," the woman said at last. "Exactly her eyes. The same gray, the same way they hold light. I told Wesley, but he only grunted. Wesley grunts at everything."
"I am sorry," Margot said. "I do not know who you mean."
"Cordelia." The name fell into the quiet of the shop like a stone into still water. "Cordelia Ellingham. Your grandmother, I expect. Though I never knew her by that name."
Margot felt the floorboards shift beneath her feet, though nothing had moved.
"You knew my grandmother?"
"Knew her. Fought with her. Mended fences with her. Wrote her letters she never answered, and received letters from her I have kept in a tin box for thirty years." The woman smiled, a small, private expression. "Sit down, Margot Ellingham. Nell, fetch the stool from behind the mortar and pestle. The one with the woven seat."
Nell scrambled to obey, dragging a wooden stool from a back corner with the ease of long practice. Margot sat. The woman remained standing, her hand still resting on the banister, watching Margot with an attention that felt both gentle and unyielding.
"My name is Nell Barlow. The younger Nell and I share it, which makes for confusion at the post office but keeps things simple at church. I have run this shop since before your mother was born, and I have lived in this town since before your grandmother thought to leave it."
"I thought she was from Provence," Margot said carefully. "The estate is in Provence. I assumed she always was."
"She was from here. She left when she was young, barely older than Nell is now. She went to Provence to forget what she remembered, and she did a fair job of it. Or she thought she did." Nell Barlow lowered herself into the chair behind the counter, moving with the careful economy of someone who had learned which joints to trust. "Until you came back."
"I did not come back," Margot said. "I came for the first time."
"Ah." The older woman tilted her head. "That is what I mean. You came back, and you do not yet know what you are returning to."
Margot's fingers found the worn leather of her satchel again. The satchel held the keys to the farmhouse, a folded copy of her grandmother's will, and a small photograph she had carried across an ocean without quite knowing why. The photograph showed a younger Cordelia standing in front of a stone house, her hand resting on the shoulder of a girl whose face had been turned away from the camera. The back of the photograph was dated 1962, and beneath the date, in ink faded to brown, were three words Margot had not been able to translate.
Mrs. Barlow, I have something of hers. I have had it since the day she left, and I have kept it safe. I think she meant for you to have it. I think she meant for you to understand it when the time came.
Margot looked up. The photograph was still in the satchel, but the question had been in her mouth since the moment she crossed the threshold.
"What did she leave behind?"
Nell Barlow smiled. The expression softened her whole face, turning the sharp lines into something luminous and a little sad.
"That is the right question," she said. "That is exactly the right question, and it is the one your grandmother spent her whole life avoiding."
Nell the younger had returned to her stool behind the counter and was listening with the focused intensity of a child who understood that something important was being exchanged. The shop had grown quieter. Even the herbs overhead had stopped their faint swaying, as though they too were paying attention.
"My grandmother died two months ago," Margot said. "I received a letter from a lawyer I had never heard of, telling me she had left me the farmhouse and the land. I did not know she owned property here. I did not know she had ever lived anywhere but Provence."
"Your mother did not tell you."
The words were gentle, but they carried a weight Margot recognized. She thought of Sarah's face when the letter had arrived, the way her mother had turned away to wash dishes that were already clean.
"My mother and my grandmother were estranged," Margot said. "For many years. I do not know the reason."
"Many reasons," Nell Barlow said. "Too many for one letter, and not all of them mine to tell. But I can tell you what I know, which is that Cordelia left this town carrying something she refused to put down, and she lived her whole life in Provence trying to set it down, and in the end she wrote me a letter asking me to make sure you understood what she could not say herself."
Margot's throat tightened. She had not known, until that moment, how much she had been waiting to hear exactly this.
"Did the letter say what I am supposed to understand?"
Mrs. Barlow rose from her chair and crossed to a shelf behind the counter. She reached up, her movements deliberate, and drew down a small wooden box. The wood was dark with age, its surface polished by years of handling. She set it on the counter between them and rested her hand on the lid.
"It said that you would come," Mrs. Barlow said. "It said you would have her eyes and her stubbornness and her way of holding silence like other people hold conversation. It said you would walk into this shop, or another shop, or some other doorway, and that when you did, I was to give you this."
She lifted the lid. Inside, nested in a square of faded velvet, lay a brass key. Its teeth were intricate, old-fashioned, the kind of key that belonged to a door no longer commonly made. A small tag was tied to the bow with a length of thin red ribbon, and on the tag, in handwriting Margot recognized from the letters in her satchel, were two words.
The Lavender Room.
"Cordelia kept a room in the farmhouse," Mrs. Barlow said. "She called it that, and she locked it when she left. No one in this town has the key. No one, until now."
Margot reached for the key. Her hand hesitated above it, the warmth of the brass almost visible in the dim light. The shop held its breath. Nell the younger had gone entirely still, her eyes wide.
"I do not understand," Margot said.
"You are her mirror," Mrs. Barlow said simply. "You are the part of her she could not leave behind, and you are the part she could not take with her. She has been waiting for you for a very long time, Margot Ellingham. Longer than you know."
The key lay in its velvet nest, catching what little light the shop had to offer, and waited to be lifted.
Margot lifted the key from the velvet. The brass held the cool of the shop's shade, a small pocket of weight that pressed into her palm like a secret waiting to be told.
"It is not what I expected," she said.
"Nothing about Cordelia was ever what one expected," Mrs. Barlow said. "Though if you had known her longer, you would have stopped expecting. There is a freedom in that."
Outside, the door opened. The bell above the frame gave its small, bright ring, and Wesley Barlow stepped in from the sun. He wore a faded work shirt the color of dust, rolled to the elbow, and his hands carried the memory of lumber in the creases of his knuckles. He paused when he saw them.
"Margot," he said. The word was simple, an acknowledgment, a greeting, a measurement of how long it had been since he had last seen her face. "You're back in town."
"For the summer," Margot said. "If not longer."
Wesley nodded. He crossed to the counter and set down the small cloth bag he had been carrying, and the clink inside told her it was bottles, perhaps three, perhaps more. His eyes moved to the key in her hand, and something shifted behind his expression, not surprise but recognition, the look of a man seeing a piece of furniture moved back into its proper place.
"Cordelia's," he said. Not a question.
"From the shop," Mrs. Barlow said.
"Cordelia's key," Wesley said, and he almost smiled. Almost. "I wondered when she would give that up."
Margot looked at him. "You knew about it."
"I knew about the room. I knew about the key. I did not know where she had put the key." Wesley glanced at his wife. "That was hers to keep. It was hers to give."
"She wrote me," Margot said. "Years ago. Letters."
"She wrote everyone," Wesley said. "She wrote me twice. Once when my father died, once when Nell was born. Both times she sent instructions." He paused, as if considering how much to say, and then he made his decision the way he made every decision, with the steady weight of a man accustomed to building things that lasted. "She sent instructions for the baby's oil."
"The baby's oil," Margot repeated.
"A blend," Wesley said. "For Nell's skin. She was born in autumn and the air here is dry in a way that cracks the hands. Cordelia sent the recipe. Lavender and calendula, mostly, and a drop of something she never named. Lillian made it up at the shop."
Mrs. Barlow nodded. "It was the first thing I ever mixed for her," she said. "She was very particular."
Wesley reached into the bag he had set on the counter and drew out a small bottle, dark glass, the kind that kept light from spoiling what it held. He set it in front of Margot beside the key.
"This is yours," he said. "She told me to keep it for you. I have had it in the workshop since February."
Margot looked at the bottle. The glass was cool, the surface slightly tacky from the warmth of his pocket, and through the dark she could see the faint gold of the oil within, catching what little light the shop offered and holding it close.
"She told you," Margot said.
"Cordelia told everyone something," Wesley said. "She told me to make this oil. She told me to keep it until you came for the key. She told me you would not come alone. She told me the year would be dry." He paused. "The year is dry."
"You remember all of it," Margot said.
"I remember the parts that mattered. She said it would be dry. She said the lavender would struggle. She said you would need help with the harvest." His eyes met hers, steady, unblinking, the blue of them pale against the tan of his face. "She said I was to offer it."
Mrs. Barlow's hand moved across the counter and rested near the bottle, not touching it but close, as if she were claiming a share in the moment. "She was a careful woman," she said. "She did not leave things to chance."
"She left me a farm," Margot said. "She left me a key. She left me letters."
"She left you a daughter," Wesley said. "That is what she said in her letters to me. She said her granddaughter would come home and she said you would not know how to ask for help. She said you would rather break yourself against the work than admit you needed a hand."
Margot's breath caught. The key pressed warm into her palm. The bottle sat before her, dark and steady, and the shop held the scent of dried herbs and old wood and the faint ghost of lavender that never quite left the air no matter how many seasons passed.
"She did not know me," Margot said.
"She knew you better than you know yourself," Wesley said. "That is the trouble with mothers and grandmothers. They see too much."
Mrs. Barlow's hand moved, finally, and rested on Margot's wrist, a brief pressure, a permission. "Take the oil," she said. "It is for your hands. It is for the harvest. It is for the long hours in the field when the sun does not relent and the skin splits and you wonder why you came back to a place you barely remember."
Margot took the bottle. It was heavier than it looked, the glass thick, the contents almost viscous in the way they settled when she tilted it.
"She used to send me a bottle every year," Wesley said. "For my hands. The recipe changed a little each time. She would write and say she had found a new note she wanted me to try. I would read the letter and then I would take it to Lillian and Lillian would make it up." He glanced at his wife. "Lillian made it better than Cordelia ever did."
"Her hands shook," Mrs. Barlow said simply. "In the last years. The measuring was not what it had been. But the ideas were always exact."
Wesley turned back to Margot. "She would write to me in October, after the harvest. She would tell me what the year had been. She would say the lavender had yielded well or the lavender had yielded poorly. She would say the rain had come at the right time or it had not. She would say the blend should have more of one thing or less of another." He paused. "She never told me why. I did not ask. With Cordelia, the asking was the wrong part. You waited. You let the letters come."
Margot looked down at the bottle. The oil caught a stray beam from the window, a thread of gold in the dark glass. "She sent you the recipes," she said.
"She sent me the ideas," Wesley said. "I sent them to Lillian. Lillian made them. We never knew what she did with the bottles after that. I assumed she kept them. I assumed she used them herself." He looked at the shop, at the shelves, at the jars. "Perhaps she sent them elsewhere too."
"She sent them everywhere," Mrs. Barlow said. "She had a list. I never saw the list. She would come in with a paper in her hand and she would read off the names and the quantities and Lillian would mix them and she would take them away. Sometimes there were six bottles. Sometimes twelve. Once she asked for twenty." Mrs. Barlow's voice was soft. "She never said who they were for. I assumed the people she loved. I assumed the people she worried about."
Wesley was watching Margot. His expression had not changed, but something in his stillness had sharpened, the way a man's attention sharpens when he is about to say something he has carried for a long time.
"She wrote me last November," he said. "It was the last letter. It came after the first frost. She told me the year was ending well. She told me the oil should have more beeswax in it that year, for the cold. She told me she was tired and that she had said what she needed to say." He paused. "She told me to look after you."
Margot did not speak. The shop was very quiet. Even Nell the younger had gone still, standing near the door with her hand on the frame, listening with the seriousness of a child who has understood that something important is happening in the room of the grown-ups.
"She said to look after you," Wesley repeated. "She said you would come home in the spring. She said the farm would be in poor repair. She said the lavender would need cutting and the fences would need mending and the house would need airing. She said you would try to do it alone." His mouth moved, a small shift that might have been a smile or might have been something sadder. "She said that was how you were made."
"How she made me," Margot said.
"How she made you," Wesley agreed. "And how she was made herself. Stubborn women who would rather work themselves to bone than ask for a hand."
Mrs. Barlow's fingers moved against the counter. "Take the oil," she said again. "Take the key. Go home. When you are ready, come back and I will teach you what Lillian taught me. The blends. The scents. The way to read a season through the smell of it."
Margot held the bottle against the key. The brass and the glass, the warmth of the shop and the warmth of the sun outside. She thought of Cordelia in her kitchen, her hands unsteady, her mind exact. She thought of a woman writing letters in October, reading off names and quantities to a pharmacist who never asked why. She thought of twenty bottles, twelve bottles, six bottles, going out into the world to people whose names she would never know but whose hands she had thought about through the long Provencal winter.
"I do not know how to ask for help," Margot said.
"No," Wesley said. "You do not."
Mrs. Barlow smiled. "That is why we are telling you that you do not have to."
Margot did not go home.
She meant to. She walked toward the door with the key in her pocket and the bottle in her hand, and Mrs. Barlow's last words still warm in her ears. But at the threshold she stopped, because the morning had shifted and she could feel it the way she could feel a storm moving across the valley, the way her grandmother had taught her to read the sky.
The street was quieter now. The sun had climbed past the roofline of the pharmacy and lay warm on the cobblestones, and the smell of bread from the bakery two doors down had thickened into something almost sweet. A cat moved along the wall of the old bookshop, its belly low, its eyes half closed. Somewhere a screen door banged softly, once, twice, then stilled.
Nell Barlow stood on the sidewalk outside the apothecary, waiting. She had not gone with them into the shop. She had stayed outside, Margot realized, because Wesley had asked her to, and because the girl understood, in her quiet ten-year-old way, that some things had to happen between grown-ups before they could be shared.
"Miss Margot." Nell's voice was careful. "Are you all right?"
Margot looked down at her. The girl's face was tilted up, her freckles sharp in the morning light, her hands twisted together at her waist. She was not fidgeting. She was holding very still, the way Margot had seen her father hold still when he was deciding what to say.
"Yes," Margot said. "I think I am."
"My dad said to wait for him. He's talking to Mrs. Barlow about something. He said to take you to the park if you wanted, but only if you wanted." A pause. "Do you want?"
Margot almost said no. She almost said she should go back to the farm and start the long list of things that needed doing before the light changed. But she had been making lists since she was sixteen, and her grandmother had been making them longer, and somewhere in the twenty-three years between, Margot had forgotten that not everything required a list.
"Yes," she said. "Show me the park."
The park was small. A square of green at the end of Main Street, bordered by oaks so old their roots had buckled the sidewalk into soft ridges. A bandstand stood at the center, white paint peeling, its steps scattered with fallen blossoms from a tree Margot did not recognize. A pair of iron benches faced each other across a gravel path, and beyond them, at the far edge, a low stone wall marked where the green gave way to a slow brown river.
Nell led her to one of the benches and sat down, then looked up at Margot as if waiting for permission. Margot sat. The wood was cool through her dress. The river made a sound like someone turning the pages of a very large book.
"My grandmother used to bring me here," Nell said. "On Saturdays, when I was little. Before she got sick. We'd get ice cream from the shop on the corner, the one with the green awning, and she'd let me pick the flavor. She always got vanilla. She said vanilla was the only honest flavor." Nell drew her knees up onto the bench and wrapped her arms around them. "She said a lot of things like that. Things that sounded simple but weren't."
Margot watched a bird cross the bandstand roof, its shadow sliding over the white paint. "What else did she say?"
Nell was quiet for a moment. Then she reached into the pocket of her shorts and drew out a folded piece of paper, creased soft from being carried and carried again. She held it on her palm but did not open it.
"She said she had a friend, once. A long time ago. They were young together. They did everything together, she said, until they didn't." Nell's voice had gone slower, as if she were reciting something she had heard many times. "She said the friend went away and came back different. She said the friend built something far away and it grew beautiful. She said the friend never forgot her, even when she stopped writing. She said she never forgot the friend either."
Margot's hand found the edge of the bench. The wood was rough under her fingers. "When did she tell you this?"
"Last summer. The summer before she died." Nell still had not opened the paper. "She gave me this and said to keep it safe. She said one day someone would come who needed to see it, and I would know who."
The river turned a page. A breeze moved through the oaks and brought down a small shower of pale petals that landed on Margot's knee and stayed there, trembling.
Nell unfolded the paper.
It was a photograph. Old, the edges gone soft and brown, the colors shifted into something between honey and dust. Three young women stood in a field of lavender, the rows running away behind them toward a stone farmhouse Margot knew as well as her own hands. They wore summer dresses and had their arms around each other's waists, and they were laughing, or had been laughing, or were about to laugh. The light in the field was the color of late afternoon in Provence, gold and silver and impossibly green.
One of the women was Lillian Pace. Margot would have known her anywhere, even in a photograph sixty years old, even laughing in a field she had not seen in decades. The shape of her shoulders, the way she held her head, the particular tilt of her mouth when she was about to say something sharp and kind. The same shoulders that had just leaned across a counter in Hickory Hollow, the same mouth, the same hands.
The second woman was a stranger. Dark-haired, broad-faced, smiling with her whole body. She had one arm around Lillian and the other around the third woman, and her eyes were half closed against the sun.
The third woman was Cordelia.
Margot had seen other photographs of her grandmother, but none like this. None so young. None so unguarded. Cordelia's hair was loose down her back, her dress was the blue of a summer sky at noon, and she was laughing the way Margot had never heard her laugh, the way Margot had never imagined she could laugh. She looked like a different person. She looked like the person Cordelia might have been if she had not left, if she had not gone to Provence, if she had stayed in this small town and grown old in this house on Main Street with a woman she loved and a life that bent but did not break.
"This is them," Nell said. "That's my grandmother. She told me once that Lillian was the best friend she ever had. She said they were supposed to grow old together. She said sometimes people go away because they love you too much to stay, and that's the saddest kind of going." Nell looked up at Margot. "She said you'd understand."
Margot could not speak. The lavender in the photograph was in bloom, and the field went on forever, and the three women stood at the edge of it as if they were standing at the edge of something else entirely.
"She told me to give this to you," Nell said. "She said when the right person came, I would know. And she said to tell you that Lillian has been waiting a long time, and that waiting is almost over, and that you should go back to the apothecary before you go home."
She held the photograph out.
Margot took it. The paper was thin and warm from Nell's pocket, and the smell of lavender was so strong for a moment that she thought she had stepped back through the years into a field she had never seen.
"Thank you," she said.
Nell nodded. Then she slid off the bench and stood in the gravel, her hands in her pockets again, her face tilted up to the oaks. "I'm glad you came," she said. "I'm glad it was you."
Wesley found them there a few minutes later, his boots heavy on the gravel, his hat pushed back on his head. He looked at the photograph in Margot's hand and did not ask. He looked at his daughter and nodded once, slowly, and she nodded back.
"Mrs. Barlow says to tell you she's not going anywhere," he said. "She says the farm will wait. She says lavender doesn't care what month it is. She says to come back when you're ready, and not before."
Margot stood. The petals on her knee fell away. She slipped the photograph into her pocket beside the key, and the paper and the brass lay together against her hip like two halves of a conversation.
"I have to go back," she said. "There is something I forgot to ask her."
Wesley tipped his hat. "Nell and I will walk with you as far as the corner."
They walked the three blocks in a silence that was not uncomfortable. The town moved around them in its slow Saturday rhythm, screen doors and lawn mowers and the distant sound of a radio tuned to a baseball game. At the corner of Main and Oak, Wesley stopped and put his hand on Nell's shoulder.
"We'll be at the diner," he said. "You come find us when you're done. Or don't. Either way, we'll be there."
Margot crossed the street alone. The awning of the apothecary was still down, but the door was open a crack, and through it she could see the rows of bottles catching the light from the back window. She pushed the door open and the bell rang, a single clear note that hung in the air long after the door had stilled.
Lillian was behind the counter, her hands flat on the wood, her eyes already on the door.
"I thought you'd be back," she said. "You have your grandmother's face when you've made a decision. You get very still."
Margot set the photograph on the counter between them. The three women in the lavender field looked up at Lillian, and Lillian looked down at them, and for a long moment nobody moved.
"She kept this," Lillian said. "All these years. She kept this and she never sent it."
"She kept you, too," Margot said. "In every bottle she ever made. In every letter she wrote to the pharmacist. In every year she stayed when she might have gone."
Lillian's fingers found the edge of the photograph and traced the outline of Cordelia's face, the blue dress, the loose hair.
"I knew her before I knew myself," Lillian said. "And then I knew myself, and I knew her still. And then she left, and I knew her in her absence, which is the worst way. And now I know her in you."
She looked up. Her eyes were bright but her voice was steady.
"What did you come back to ask me?"
Margot drew the photograph toward her and folded it carefully, along the same creases Nell had made, and slid it back into her pocket.
"Teach me," she said. "Teach me the blends. Teach me the scents. Teach me how to read a season through the smell of it. Teach me how to stay."
Lillian came around the counter. She moved the way very old women move when they are sure of the ground beneath them, one hand trailing the wood, the other reaching out. She took Margot's hands in hers, and her grip was dry and warm and certain.
"Sit down," she said. "We have a long morning. We have a longer life. We will begin with the oil you are already carrying, and we will end when the light changes, and then we will begin again."
She led Margot to the stool behind the counter, the same stool where the young woman in the photograph had probably sat, in a different summer, in a different century, waiting for someone to walk through the door.
Outside, Wesley and Nell Barlow turned the corner of Main Street and walked toward the diner, and the town moved on around them in its slow and patient way, and somewhere in Provence a field of lavender bent in a wind that had traveled a long way to find it.