The Girl Who Watched the Leaves Fall
The bell above the door jingled for the third time that hour, and for the third time, Willow didn't look up fast enough to see who'd come in.
"Willow." Her mother's voice carried that particular note of patience stretched thin, the one she used when she'd already said a name twice before. "The lavender bundles aren't going to tie themselves."
"Sorry, Mama." Willow pulled her gaze from the window, where a fat maple leaf had been spinning lazily past the glass, caught in some invisible current of wind. She picked up the twine again, looping it around the dried stems with fingers that knew the motion well enough to do it without thinking—which was, perhaps, the whole problem. Her hands could tie lavender in their sleep. The rest of her was somewhere else entirely.
The shop smelled the way it always did in autumn: dried chamomile and crushed juniper berries, the sharp tang of vinegar where her father had been steeping something in the back room, and underneath it all, faint and persistent, the smell of woodsmoke drifting in from every chimney in Thistledown. Willow had grown up in that smell. She could have named every herb on the shelves with her eyes closed. And still, some…
