Page 47 of The Candlemaker

Again, her shoulder brushed against my chest because I didn’t move out of her determined path fast enough.Maybe I didn’t want to.

“Gigi was the one who bought me a candle-making kit for my thirteenth birthday. It was just something fun at first. Something I’d do here and there with Lou. With my friends.” She tipped her head, assessing the level of the wax and then dunking the thermometer once more before murmuring, “Perfect.”

She moved likeacandle nymph. Flitting around me as trays of empty glass jars appeared and then three metal pitchers, one larger than the other two. The entire time, it was arms to shoulders. Chest to arms. I brushed against her so many times, it was a damn miracle the wax hadn’t evaporated from the heat.

“I need you to wipe out all the jars for me. Sometimes there are smudges on the inside.” She handed me a towel, and one of my eyebrows lifted. “Please.”

I palmed the base of one jar, wiped the inside, and replacedit on the tray. The task was mindless, which let my mind wander right back to where it wanted to be.Her.

“What happened at sixteen?” I asked again as she held the larger metal container under the spigot of the wax melter and opened the valve and let a rush of burning wax fill the container.

“The way Gigi tells it, or the truth?”

My heart thudded. What I wouldn’t do for even a sliver of the truth from her…

“Both.”

“When I was sixteen, I wanted to make some extra money, so I started playing around with blueberry scented candles, knowing I could sell them at my mom’s store along with her jam. I wanted to be a part of the business, but I wanted to do it my own way.”

No surprise there,I thought. “That’s Gigi’s version.”

She hesitated. “Yeah.”

I stilled. “And the truth?”

She stopped the wax from pouring out and brought the metal container over to the scale. I stood silently—impatiently—as she set an empty pitcher on the scale and began to measure out wax from the container she’d just filled into it. Her concentration on the task was disproportionate to its simplicity. She wasn’t weighing the wax as much as she weighed the decision to tell me the real story or not.

“When I was sixteen, my brother Kit came home from the hospital for the second time,” she began slowly, and with just one sentence, the story veered from anything I’d been thinking. “The first time was what brought him home from the war. The second time was after the marathon bombing.”

Damn.I forced the air through my lips, the weight of her story pressurizing my chest. I couldn’t imagine what that was like—I didn’t even feel like I had the right to. But I couldn’tstop myself from imagining her. Sixteen. Both of her older brothers clearly had filled the void that her deadbeat father had left. And then to almost lose one of them. Twice.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing there was some sum of money I could pay to make those words feel like they actually did something.

“It was hard for him—hard for all of us.” She moved the pitcher off the scale once it weighed the correct amount, and then did the same with the second pitcher. “Gigi started dying her hair. My cousins and I started pulling silly pranks on each other—anything to try and lighten the mood. And Kit…he pretended well enough during the day, but at night…”

I finished wiping all the jars clean when Frankie grabbed the thermometer again and checked the temperature of each pitcher. The whole time, I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want to say anything because I wanted her to finish, and the silence felt like one more challenge between us. To sense who would be the first to break it.

“Perfect,” she murmured, and then grabbed the smaller beaker of her fragrance. “I like to add it when it’sjust under one-eighty-five.”

She poured the fragrance into the hot wax, tipping forward and taking a deep breath.She wrinkled her nose, and you would’ve thought the way my dick hardened she’d decided to strip right in front of me, but no, I was turned on—aching—from a damn nose twitch.

Her eyes fluttered open, staring at the wax, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing it. She wasn’t seeing anything except the continuation of her story.

“The nightmares got so bad, he stopped sleeping in his room because he knew he kept waking us. So, Kit moved to the couch. It helped us sleep better, but not him.” She robotically repeated the process with the second pitcher, using a containerof fragrance that was already mixed.“One day, I decided to make candles—blueberry candles to mimic the scent of Mom’s jam to sell in her store. Anyway, I lit the candle,forgotI lit the candle until around midnight, and I ran downstairs to douse it, and that was when I saw him;Kit was asleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly.”

Damn.Before I could say anything, she plucked something from the shelf below, and when she handed it to me with the instructions, she said, “Now, we stir.”

“Chopsticks?” I took a pair and followed her lead, dunking them into the second pitcher and stirring while she did the other.

“I order a lot of takeout while I’m working, so I have a lot of extra sticks,” she explained, pausing for a few long seconds before she finished her story.“Of course, I thought that night was a fluke…that it was just a random, peaceful night of sleep. So, I tested it out every night for the next two weeks, and every night I lit that candle, Kit slept…soundly.”

“Wow,” I rumbled, not knowing what else to say.What the hell else did you say?At sixteen, I’d been preoccupied with two things: girls and how I was going to make so much money so that Mom never had to worry again—so much money that my father would know my name and regret walking away from someone who’d achieved so much.

At sixteen, she’d started a business to save her brother’s life.Not literally, but damn if it wasn’t fucking close. And this whole time, I’d looked at her candles—her store—as some quaint little hobby that only a tiny town with a huge tourist population could turn into a business.

“At first, I wanted to understand it—how it helped him. So, I looked online and read all these articles and papers on the psychology of smell.” She took another sample of the scented wax. “Compared to our other senses, smell cantrigger an immediate emotional response, along with a memory.”

I stilled, Mom’s face flashing in my mind the instant she breathed that beach candle—the instant she came back to me. It was the whole reason I was here—to make that last.

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