Page 48 of A Novel Love Story

This woman wasn’t her.

“It’s just,” Maya finally caved, “sometimes when I think about it too hard, it feels like I’m just … sort of this sidenote in my own life, you know? Like I don’t have one of my own here in Eloraton.”

“Like …” I hesitated. “A secondary character?”

“Yes!”she crowed. “I just feel like I’m stuck. And the only person who understood was—Oh.” She froze, staring at the woman on the sidewalk. “Lyssa,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The redhead stood in front of us, about ten feet away, carrying two paper bags full of groceries, her wide-brim hat shadowing her face. At the sound of her name, she pulled herself to her full height, shoulders square. “Maya,” she replied.

I could see how, yesterday, Junie confused us. We both had long reddish-copper hair and a heart-shaped face, but that’s where our similarities ended. She wore hers in pigtail braids, and dressed in green rompers, and had a sleeve of flower tattoos that she kept adding to, even though it was already stuffed full.

I expected Maya and Lyssa to blush at each other, to make flirty small talk, like they had inHoney and the Heartbreak, but there were no teasing smiles, no moony eyes. There was a wall, and jagged spikes, and man-eating plants between them.

She simply gave a polite hello, and recognized me. “You’re Anders’s friend from yesterday!”

“Not quite friends,” I clarified.

“Oh …” She shifted awkwardly, and then asked Maya, “How’s your family?”

“Good,” Maya replied woodenly. “Except for the mutiny of bees.”

Lyssa nodded. “That reminds me, I’m going to go help Gemma figure out a solution. I’ll … see you around?”

“Yeah,” she replied, her hands curled into fists, and she didn’t move again until Lyssa had passed us on the street and migrated across the road toward Sweeties.

Beside me, Maya held her wrist with her grandfather’s fixed watch, and gave a long sigh. “Look at me, babbling. It was nice chatting with you,” she added, and pulled her headphones back over her ears.

I watched her go, and when she turned down the next street, I began to wonder ifallof the characters were stuck like that—somewhere after the happily ever after of book four. In that span, Anders appeared, Maya and Lyssa split, the bees started a mutiny and … what else had changed?

That’s when I remembered.

“Wait,” I said quickly, and she glanced over her shoulder, taking off an earphone.

“Sorry, yeah?”

“Do you know what’s behind the inn at the Daffodil? You know, there’s a pergola and there’s an alleyway, but …”

She gave me a strange look. “Yeah, it’s abandoned. There’s nothing back there.” Then she left down the street toward home, and I decided where I wanted to go next.

THE PERGOLA STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE DAFFODIL INN’Sgarden, so that’s where I went. The path beyond it squeezed between two old buildings crawling with ivy. Clover and weeds grew from the cracks in the pavement and in the edges of the building. At the end of the alleyway was an iron gate, though it didn’t look locked.

I stopped under the pergola, looking down the narrow way. All day, I’d been racking my brain about this space, this nook behind the inn, but I didn’t remember it at all. This had not been in the books.

This … this was somethingnew.

I stepped through the pergola into the alley, the temperature between sunlight and shadow making my skin prickle with gooseflesh. The air felt like it was filled with electricity. I followed the alleyway down to the wrought-iron gate, and pushed it open.

The gate led to a courtyard, boxed in on all sides by buildings, so there was only one way in and one way out. There was an overgrown fountain in the middle that somehow still worked, marked with algae and moss as the water poured from the maiden at the top. Honeysuckles and wildflowers crawled across the carpet of grass and broken stone pathways, and oak trees grew, their branches swaying in the breeze, sending ripples of sunlight down through the leaves like the bottom of the ocean.

This place felt …impossible. Like there was something new lurking just under the clovers. It was right in the center of town, but how come it’d never been brought up before? Was it in the town maps in the front of the books?

At first glance, it looked like just a forgotten courtyard.

But then the shadows shifted, the trees blew the other way, and through the weeds there were glimpses of … stranger things. Statues, mostly. Old and forgotten, all broken and lying in different states of disrepair as nature slowly reclaimed them. There were mannequins huddled together in an embrace that reminded me of the couple found in Pompeii, and there were cat statues missing teeth, and birds missing wings. There were half-written epitaphs on tombstones jammed into the overgrown ivy, but none of them had names.

No, they said things like:

DRAFT4_TOEDITOR_3.docx.

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