Page 43 of The Witch & the Hound
We stood there in my kitchen, holding each other while the coffee went cold and the morning sun painted everything gold. Outside, Seaview was waking up, shops opening, tourists already crowding Main Street for the Halloween festival's final day, normal life carrying on like it always did.
But inside my house, something had shifted.
Chapter 16
Maggie
The Halloween festival's last day was chaos, good chaos, the kind where kids ran wild with face paint and sugar highs while parents pretended to be in control.
Bram and I walked through it together, hand in hand, drawing stares but also smiles. Waves from people I barely knew. Nods from shopkeepers. Mrs. Carroll called out from her boutique, "That dress worked, didn't it?"
"Eventually," I called back, grinning.
We passed the pier where we'd found Lily. Someone had hung a banner:Thank You to Our Local Heroes.
Bram stopped, staring at it.
"That's us," I said.
"That's strange."
"Get used to it."
We kept walking, past the bonfire that was already being set up for tonight's celebration, past the face-painting booth and the pumpkin-carving contest, and the booth selling my soap with a sign that read:Made by Seaview's Own Maggie Doyle.
Seaview's own.
When had that happened? When had I stopped being the isolated witch making soap in her backyard and become part of the town's identity?
Maybe when I stopped hiding.
Maybe when I let someone see me.
We ended up at my workshop, the door propped open to let in the autumn air. Bram leaned against the workbench while I checked on the week's batches: rosemary, lavender, cinnamon, and nutmeg for the upcoming season.
"Can I help?" he asked.
"With soap?"
"With whatever you need."
I looked at him, really looked. At Bram, who'd been welcomed by a town that had barely noticed him a week ago, who was offering to help me make soap on a Saturday afternoon because that's what people did when they were building something together.
"Yeah," I said. "You can help."
I showed him how to cut the bars, how to wrap them in paper, how to label them with my cramped handwriting. We workedside by side, the workshop warm and fragrant, the afternoon sun slanting through the windows.
It wasn't fancy. It wasn't dramatic. It was just us, making soap, being together.
Being home.
Later that night, after the festival wound down, after the bonfire burned low, after we'd said goodnight to neighbors who actually knew Bram's name now, we sat on my porch and watched the stars come out.
"I've been thinking," Bram said slowly. "About my lease."
"Yeah?"
"There's an apartment above Mrs. Carroll's shop. Small. One bedroom. But it has a view of the harbor."
