Page 17 of Claimed By My Exiled Alphas
Chapter 7
Talia
The text from Hollis came Thursday morning while I was elbow-deep in sourdough starter, trying to coax life back into the culture I’d neglected for three days.
Beautiful day. Would you like to see my grandmother’s garden? I think you’d appreciate it.
I stared at the message, flour dusting my phone screen. In the week since our long conversation over tea, Hollis and I had fallen into an easy rhythm. I’d stop by Pine & Pages most afternoons, and he’d have a book waiting that he thought I’d like, along with whatever herbal blend Elias had recommended that day. We talked about everything and nothing. Food and literature and the particular quality of mountain light in autumn.
But this felt different. More personal than tea in a bookstore reading chair.
I’d love to. When?
Now? If you’re free. It’s the kind of afternoon that won’t come again until spring.
I looked at my sourdough starter, at the recipe testing I’d planned for the afternoon, at all the practical reasons I should say no.
Then I texted back:Give me twenty minutes to clean up.
I’ll pick you up.
Twenty minutes later, I was climbing into Hollis’s ancient Subaru, noting the collection of books on the back seat and the faint scent of chamomile that seemed to follow him everywhere.
“Thank you for saying yes,” he said as we pulled away from my cottage. “I don’t bring many people there.”
“To your grandmother’s garden?”
“To anywhere that matters.” He said it simply, like stating a fact rather than making a confession. “But I wanted you to see it.”
We drove in comfortable silence through town and up into the foothills, taking a narrow road that wound between properties marked by split-rail fences and sprawling meadows. The October afternoon was exactly what he’d promised. Perfect blue sky, aspens turning gold, that particular slant of light that only happened in autumn when the sun hung lower but still carried warmth.
“How long since she passed?” I asked as he turned onto a gravel drive.
“Three years this November.” His voice was steady, but I caught the thread of grief underneath. “I inherited the bookstore and the house. She even left me with instructions about the garden and how to keep it growing.”
“Have you?”
“I’ve tried.” He pulled up in front of a small craftsman bungalow, white paint weathered to soft gray. “But I’m not asgood at it as she was. Plants require a kind of attention I’m still learning to give.”
We got out, and he led me around the side of the house to a gate set in a stone wall. When he opened it, I understood immediately why he’d wanted me to see this on a day like today.
The garden sprawled across what must have been a quarter acre, terraced into the hillside with stone walls that looked like they’d been there forever. Late-season flowers still bloomed in defiant bursts of color. Asters and sedum, chrysanthemums in rust and gold, ornamental grasses gone to seed and catching light like they were made of spun sugar.
But it was also slightly wild. Overgrown in places, like the person tending it was doing their best but couldn’t quite keep up with nature’s insistence on sprawling.
“Oh, Hollis.” I moved forward without thinking, drawn to a patch of herbs that had clearly been carefully maintained even as other areas ran riot. “This is beautiful.”
“It’s a mess,” he said, but there was affection in his voice. “She would have had everything in perfect order by now. I let things get away from me.”
“It’s not a mess. It’s alive.” I touched a sprig of rosemary that had grown woody and wild, releasing its sharp scent into the afternoon air. “Gardens aren’t supposed to be controlled. They’re supposed to be tended.”
He came to stand beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body in the cooling air. “That’s very diplomatic.”
“It’s true. Look at this thyme.” I crouched beside a patch that had spread across the stone pathway, tiny purple flowers still blooming despite the season. “It’s thriving because you let it do what thyme does naturally. Spread and fill spaces and offer itself up.”
“My grandmother would have kept it contained to a specific bed.”
“Your grandmother probably also didn’t work full time running a bookstore while trying to grieve her death.” I looked up at him, squinting against the sun behind his head that gave him a halo of gold light. “You’re keeping it alive. That’s what she asked you to do.”
