Witchery

Broadacres smelled of cedar, basil, and clean linen.

For a long time those were the only facts Kath trusted. The rest arrived in pieces: Grace’s hand at her elbow, a hallway lit low along the baseboards, a room with curtains that moved in the night wind, the neat bite of antiseptic at her temple.

When she woke properly, morning had come in silver. Not the knife-bright glare from the attic room at Jackson Orchard, but a wide, sifted light through maple leaves. A glass of water stood on the bedside table beside two painkillers, a folded towel, and her rosin wrapped in Eileen’s blue cloth.

Kath pushed herself up too quickly.

“Lie back,” Grace said from the chair by the window. She was reading a paperback as though waiting at hospital bedsides was an ordinary hobby.

“My violin.”

“In the corner. Case closed. No one has pawed it.”

Kath looked. The black case leaned beside an old cedar wardrobe, unremarkable and safe.

Her eyes stung with a speed that embarrassed her.

Grace closed the book over one finger. “You have a mild concussion, a heroic bruise, and a split scalp that has been cleaned and glued. You also inhaled more smoke than was sensible. I have left Colin Jackson two messages saying you are alive, injured, and not available for orchard labour today.”

“He’ll say I walked off.”

“He can use his imagination for other things.”

Kath laughed once, then touched her head because laughing hurt.

Grace stood and crossed the room with the economy of someone who had spent years moving in weather. She checked Kath’s pupils with a penlight, asked the date, the town, the name of the prime minister, then the name of the woman who had driven her out of a smoke line in an old green truck.

“Grace Gray,” Kath said.

“Acceptable.”

“Retired search-and-rescue pilot.”

“Better.”

“Owner of a very real place.”

Grace’s mouth moved near a smile. “Alex has been accused of worse than accuracy.”

The name settled between them with its own pulse.

Kath looked down at the blanket. It was white cotton, mended in one corner with green thread. “Does she know I’m here?”

“Yes.”

“Did she come?”

“She wanted to. I told her not to arrive before you had slept.”

“You told Alex Simpson not to do something?”

“Frequently. She takes it as character development.”

Kath put both hands flat on the blanket. They looked wrong in clean light: scratched, stained at the nails, one knuckle swollen from the pump shed door. Work hands. Music hands. Hands that had been useful to everyone except herself.

Grace followed her gaze. “There is breakfast downstairs when you are ready. There is no invoice attached to it.”

“I can help.”

“That was not an invitation to negotiate.”

“I don’t like owing people.”

“Then call it evidence. You are being shown that care can exist without a hook in it.”

Kath hated how badly she wanted to believe that.

Breakfast complicated the evidence.

Grace did not carry a tray upstairs like a nurse in a sentimental film. She made Kath come down slowly, one hand on the banister, and pointed out every obstacle as if narrating a landing approach: rug edge, third stair shallow, dog in moral crisis near the kitchen door.

The dog was large, elderly, and offended by Kath’s existence until she sat. Then he rested his chin on her uninjured knee and exhaled damply.

“That is Orville,” Grace said. “He believes trauma improves with supervision.”

“Does it?”

“The evidence is mixed.”

Breakfast was toast, eggs, sliced tomatoes, and tea strong enough to have an opinion. No one asked Kath to earn it. Grace ate standing at the counter, reading messages on her phone and answering none of them until Kath had finished half a slice of toast.

“Colin has called four times,” Grace said.

Kath’s stomach closed.

“I have not answered. I texted him the relevant facts. Alive. Mild concussion. Resting. Returning when medically sensible.”

“He will hate that.”

“I wrote medically sensible specifically for that reason.”

Kath looked at the plate. “I should call Jean.”

“You may. You do not have to.”

May. Not should. Not must.

Kath took the phone Grace offered and called the kitchen landline because Jean sometimes left her mobile in the laundry. Jean answered on the second ring.

“Jackson Orchard.”

“It’s me.”

The breath on the other end broke. “Kath.”

“I’m all right.”

“Grace said. Colin said you made a scene.”

“In the pump shed?”

“In his head, I think.” A pause. “Your room is untouched.”

The sentence was not casual. Kath heard what it cost.

“Thank you.”

“Rest,” Jean said, too quickly, as if Colin had entered the room. Then, softer, “Do not hurry back for our sake.”

The line clicked dead.

Kath set the phone down and discovered she was shaking.

Grace did not comment. She pushed the jam closer.

Care, Kath thought, could be a person not watching you fail to hold a spoon.

After breakfast, Grace showed her the rule of the house.

Not rules. Rule.

“If a door is closed, knock,” Grace said.

Kath waited for more.

Grace rinsed a plate. “That is it.”

“No quiet hours?”

“If Orville barks at raccoons, quiet hours are theoretical.”

“No guest areas?”

“You are not a guest unless you prefer the word. You are also not staff. If you want tea, make tea. If you want to be alone, close a door. If you want to leave, tell me so I do not organize a search party and become tedious.”

Kath looked toward the hallway, where every door had a latch that worked.

“And if I break something?”

“Tell me.”

“And then?”

“Then we know what is broken.”

The simplicity of it nearly made Kath angry. Whole lives could be arranged around not knowing what was broken.

Grace dried her hands and leaned against the counter. “You are waiting for the price list.”

“People usually have one.”

“Yes. Mine is short. Do not lie to me to make my life easier. Do not injure yourself proving you are useful. Do not mistake privacy for punishment.”

Kath swallowed. “That is short?”

“I edited.”

She slept again after breakfast. When she woke a second time, the afternoon had warmed the room and someone was playing piano badly downstairs. Badly, but with confidence. A scale, a wrong chord, an amused correction. Kath found a cardigan folded over the foot of the bed and pulled it over her borrowed shirt.

The hallway opened to a landing above a long room. Books lined one wall. Windows lined another. Below, a black upright piano stood with its lid propped open, and beside it an instrument cabinet held violins and violas behind glass doors.

Grace sat at the piano, peering at sheet music through half-moon glasses.

“I thought you said no one pawed things,” Kath said from the stairs.

“These are mine. I am allowed to paw my own mistakes.”

“That’s a D natural.”

Grace looked at the page. “Is it?”

“In that key, yes.”

“Come correct me, then.”

Kath descended slowly, one hand on the rail. The room smelled of polish, paper, and faint resin. Not performance resin. Stored resin. Old practice rooms. Cases opened after years.

The cabinet door stood unlocked. Inside, on the middle shelf, a fiddle lay in a brown case with worn velvet. Not expensive in the glossy way, but cared for.

“Who played that?” Kath asked.

Grace did not answer immediately. “A friend.”

Kath knew the shape of silence when it was protecting something. “Can I see it?”

“You can.”

The fiddle was lighter than Kath expected. Its varnish had darkened at the edges, and the chin rest bore the small dullness made by actual use. Kath touched the strings. They answered with a tired shimmer.

“It needs tuning.”

“Everything does, eventually.”

Kath glanced at her.

Grace sat back. “I heard your mother play once. Not on a stage. Here. In this room, before Broadacres became respectable enough to have brochures and too many committee meetings.”

The room tilted.

“Eileen was here?”

“More than once.”

Kath gripped the fiddle neck until the strings bit her fingers. “Colin said she ran from all this.”

“Colin says many things in a tone that makes people tired enough to stop checking.”

“You knew her.”

“A little. Not enough. Enough to know she played as though she was arguing with the dead and flirting with the living at the same time.”

Kath laughed, and this time the pain in her head was worth it.

Grace’s eyes softened without pity. “There are recordings. Letters, too, I think. They were not mine to sort. Some went back to the Jacksons when Eileen left. Some remained here by accident or stubbornness.”

“Colin has them.”

“Some, likely.”

“He said he kept what mattered.”

“Then he may have told the truth by mistake.”

Kath set the fiddle back in its case with care so deliberate it became prayer. “I need to go back.”

“Not today.”

“My things are there.”

“Things can be fetched.”

“Not by you.”

“By Alex, if you ask. By me, if you do not. By the police, if Colin becomes foolish.”

The word police made Kath flinch. Grace noticed and let it pass.

“I am not keeping you here,” Grace said. “Broadacres is not a prettier cage. But I will not drive a concussed woman back into a house where her first instinct is to apologize for bleeding on the floor.”

Kath looked toward the windows. Beyond them, the land rolled in gold rows down toward the lake. No one shouted. No machines shrieked. Somewhere outside, a dog barked once, then decided against making a career of it.

The front door opened.

Alex’s voice came from the hall, low and careful. “Grace?”

Kath’s body answered before her judgment did. Her shoulders eased. Then she despised herself for easing.

Grace watched her. “Do you want me to send her away?”

Kath could have said yes. The choice itself made her throat tight.

“No,” she said. “But stay nearby.”

Grace rose. “Always within inconvenient distance.”

Alex appeared at the doorway with smoke still caught in her hair. She stopped as soon as she saw Kath, hands empty, face stripped of its public calm.

“You are alive,” Alex said.

“That was the report.”

“I am sorry. Not for the weather. For not knowing sooner. For not being there.”

Kath wanted to say that no one had been there. That was not fair. Grace had been there. Jean had once been there with a plaster. Miro had been there with fruit and quiet facts. Alex had been there on a road with a broken suitcase and again in margins and notes.

“You couldn’t have known,” Kath said.

“I could have asked more questions about the farm before now.”

The answer was too honest to swat away.

Grace moved to the piano and pretended to study the music with insulting obviousness.

Alex stepped no farther into the room. “May I come in?”

Kath’s heart kicked once, hard.

“Yes.”

Alex came to the edge of the rug and stopped again. “I brought your book.”

From her satchel she took the copy of Evangeline. Its corner was scorched brown.

“You went to the ridge?”

“After Grace called. I thought you might have left it. I found it under the shale.”

Kath took the book. Their fingers did not touch. The restraint felt more intimate than touch would have.

“Thank you.”

“There was a note in it,” Alex said. “I did not read it.”

Kath opened to the marked page. Her own handwriting stared back: Some people are too fond of being paid in loyalty. Under it, Alex’s answer. That is a line worth keeping.

Kath closed the book.

Alex’s voice lowered. “Is Jackson hurting you?”

The question was too direct. It should have made things simpler. Instead it showed how many kinds of hurt did not photograph well.

“He is feeding me,” Kath said.

“That was not the question.”

“No.”

“Kath.”

Her name in Alex’s mouth made the room dangerous.

Kath looked at Grace’s fiddle. “I cannot choose anything while all my choices live in his house.”

Alex absorbed that. No protest, no promise too quick to trust. “Then we start with getting your choices out of his house.”

“We?”

“Only if you want we.”

Grace struck a wrong chord. “D natural.”

Kath startled, then laughed despite everything.

Alex smiled, small and brilliant.

The laugh unsteadied Kath more than the injury had. It opened some locked inner door, and behind it was longing, immediate and unreasonable: Alex’s hands, Alex’s voice, Alex waiting for permission. Kath could imagine crossing the rug. Could imagine asking for the one kindness that would ruin her for all lesser ones.

Her body imagined it before her mind could make rules. One step. The give of the rug under her bare feet. Alex’s coat smelling faintly of smoke and cold air. The place under Alex’s jaw where her pulse would be, if Kath put her mouth there, if she allowed herself even the thought of it. Heat moved through her too quickly, humiliating in its clarity. Not romance in any tidy sense. Not gratitude. Want, plain and physical, arriving in a room where she had been given soup and a working door and no bill for either.

Alex saw the wanting on her. Of course she did. Her hand lifted a few inches, then stopped before it became an offer Kath had to refuse. The restraint made the wanting worse. A reached-for touch would have been simpler; Kath could have stepped back from it, named it too much, made herself safe by making Alex wrong. But Alex only stood there with her hand suspended between them, palm open, asking nothing and making the air around Kath’s skin impossible to ignore.

Kath’s throat tightened. She wanted that hand at her waist. She wanted Alex’s mouth close enough to feel the question before hearing it. She wanted to stop being measured by usefulness and be touched as if her wanting had weight of its own.

Instead she gripped the book until the scorched corner pressed into her palm.

“Not yet,” Kath said.

Alex did not ask what she meant.

“All right.”

“I need to be free first.”

“Then I will not call waiting nothing.”

Kath looked at her then, really looked. Alex’s restraint was not coldness today. It was labour. It was choice.

“There is a tune,” Kath said. “One Grace says my mother played.”

“Will you play it?”

Kath touched the blue cloth in her pocket.

Her head ached. Her hands shook. Colin still had her room, her hidden violin, Eileen’s papers if they existed, and the power to turn one night away into a debt.

But Broadacres held an old fiddle and a woman who had known her mother and Alex standing at the edge of a rug as though boundaries were holy.

Kath lifted the instrument.

“Once,” she said.

The first note scraped.

The second found the room.

By the fourth, Grace had stopped pretending to read.

By the eighth, Alex was crying without making a sound.

Kath played the fragment she knew, and the house kept it.

Afterward, no one applauded.

Grace closed the piano lid softly. Alex wiped her face with the heel of her hand and looked embarrassed only because she had been witnessed feeling something she had not scheduled. Kath lowered the fiddle and waited for the usual request: again, louder, prettier, explain what that is, explain why it matters, explain what happened to you.

Grace said, “Soup at six.”

Alex said, “I can drive back to the orchard for anything you need.”

“No,” Kath said too quickly.

Alex nodded. “All right.”

“Not because I trust Colin with my things.”

“I understand.”

“Because if I let you fetch them, he becomes your problem too.”

Alex looked at her then. “He already is, in several public-policy categories.”

“Do not make me laugh with a head injury.”

“Sorry.”

Grace picked up the old fiddle. “Nobody is fetching anything today. Today the only task is not turning recovery into an audition.”

Kath looked at the room: the piano, the cabinet, the book in her hand, Alex waiting for no permission she had not been given. It should have felt like sanctuary.

It felt like temptation.