Noelle cleared her throat. They both turned to her.
“First, look, I hate the name, but that’s neither here nor there,” Noelle said, her arms across her chest. Miriam’s heart sank. “Otherwise, it’s a solid start. Some kind of all-year event destination is probably what we need to pivot to, even if it’s going to mean so many more people in my damn woods. If we can get the Rosensteins on board as investors, and give the bank numbers, we might be able to sell them on it. But there’s something you’re missing, Miriam.”
She was pointing at the paper, and Miriam looked at it, trying to figure out what she’d missed.
“We need to get people here. And of the three of us, only one of us has a fandom. Ugh, I can’t believe I’m saying this.” Noelle scrubbed her hands over her face. “The best way to attract tourists would be for you to be here full-time.”
Miriam blinked at her, her mind blank. She couldn’t do that. And Noelle couldn’t really want her to.
Hannah looked thoughtful. “We could do a lot of stuff targeted around art if you were here, really carve out a niche as a destination. Art classes, local artist collaborations, week-long artist retreats, antique auctions.”
“DIY ruin your own antiques,” Miriam said, seeing it in her mind.
Noelle was scowling at her, which didn’t seem fair, since she was the one who’d brought up the idea in the first place. She must really love Carrigan’s, if she was willing to broach the idea of Miriam staying to save it.
“Could you leave Charleston? Logistically?” Hannah asked. “Have you thought about it?”
Shehadthought about it. She’d done all the math late one night. Just in case, she’d told herself. What it would take to close up the store, move all her materials here, and set up a permanent workspace. How much it would cost, and what part of Carrigan’s she could take over without disrupting the entire business.
The day Elijah told them about the will, Hannah had mentioned the carriage house. Miriam had snuck away from customers to do a walk-through during those long, busy two weeks when they’d first opened. It wasn’t a bad option. With the right conversions, it could be perfect. She would need to add a filming space, with a lighting setup, but it was doable.
She nodded. “Logistically, I could.” Emotionally, that was more complicated math. She would have to give up Charleston and Tara, who would never move here. It was more risk than she’d taken in, well, a decade.
“I think this is a plan we can take to the Rosensteins,” Hannah said. “First, we need specifics, projections, concrete ways we’ll get ourselves through the first year…”
“I’ve started cost analysis, although I need some numbers from you on Carrigan’s expenses,” Miriam assured her. “Except I didn’t write myself into the plan.”
“We need to know if you’re onboard, before we talk to them,” Hannah said. “Because it’s a whole different pitch.”
“Do you want me here?” Miriam asked. She wasn’t even going to think about whether or not she wanted to be here, herself. One step at a time. Noelle was silent, but Miriam already knew her answer. She was watching Hannah. If Hannah wanted to do this with her, maybe…
“I do.” Hannah smiled, and that smile was a part of Miriam’s happiness she’d forgotten she needed. “I want you here. I want to do this wild idea with you. Cass wanted you here. The Matthewses want you here. Do you want to be here?”
The idea of making a decision that would alter the lives of everyone she loved made Miriam want to run back to her warehouse and hide. In that space, she made all the rules, and nothing she did impacted anyone but herself.
She breathed through a rise of panic.
“We said I would stay through Thanksgiving and then we would figure things out, and that’s in a week. Can I still have that week? To try to sort out my brain?” she asked, pleading with Hannah with her eyes to understand why she couldn’t make this decision on the spot.
“You’ve had a decade, woman,” she heard Noelle grumble under her breath.
Hannah nodded, though. “Let’s all sleep on it, I’ll do some more finessing to the parts of the plan that don’t hinge on you, and we will talk about this in a week.” Hannah hugged her, hard, and she held on tightly.
“I need you to know that it means the world to me that you asked, Nan,” she said, a couple of tears falling into Hannah’s hair.
“Whatever,” Hannah said, wiping away her own tears. “Anything for Carrigan’s. Now let’s get back to work. We can’t sell trees from the library!”
Chapter 7
Noelle
The weeks before Thanksgiving were busy enough for Noelle to feel her introversion stretched, but even as she lost herself in the hustle, she couldn’t turn off her brain. She missed Cass, she couldn’t ignore how hard Miriam was busting her ass, and she worried that Hannah was burning herself out. She was itchy with stress about things she couldn’t fix or change. She found herself more than once out in the back acreage, taking care of trees she could mostly control.
There was a stand of young saplings she was coaxing into full health after a scorching summer. During the off-season, she read and spoke to botanists around the world about the effect of global warming on pine tree growth. She was trying various ways of adjusting the planting season to meet their new reality. Still, if she lost this crop, there would be a very lean year soon, so Noelle was doing everything she could to get them through.
The day after Miriam presented her plan, Noelle patted one particularly scraggly little tree on the top. “Good girl,” she whispered. It never hurt to remind the trees that you loved them.
Shoving her gloved hands under her arms for warmth, she looked around. It was almost laughably perfect outside, crisp and cool but not the biting cold that would come as winter set in. The air smelled like woodsmoke, wet earth, and pine. At the very back of the property, she could hear the stream that ran down from the mountaintop snowmelt, bubbling happily in the background. She breathed deeply and felt every muscle in her body relax, for the first time since Cass died.