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‘I’d need to think about it.’

‘Take all the time you need.’

Maybe not that much time, not if she’s going to help⁠—

‘Hush, Lunar, you should not try to influence her behaviour.’

‘Help with what?’

It is for Aiden and Mia. We think that they shouldn’t have to cancel their wedding.

‘They’re not getting married? That’s terrible. What are you doing about it?’

We have a plan… but we need help.

‘Tell me what I can do. Whatever it is, I’m in.’

‘You should listen before you make that decision,’ Rayenne cautioned.

‘That’s fair, and I appreciate the warning, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to agree.’

* * *

It only took Amrita to the next day to have committed to her decision. Helping was part of who she was: it was in her blood – and apparently her magic, as weird as that was to think. She was still terrified, but learning that Sylvie was in pain and regressing without her, and hearing Mia’s wedding was being cancelled, just wasn’t something she knew how to accept. Not when she could help. Being scared was far less bad than how bad she would feel if she didn’t help.

She took a deep breath and called Katie, her heart hammering in her throat while she waited for the other woman to pick up.

‘Amrita? Hi. I’m so glad to hear from you. We’ve been worried about you. How are you?’

‘I’m… getting there. It’s a bit of a steep learning curve, but…’

‘But you’re coming back? Please tell me you’re coming back.’

‘I am. And I want to help. My next call will be to Sylvie. But I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help with the wedding, and⁠—’

‘Yes!’ Katie squealed excitedly. ‘Your timing is perfect. I was just speaking to Beth – she owns the dress shop in Hudsbury – and I was hoping you might be able to help us with something blue…’

Amrita nodded as she listened – starting to feel like everything was making sense and falling into place exactly as it was meant to be.

13

Beltane hit differently this year for Jamie, with the usual excitement replaced with a pang of regret. He’d smiled briefly at the garden gnomes – lined up in wedding finery – then carefully helped to move them, while trying to chat and smile with friends. The pain had set back in at the sight of the cherry blossoms, no longer plump and pink, instead shrivelling to faded brown and littering the floor – as dead as his relationship with Amrita. Something incredibly rare and beautiful crushed into nothing. The thought was enough to break his heart all over again.

But he did his best to push through it because there was no way he wasn’t going to help do this for Mia. He’d worked mechanically, heaving around stacks of chairs, relocating stones and debris, the dead flowers and heavy tables.

He was sitting, head down, fighting with yards of slippery fabric that refused any of his attempts to get it to behave when a pair of flip-flops, dirty knees and cut-off shorts appeared in his vision.

‘Like this, J.’ Deft fingers with mud under the nails took over and quickly corralled the fabric into behaving with a flurry of movements that seemed to low-key bend the rules of time and space, and left the fabric tied into a billowing rose/bow/puff thingy.

‘Morning, Lils. You’re going to have to do that a lot more slowly, please.’

‘That was me doing it slowly.’ She laughed.

‘In that case, can you show me again? Like maybe another twenty or thirty times?’

She giggled and sat next to him, perfectly happy on the floor. ‘I’ll tie a few more, and you watch.’

‘Thanks. Not sure how I ended up with this task – I’d thought I was done with the chairs, but someone threw this at me. Lugging around heavy furniture was much easier than this frou-frou stuff. Which you are making look incredibly easy, by the way.’