The Woman at the Window

Fiction Friday — Secret of the Moonmist Brooch

Good afternoon, and happy Fiction Friday!

Last week, Briar arrived in Moonmist — eight hours of driving, one extraordinary cardamom roll, and a key that fit the lock on the first try. This week, she’s alone in her grandmother’s shop for the first time. And something in her pocket has been waiting a very long time for this moment.

Chapter 2: THE BROOCH

The shop was bigger than it looked from the street.

I’d expected cramped. Colonial buildings in New England have a way of making you feel like the architecture is personally affronted by your presence, all low ceilings and narrow doorways, and the general energy of a space designed for people four inches shorter than you. Moonmist Tea & Apothecary was not like that. It opened up as I stepped inside — not dramatically, but generously — the way a room feels when someone has spent decades arranging it with genuine care.

I stood just inside the door and took stock of the space: there were floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall, lined with amber-glass jars and colorful tins and bundles of dried herbs tied with twine. A long oak counter running the length of the room was scarred from use but clean. Display cases with glass fronts held many items I couldn’t identify. A worn Persian rug in shades of indigo and gold that had probably been beautiful fifty years ago covered most of the old wooden floor.

The room still retained the faint smell of herbs…but it wasn’t medicinal. The fragrance was welcoming.

Tilda had mentioned that the apartment above was accessed through a door at the back — narrow stairs leading up, and that third step did creak, as advertised. The staircase led to a landing that opened into a space that was small but cozy, with a kitchen that faced the main street and a bedroom tucked under the eaves. Someone had left fresh linens on the bed. I suspected Tilda.

I moved my car to the gravel parking space in back, took my bag up, then headed back downstairs because standing in the bedroom under the eaves felt too much like I’d decided to stay, and I hadn’t decided that yet.

I was going to need more information before I decided anything.

The shop was the logical place to start. I moved slowly, running my fingers along the edge of the wooden counter, reading labels. Chamomile — rest and clarity. Valerian — dreamless sleep. St. John’s Wort — grief. That last one stopped me for a second. Then I kept going.

The labels were in Sylvie’s elegant handwriting — the same careful cursive from the gift card in Columbus, but slightly more faded here, yet unmistakably the same hand. She’d labeled everything herself. Every jar, every tin, every bundle of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. Decades of it. Decades of a woman alone in this shop, working, thinking, keeping track.

I pulled out my phone and called my dad.

He picked up on the second ring, which meant he’d been waiting.

“You made it,” he said.

“I made it.”

“How is it?”

I looked around the shop. The Persian rug. The jars. The climbing plant pressing its face against the front window from the outside, curious. “It’s a lot,” I said.

“Is it a wreck?”

“No. It’s — “ I tried to find the right word. “Accumulated.”

He was silent for a moment. My dad understood accumulation. He’d been married to my mother for thirty-four years and had spent most of that time quietly indulging a woman who kept every card anyone had ever sent her. Mom considered throwing away an old magazine a small sin. “You okay, kiddo?”

“Yes,” I said, which was mostly true.

“Well.” He exhaled. “Call me tomorrow. And eat something.”

“I already ate,” I said. “I had the best cardamom roll and mug of cappuccino of my life about an hour ago.”

“That’s not dinner.”

“It was essentially dinner.”

He made a sound that was half laugh, half disapproval, which was one of my favorite sounds in the world, and we said goodnight.

I set my phone on the counter and stood there in the quiet of the shop. I missed my mother so much that I had to put both hands flat on the wood and breathe through the emotions. She would have loved this place. I imagined her walking through it slowly, touching everything, asking questions I couldn’t answer, and then she would have rearranged things with absolute confidence that her arrangement was better and right.

She never mentioned it. Never knew it existed, or if she did, she never said.

That was the part I kept coming back to.

I straightened up. Discovered the small workroom behind a floor-length velvet drape adjacent to the back counter, and to my delight, there was a copper kettle and a tin of sweet-smelling tea labeled in Sylvie’s handwriting. I stood there for a moment looking at it.

I located a ceramic mug, filled a metal tea-ball, and made a cup of tea.

It tasted like the shop smelled — spicy but warm and faintly sweet…cinnamon and clove and vanilla, with a hint of orange peel. I carried the mug to the front of the shop and sat on the stool behind the counter, looking out through the front window at the main street of Moonmist settling into its evening. The lamppost on the sidewalk featured a big hanging pot of vibrant blooms, and the mist off the lake had found its way into the streets. Two people walked past, deep in conversation. A gray cat sat on the windowsill of the shop across the street, regarding the world with what appeared to be serene indifference.

I reached into my front pocket and took out the velvet box.

It had been eating at me since Columbus, and it seemed wrong to leave it in the car. I’d spent eight hours staring at it on the passenger seat and the past hour thinking about it while I moved through the shop. I’d been aware of it the whole time, as if it were calling my name.

I set it on the counter and opened it.

The brooch caught the lamplight from the street and created a prism of color splashing across the shop walls — silver, and blue, and green. Beautiful, the same as it had been in my Columbus kitchen. A heavy, old piece of jewelry that my grandmother had put on every morning of her adult life, and then decided to send to me.

I picked it up and turned it over in my palm. The stone warmed in my hand like something waking. Gradual, then certain. The heat traveled from my palm, into my wrist, up my arm, and finally settled in my chest, thrumming there, steady and rhythmic.

Like a heartbeat that had been waiting a very long time to find expression.

Briar.

I went completely still.

A voice spoke inside my head — it wasn’t exactly audible, more like the impression of a person, hesitant, crossing an enormous distance. But certain of its destination.

I looked down at the brooch.

The stone pulsed with an inner glow, once, twice, soft and slow.

“Hello?” I whispered into the silence of an empty shop, in a town that didn’t appear on any map.

There was no response, but the warmth in my chest remained steady. The street outside was quiet. The cat across the way still sat there on the windowsill, indifferent.

I watched for what felt like a long time, holding the warm brooch in my palm, waiting. The warmth didn’t retreat, but the voice didn’t come back. The moon moved across the window, and the mist thickened on the street. Eventually, I set the brooch back in its box and sat with my cold tea, thinking about what it means when you hear your name in an empty room.

I’m a nurse. I believe in evidence.

The evidence was that I was exhausted, grieving, and alone in a strange town, and had probably imagined the whole thing.

I closed the velvet box. Picked up my cold tea. Turned off the lights and went upstairs to bed.

I did not sleep particularly well. But I dreamed — briefly, vividly — of an old woman, standing at a window very much like the one in the shop downstairs, looking out at a street very much like this one, and smiling.

And at her neckline, she was wearing the brooch.

That’s Chapter Two.

Chapter Three arrives next Friday — and so does someone who has absolutely no business showing up at seven-forty-five in the morning with two coffees and a press credential.

If you’re not subscribed yet, fix that now so you don’t miss it. And if you felt something shift when Briar picked up that brooch — I’d love to know. Drop it in the comments.

Secret of the Moonmist Brooch is available now for pre-order on Amazon

Until next Friday —

— Tracy