Chapter 17: 17: Coming Clean

“So, have you… lived here long?” Wren asked as she and Juniper joined the main street through the village. She immediately kicked herself internally for asking such a patently stupid question, but long silences were funny: she often thought she’d quite like to just be quiet for a good stretch of time and enjoy not saying or listening to anything, but whenever such a silence came, she invariably found herself breaking it. And with the least worthwhile things, too.

“My whole life,” Juniper said. “Dad’s parents moved here from… somewhere not very far away, had him, brought him up here. At some point, he went as far east as Niemouth, met Mum, they came back here and had me.”

“Wait, ‘as far east as Niemouth’?”

Juniper snorted. “Yeah, that’s as far from here as I think he’s ever been. Probably made it there and back in a day.”

“And I guess your parents raised you into the business?” Wren hazarded.

A nod. “Something like that. My grandparents started it towards the end of their lives - they had some knowledge of how it was all done, I guess from whatever they’d been doing before they moved here. Dad learned the trade, then… so did I.”

Wren thought very carefully about whether to say what she wanted to say next, decided it might not be the best idea, then did it anyway. “Is it what you want to do?”

Juniper raised an eyebrow. “We’ve known each other all of ten minutes and we’re getting that deep into life goals and stuff?”

“I only got to this village yesterday and, like, four people have already done the same thing to me,” Wren said.

“You do…” Juniper cut herself off, then gave a quiet chuckle and resumed. “I mean, if four people have already pointed it out, it won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that you do give off a bit of a… vibe.”

Wren stared at her flatly.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Juniper continued. “We see it a lot around here, actually. People who’ve come from a life they realised wasn’t for them anymore - they tend to come looking for something quieter, maybe something closer to nature, I don’t know. But a lot of the people who come here from elsewhere… they’re looking for something, but they don’t often know what.”

A few moments passed. “Do they find it?” Wren asked in a small voice.

“Some of them, I think.”

“Hang on a second,” said Wren, “this conversation was supposed to be about you, not me and my weird life insecurities.”

Juniper let out a surprisingly robust bark of laughter. “They’re not weird,” she said. “But hey, at least you can admit you have them. A lot of people can’t, and then they just stay unhappy.” She smiled, first widely, then faintly. “As for me… I don’t know. I never thought about doing much else, I suppose. And I can’t imagine being happy anywhere but here. Or… no, I’m sure I could be, but I’ve never had a reason not to be here or do what I’m doing.”

“That’s… how I felt,” said Wren. “I’d never thought about doing anything other than what my family made - I mean, no, they didn’t make me do it, but they made it feel as if there wasn’t much point considering anything else. I thought I was alright with that. Figured it was the best chance I was going to get of having a good life, whatever that means.” She took a deep breath. “And then, one day, I just realised I hadn’t actually been happy for a long time. Didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I hadn’t been doing it.”

Juniper nodded several times, eyes moving around as if she were reading something. Eventually she said, “I get it. And I appreciate what you mean. Sometimes I wonder what else I might have done - well, might still do - but… you know, I truly think I’m happy where I am right now, and if something shows up that looks like it might make me happier, I’ll do that instead. And that’ll be enough for me.”

“Enough,” Wren repeated.

“Hm.” Juniper thought about it for a moment. “Maybe people around here are just good at taking whatever they get and saying ‘yep, that’s enough, I’m happy with that’. From what I hear of people in the big cities, that might not be so true for everyone. Always chasing after stuff.”

“They probably do get more stuff,” Wren admitted, “but… I don’t know whether that’s good for them.”

“You need some stuff,” said Juniper. “Most people around here fall on tough times at least once or twice in their lives, and when they do… well, maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it’s a bit depressing how difficult it is to be happy if you really have nothing. But then, that’s why I like it here. The community won’t let anyone suffer on their own.” She looked around at the buildings of Cotton Mossford, a fond look in her eyes. “Yeah, maybe we are just good at being happy with our lot. And maybe that makes us unambitious or something, but we like the way we are.”

“Disappointment is the difference between expectation and reality,” Wren quoted. “My mother used to tell me that, usually right after she’d made her incredibly high expectations clear so I’d have no doubt about how she’d feel if I failed to meet them. I often thought it would be better to have no expectations, and maybe that’s what people have managed here, but she was clear: major success or major disappointment, with nothing in between.”

“She sounds… like a lot.”

“That she is.” Wren exhaled deeply. It had been a strange day. One of the best meals she’d ever had, a tale of dark mystery told by an effervescently odd courier, the satisfaction of helping someone find what they were looking for… and then multiple conversations she wasn’t really prepared for, with people she didn’t know, about her deepest doubts and fears. She was exhausted, and it wasn’t yet close to sundown. “You know,” she said, surprising herself as she did, “I don’t know how in all the hells this happened, but Myrinna thinks I’m her granddaughter.”

Juniper quirked her head. “That’s… interesting.”

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“She wants me to stay and work at the Hilarious Misunderstanding - live there, even - but it’s because she thinks we’re related, and we’re not. And… I don’t know. I was never planning to stay here, I was going to World’s Beginning and this was on the way, but now it feels like there might be something here for me, maybe, and if I tell Myrinna the truth, I don’t think she’ll still want me there. But I can’t not tell her.” Wren ran out of breath on the last sentence. “I can’t not tell her,” she repeated.

“No, I don’t think you… can’t not,” said Juniper. “Can’t… not… I don’t think you can hide it, let’s say that.”

Wren nodded. “Yeah. Or no. Whichever one means I have to come clean.”

“If this were Look Out, Pigeon!,” Juniper mused, “this would be the sort of plot thread that would hang over the whole thing for dozens of chapters to keep the tension going. Will our brave hero’s lie be found out, or will they continue to deceive an old woman because the truth might hurt both of them? That kind of thing.”

“That sounds… dramatic, probably fun to read, but not something I much want to live through,” said Wren. “If I’m going to stay here, it’s because I want less drama, not more. So if I were in one of those stories, maybe some readers wouldn’t like it, but… well, it’s my story, and this is how I want to do it, so there.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Juniper reassuringly.

By this time, they had reached the turning for the street down which lay the Hilarious Misunderstanding. Juniper took one hand off the trolley to give Wren a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“Look,” she said, “if Myrinna doesn’t want you staying with her, that doesn’t mean you can’t stay here, if you still want to.”

“I don’t know what I want,” Wren groaned, rubbing her face. “That’s become an abundantly clear theme today.”

“Well, that’s a problem we can solve another day,” said Juniper. “Right now, this Myrinna-thinks-you’re-her-granddaughter situation is a problem that needs to be solved before it turns into more problems.”

“You’re right.” Wren nodded. “I mean, I know you’re right. I just still don’t have to look forward to doing it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Juniper. “If it all goes completely tits up, I have a lot of gin here.”

~~~

Inside, Myrinna was standing in front of one of the shelves, staring at it as if it had done her some sort of terrible injustice.

“Ah,” she said as Wren entered, “perhaps you can help. Something’s not right here, but I can’t tell what.”

Wren sidled up next to her and eyeballed the shelf. It, like most of the other available surfaces in the Hilarious Misunderstanding, was stuffed to bursting with an assortment of things that shouldn’t have belonged together but somehow looked like a perfectly sensible arrangement. Except…

“It’s that,” said Wren, pointing to a metal tin with a bright orange label declaring that the contents were “Fish Bait Bait - For When You Need To Catch Some Bait So You Can Catch Some Fish!”. “It’s too small and the colour stands out too much, but if you swap it with…” She reached out. “May I?”

Myrinna nodded, a crooked smile on her face.

Wren swapped the tin with a vase in dark grey with a royal blue pattern. “There,” she said.

Myrinna patted her on the back. “Quite right,” she said.

Something about the old woman’s grin clued Wren in. “That was a test.”

“Of course,” Myrinna said. “You think I wouldn’t be able to notice a mismatch that severe in both size and colour? Come on, now.”

Wren gave a quiet snort. “Of course.”

“Afternoon!” called Juniper from the door, at which point Wren realised that the young woman hadn’t yet managed to get the handcart into the shop. She quickly darted back to the entrance and helped Juniper bump the wheels over the threshold. “One order of… quite a lot of bottles this time, Myrinna.”

“Yes, well.” Myrinna nodded, giving Juniper a fond look. “They always sell.”

“I’ll put them in the stockroom,” Juniper said. On her way across the shop floor, she made a wide-eyed face at Wren that could only be interpreted as “flipping tell her!”, which was not at all subtle and which Myrinna could hardly help but see.

“Odd expression,” the shopkeeper muttered.

“Yeah,” said Wren, turning to the older woman. “Look, there’s something we need to talk about.”

Myrinna fixed her with a look Wren couldn’t quite decipher. There was curiosity there, wondering what Wren would say and waiting for her to say it, and anticipation, but there was also a keen sense of resolution, as if she’d been expecting it. “Yes,” she said.

Wren took a deep breath. “Myrinna,” she said, “I’m not your granddaughter.”

“Oh,” said Myrinna without missing a beat, “I know that.”

“... Eh?”

The old woman took Wren’s arm and squeezed it. “My son is many things,” she said, “and I love him dearly for all of them, even the ones I think he’d be far better off without, but he has no daughter.”

Wren blinked at Myrinna several times. “Um,” was all she could think to say.

“I know that Alister Manchfort, that friend of his that moved away with him. Alister’s been home four, five times a year since they left, and all I had to do was give him a little bit of cheese and he told me everything. Dachran never moved out to Din. Never had children.” She took a long breath through her nose. “But, from what Alister said, he had a good enough life. Just not the one he was telling me about in his letters.”

“But…” Wren was torn between, on one hand, the instinct not to pry into the family business of this old woman whom she did not in fact know at all, and on the other, the sheer bone-wrenching curiosity. “But you never let Dachran know? That you knew he was lying to you, I mean?”

“I considered it,” Myrinna said, gazing off reflectively. “But what good would it have done, really? He made his choices. I let him make them. I… supported him, even in lying to me.” Her body trembled with a brief shiver, then she regained her composure and fixed Wren with a solid, unwavering look. “I made my peace with it a long time ago.”

Wren’s head was spinning. “Why didn’t you call me out, then? You knew straight away what was happening, but you acted as if you really thought I was your granddaughter.”

“I don’t entirely know,” Myrinna admitted. “I think I liked the idea of it. Letting myself pretend to believe it, just for a short time, was… it was nice. And I knew as soon as I read that letter that you had no idea of the position my son had put you in. You didn’t know he was going to tell me you were my granddaughter, or that he’d volunteered you to work here. So… well, I didn’t give you much of a chance to tell me otherwise, did I?”

Wren shook her head, unable to help a small smile at the utter relief. She’d been thinking Myrinna might throw her out straight away - she’d been prepared for that possibility, but now that it didn’t seem to be happening, she was realising for the third or fourth time that day that leaving Cotton Mossford just wasn’t what she wanted to do.

“You came clean almost as soon as you could, really,” Myrinna said. “Sooner than most would’ve in your situation, I think. And there are clearly things you do understand about how to run a place like this, whether Dachran was telling any kind of truth about you having experience with merchants or not.”

“That part… isn’t untrue,” Wren said.

“There’s only one thing I’m curious about,” Myrinna continued, and Wren suddenly knew with absolute certainty what she was going to say. The floaty feeling of relief in her stomach turned to bricks and nails. “How did you know Dachran?”

Wren swallowed. She looked at her feet, then back at Myrinna. She glanced away again, realised she’d been inhaling for too long, and forced herself to steady her breath before her lungs popped from overfilling. She shuffled her feet. She wrung her fingers. All the while, Myrinna’s expression shifted from kindly and curious to more and more fearful.

“I’m sorry,” Wren finally said, as clearly as she could around the horrendous lump in her throat. “I met him just before he died.”

Myrinna stared at Wren.

Wren stared at Myrinna.

There was an almighty crash as Juniper emerged from the stockroom, knocking over a whole shelf of trinkets and tchotchkes in the process. “You didn’t mention that part,” she protested. Then, directed at Myrinna: “I didn’t know she was going to say that!”

A tear rolled down Myrinna’s cheek. “Well,” she said, “you’d better tell me how my son died.”