But Harriet did not intend to remain tainted, stained, or appallingly fragrant a moment longer. It was a beautiful summer weekend morning. The early light outside was making her bedroom glow happily. And she was a woman of purpose who chose her path and her mood instead of letting them be inflicted upon her from without.
She was most assuredly not the sort of woman who woke up on a Sunday morning reeking of the night before, thank you very much.
Harriet threw back her covers and got up, then made her bed more briskly than usual. She normally preferred to take her time getting her many pillows just so—because making a bed made the whole day, as her mother liked to say—but this wasn’t a typical morning. Then she marched downstairs to her laundry room, where she ran last night’s clothes through the wash once again. And took the cardigan she’d soaked when she’d gotten home last night out to the small clothesline behind her little house and hung it carefully so it wouldn’t lose its shape.
Once the sweater was catching the breeze that swept right down from the mountains, which Harriet felt was far better than any disinfectant, she marched right back inside and took herself straight to her shower. Where she carefully, thoroughly, washed her hair. Twice.
Only when she felt that she’d truly banished any lingering remnants of the Coyote did she climb out, dry herself off and dress, then commence her usual morning routine. That included feeding all five of her cats, murmuring to each of them in turn as she set out their dishes. Eleanor, her dignified elder tabby, only gazed at her in disappointment for the late start while Milton, Eleanor’s deeply lazy brother, complained lustily. Her other male cat, the enormous Chaucer, was shouting about his imminent death-by-starving in the guest bathroom, even after she put his dish down. Brontë, her moody black cat, was silent—but judgy, Harriet felt.
And then she had to go looking for little calico Maisey, the smallest of her cats, who was half-feral, liked to burrow deep into improbable places, and had to be coaxed out to eat her breakfast.
Only after she’d crooned Maisey out from the depths of the hall closet, deep in a bin of winter scarves, did she head to the kitchen to put her kettle on at last.
And only then, once she’d brewed up a proper pot of tea, did she permit herself to think about Jensen Kittredge in all his glory.
“And his glory is considerable,” she told Eleanor when the cat jumped onto the kitchen counter to monitor the tea making.
Harriet sighed, because he had been … entirely too much, really. Her brain, always her favorite part of herself, shorted out as she recalled it.
Him.
Eleanor did not look impressed, but she did present her belly to be dutifully rubbed.
As a rule, Harriet preferred cats to men, glorious or not. And to most other people as a whole. It wasn’t that she was a recluse or actively disliked anyone in particular. But she wasn’t like them. She never had been, and she counted herself lucky to both know and accept it. On the few occasions she’d attempted to pretend otherwise, other people had been quick to point out her differences to her.
Cats, by contrast, never cared if she was odd.
Harriet had come by her oddness honestly. She had been a late-in-life surprise to her parents, who’d been contentedly childless until her arrival. Harriet had been raised with books, cats, and two distant academics who had always behaved as if they were vaguely shocked to discover there was an actual child roaming about the place—especially one they’d made.
When she described her childhood to her friends, they always seemed sad. And Harriet didn’t know how to tell them that she hadn’t been sad at all. Ever. She’d been treated like an adult from the time she could talk, which had made her remarkably ill-suited for both social interactions with other children her age and the typical classroom instruction offered to small humans. When called in to discuss Harriet’s isolation from her peers and many behaviors incompatible with the classroom, her parents had usually taken the meeting as an opportunity to debate her teachers about their methodology and governing philosophies.
This had not made Harriet popular with either other kids or her teachers, but as Harriet had not been raised to care about other opinions unless they were presented to her in a well-reasoned argument, she hadn’t much minded. Outside of school, she’d always had a remarkable measure of independence. And her parents had been wildly indulgent in their own way. If Harriet could make a decent case for it, she could do it. Whatever it was.
That was how she’d argued herself out of the unquestionable torture of seventh grade and had merrily turned to homeschooling for the remainder of her basic education. This meant that she’d completed her schoolwork in record time and had spent the rest of her days reading whatever books took her fancy, educating herself as she went. With the guidance of the local librarians, she’d read almost every book in the school and town library by graduation.
By the time she’d gone to college, Harriet was so far out of step with her peers that there was no way back. She didn’t understand the things that consumed them—like the uncomfortable clothes the girls in her dorm were so obsessed with, not to mention the dimwitted boys they all found so swoon-worthy—and after a few, brief, and unhappy attempts to blend in, she’d given up entirely.
Harriet was too impatient and intense to blend. There were far more interesting things to worry about. Such as … anything, really. Yes, she knew she dressed like an old woman and was no fun, according to the other freshmen on her hall. But it was a relief all around when she stopped pretending otherwise, because dressing to conform with others she didn’t much like or keeping her opinions to herself wasn’t going to change who she was inside.
She liked quiet. She liked cats. She enjoyed research, reading, and studying. She preferred comfortable clothes that she could move in and hairpins to keep her heavy hair from annoying her while moving. Most of all, she liked her own company.
She wasn’t sad when she was left alone. She was happy.
And as time went on, she became serenely unconcerned that these things set her apart from most of her fellow students. If people were put off by her oddness, good. She knew then that they wouldn’t be friends. Her actual friends didn’t care what she wore, how early she went to bed on a Friday night, or that she’d adopted a pair of tabby kittens—Eleanor and Milton—while still living on campus her senior year and liked them better than most of her peers.
After college, she’d decided to get an MLS degree, because she’d spent so much time in libraries—she would even say they’d saved her more than once—that it seemed a natural fit. And after a pleasant-enough stint in a much larger and busier high school library a few hours from her parents’ home in Missouri, she’d ended up in Cold River, Colorado, three years ago.
Harriet carried her tea tray out onto her front porch, where she could sit there looking out on the tidy little street that was home now and soak in the summer morning.
A front porch is a gift, her mother always said. Just because the rest of the world is locked inside, watching yet another pointless television program, that doesn’t mean you should neglect the simple pleasure of breathing in your world in its particulars.
Harriet made a point to sit out on her front porch whenever the weather was fine, which was no hardship in her cute little house. Especially when Chaucer thundered out after her and heaved himself into her lap. Harriet sighed happily as she accommodated him. Having lived through three brutal Rocky Mountain winters now, she took her good weather seriously.