Sweet Romance14 min read
The Green Stone and the River Between Time
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I woke to the weight of a stranger’s arms and the sharp sting of falling flat on my backside.
"Are you all right?" a voice asked, calm and dangerous. It was three words but sounded like a verdict.
I blinked up into a face I did not know and a body I would learn to recognize. He had the jaw of someone who had split wood since boyhood, eyes like late autumn water, and skin the color of someone who worked the hills. He set me down so abruptly that my butt slammed into the ground, and my mouth made a sound between a sob and a laugh.
"You're terrible," I managed, wiping fresh tears that weren’t entirely from pain. "You drop people like firewood."
He did not laugh. He only said, "Don't wander where the dogs are loose."
"I was just—" I stopped. The memory tumbled back: a snarling dog, my feet running, the world going black when I looked back. Then darkness, and now this.
He turned, tugged a shirt straight, and walked off like it was the most ordinary day in the world.
I sat there, one hand to my rump, one hand to my bewildered heart. I should have been furious, but when someone leaves you with your backside on the dirt and walks away with no apology, all you can do is plot mild revenge.
"Don't come near me again," I told the back of him, and meant it with the kind of sting that vows small calamities.
It was the kind of beginning that novels warned about and real life seldom offered. I had not planned to be the heroine of any story. I was a food blogger by trade in a life I had loved—cafés, review posts, and bags of instant noodles I called research. Then a jade pendant, warm in my palm in a hotel room, had sung like a minor instrument and pulled me into someone else's life.
"Where did I go?" I asked the mirror in the small straw house that was mine now. I had been Haisley Lundberg for three days in a place that smelled of stove smoke and river mud, and the name sat oddly in my mouth like a borrowed spice.
"You're here," my grandmother said, but she called me "my Haisley" like the Haisley who had been born and not the Haisley who arrived.
I discovered my secret by accident. A door in my back room opened to the impossible: shelves full of canned goods that should not exist in this time, a working electric kettle, a frozen corner where ice did not melt. A mark like the jade's pattern had blossomed on my inner arm. "Enter" I whispered once, and the house followed. "Exit" and I was back.
"Space," I told the empty room, as if the word were a talisman. I laughed a little too loud. "Gold. Finger. Whatever you want to call it, don't let me lose it."
The river by the small house had a stretch where the water felt wrong—warm and breathing like a spa. I realized that if I immersed my bruises in it they faded. If I left a jar by the kitchen sink and filled it from the river, the villagers who drank from it recovered from things people said would take months.
"This is not a dream," I told my reflection. "This is a job. Stock the pantry."
I inventoried like a woman who knew scarcity. Instant noodles, a packet of modern tea, a small solar watch I had learned to hide in a pocket, and a handful of other things I could move between worlds as my advantage. I learned to slip into the backroom with ease, and each time the green light at the base of the jade mark gave me a small, private laugh.
"Don't be reckless," my own internal voice said, and I kept a careful rule: bring supplies, keep secrets, feed my family.
They wrapped me in affection. I was "their only daughter," the fragile center of a house of men who hid worry under food and laughter. They worried, I soothed. They watched me like the world might slide off its hinge. I had been given a second body to live in, but with just as many tender edges.
"It was that Victor Banks," my mother said one night, her voice low and cold. "He promised to take you to the city and left without a word."
"Let him leave," I told her, and meant it with a coldness I had borrowed from the other Haisley. He had been polite and smooth, a face that smiled a lot and anchored nothing. If I could not change the past in that other life, I could at least control who I licensed for my present.
Then trouble came to our gate like summer thunder. A dog—owned by the family next door—had been beaten and left bloody at our doorstep. A quarrel ignited like dry kindling. I stood small and trembling and stubborn, and once the first blow landed across my cheek, my fists found courage.
They were surprised when I grabbed a plank, and surprised again when I swung at them. Shock makes the best ally. They fought back; I remember one second before the ground swallowed me and instinct handed me a pair of arms that belonged to a stranger—the very arms that had dropped me earlier. He steadied me, and the village held its breath.
"Who are you?" my grandmother demanded, like thunder in brittle china.
"My name is Arlo Baldwin," he said, and the room got quieter like someone reaching into a pocket and taking out a note.
I met him properly then. He was lean, not showy; someone whose muscles had learned to map mountains and animals. He moved more like river rock than like city polish. His grandmother, an older woman with an upright spine and a patient smile, invited our women in with a grace that softened accusations.
"You saved me," I said later, but my voice was small. "You dropped me, then saved me. Explain."
He raised one eyebrow. "You make rules for people you barely know?"
"Fair," I said. "Rule one: don't drop the heroine. Rule two: don't go hunting in places with big dogs."
We laughed, and the laugh was a first brick in the bridge between us.
He came to that house like a steady season. Not an intruder; a presence. He brought a rabbit one day and his hands were careful as if meat were a holy thing. I cooked the rabbit badly at first and then found rhythm. When people tasted what I could do with a few modern spices and a good stock, it changed our days. The scent of my cooking became a small miracle—neighbors began to come by under the pretense of borrowed sugar.
"Who taught you to make a sauce like that?" someone asked one afternoon, surprised to see the village fall silent mid-bite.
"Half the credit goes to a place that isn't here," I said, and Arlo laughed, delighted and a little bemused.
We shared a secret after that: I took him into the backroom of the impossible house. His face when I opened the door was exactly as I had imagined it would be: childlike wonder, practicality trying on magic like a coat.
"This is yours?" he asked.
"It is mine now," I said. "And also—sort of—not mine." I told him the story of the green stone and the light that had carried me across time like a parcel on the wind. He listened, like he was building the geometry of my future in his mind.
He did not scoff. He admired, like someone who had seen the worst of storms and still kept a weather eye out for sun.
When the town's rougher sorts learned that I had a space where the future smelled faintly of citrus and metal, trouble lurched like a dog in a dark alley. A man named Victor Banks returned to the village. He had been the sweet-faced liar who had promised a city life and then left. He had gone away and come back with manners and better shoes, and a small arrogance wrapped like a shawl.
"You're running with the wrong crowd, Haisley," he said one morning when he caught me walking the lane. "You could have been in the city."
"I traded a skyscraper for a river," I said. "So far it's a better deal."
He smirked. "You always were a quaint little fool."
I let it rest. I had a life to build. My pantry had more than hunger in it now; it had hope. Arlo's small, patient hands were planning a life that made room for my handful of modern tricks. We began to make things—puffs and cakes and little miracles that fit in paper boxes—selling them in the market that smelled of dust and sun. Business grew like a story you nudge with a finger and watch unfold.
"Two for a penny," Arlo said once, testing a price. "No—make it two for two. Better to get them used to the idea our sweets are worth something."
Our friend—bright and brash, Cedric Lopez—took the goods to town. He returned like a man who had seen a small revolution. "They love it. They want more. Bring five hundred tomorrow."
"You heard the man," I said, and we turned the kitchen into an assembly line. My mother, my grandmothers, the wives—everyone pitched in. It became a village affair and a strange and happy kind of family wealth. The jars poured into the space, and I moved money, buying soap and toothbrushes and other small modern comforts, smoothing out the edges of their days.
Then the village turned cruel, as villages occasionally do. Rumors began to drift like smoke—established, sticky lies. "She traded herself," one woman whispered. "First a city man, now the hunter boy. What else is she hiding?"
They said we were improper, they said I had no shame. The usual smallness of jealousy found a voice. It found speed. The stories grew teeth.
Arlo did what Arlo had done all along: he faced them with quiet force. He walked to our house with a cart of things—sugar, a sewing machine, a radio—and with his grandmother as witness, he bowed to my family and asked for my hand.
"She is Haisley," Susanne Esposito—his grandmother—said with a steady voice like an old pillar. "And she is ours now."
They called it a match and a marriage and a halt to gossip. For a while that stopped the sharp tongues of the women who used to throw stones with words. Our wedding was small and honest. The whole town turned out as much out of curiosity as joy, and we married under a ribbon of sun and laughter. I wore an old red dress, because what else does one wear when you stitch a life with threads from two times?
The pleasures of married life were ordinary, sweet, and suddenly complicated. I trusted him with my secret because a life built on secrets is a house with no doors. He learned the ways of the backroom, and he did not stray into greed. He used the healing water for his grandmother, who returned to walking solidly like a woman who had been given a new rib of strength.
"I owe you everything," Susanne told me once, cradling my hands.
"Don't say everything," I teased. "We still owe the bakery a sugar debt."
But Victor Bank's shadow was not done. He returned, not as a supplicant but as an accusation. He swaggered through the market square when a feast was on, when our wedding had turned the town's gaze to us like a lantern.
"You sold your favors for trinkets and sweets," he said loud enough for a dozen heads to turn. "Who buys a hungry girl's dignity for a cake?"
"You're drunk on whatever sheen your conscience gives you," Arlo said measuredly. "Say what you will, but ours is a fair trade."
Victor grinned like a man built on the brink of ruin and then leaped. He had gathered a few documents during his years in the city—contracts, letters, receipts—and paraded them like trophies. He was trying to sell a story: that I had gone to the city and come back to con the villagers.
"Look how easily they bought her lies," he crowed. "She is an actress! She played you all."
"Silence," I said, because sometimes the best weapon is a voice that speaks the truth plainly.
I stepped forward into the market's sunlight. I had planned for this; I had expected the man to try to spin story into weapon once his pride could no longer feed him.
"You remember the jade?" I asked, and his smirk faltered like a skater on thin ice. "Do you remember me in the city?"
He laughed at the memory, a sound like brittle glass. "You were easy then."
"People watched movies," I said. "People lied about kindness. You left. For a hundred dollars, you left. Those receipts you flutter like a peacock today—do you remember where they came from?"
He opened his mouth. His face went from smug to puzzled to hurt in the space of a heartbeat.
"Those were payments for trifles," he lied. "A loan. A promise."
"Do you remember the messages you sent to the woman in the city while you promised me a future?" I said. "Do you remember the list? 'When I'm done here she'll be nothing but a door to unlock.' Those are your words."
There was a tank of silence. I brought my evidence: a bundle of letters and a small, crude notebook I had found in the city world—theirs, but not mine—where he'd scribbled promises and contempt. I had kept one photograph he'd thought he'd burned, a man with another woman's fingers in his hair while he promised me a street-stone fate.
I set the papers on a wooden stall table between the high baskets of vegetables and the women's chatter. "Do you remember these words?" I asked. "Do you remember who you used? Who you called a lifeline? Who you used as a warm shell?"
Victor's confident color bled out of his cheeks like dye into water. "That's not—" he began, then shut his mouth.
"Your face used to be smooth," I said. "Now it is a map of small lies. Look at your notes." I read them out loud. The market went quiet enough to hear a pin drop into flour.
"‘She'll be gone when the train comes. She'll keep the savings in a tin. She is a stepping stone.’" I pronounced his words like a judge pronouncing a sentence. The crowd leaned in.
His expression went from petulant to incredulous. "I never—"
"—said you would leave me?" I finished for him. "Yes, you said it. Loud and proud. You braced your neck for the city and said I was a doorway."
People were murmuring now. The women who had once hissed behind closed hands were looking at him freshly, like a mirror they had not polished.
"You liar," an old man said. "You used her."
"It was a misunderstanding," Victor stammered, but the word had no anchor.
I had not come just with letters. I had come prepared for the theater of truth.
"Here," I said, "is the letter you left with me the night you took the bus." I unfolded a small, yellowed paper. "You wrote: 'I will take what I can then find nice things elsewhere. Forgive me for being practical.'"
"I—" He looked at the assembled people like a man seeing his name on a gravestone. "That wasn't meant for anyone—"
"It was meant for me," I said. "Me. The one you promised things to."
There was a collective sound—half gasp, half laugh. Mothers clucked; men cleared throats. Phones—somebody's borrowed gadget—were lifted. "Film it!" one of the younger men cried, and a hundred fingers pinched and held.
Victor's face drained. His eyes turned to hard glass. He started, then swore. "You set me up!"
"I set nothing up. You set yourself down where everyone could step on you," I said. "You call me names and return. And now you expect what? To be believed?"
He took two steps toward me—maybe to strike, maybe to plead. The crowd pressed closer because humiliation is a commodity people trade in public.
"Please," his voice changed. For the first time, there was fear in it. "I didn't mean it like that."
A woman in the crowd spat. "You meant it exactly as you wrote."
He slid to the ground in front of the stall, hands out like a beggar. The market had become my court. The sun lay thick on the cobbles and turned the dust to gold.
"Please," he begged, voice raw. "I lived wrong. I was foolish—"
The transformation was almost literal. He had been a man of polished promises; now he was a man of matted hair and pleading fingers. He pleaded to me like sea begging sky, like a man who had finally remembered he had to ask for mercy he had never given.
"Do you want money?" I heard someone mutter. "Do you want the bailiffs?"
Victor blinked at me, eyes drowning. He reached out, palms open and trembling. "Don't make me leave," he said suddenly, the shame making him small enough to fit in a cupped hand. "I can't bear being mocked."
The crowd reacted the only way a crowd can: with a chorus of opinions. A woman closer to the stall laughed once, a cold sound. "You mocked her, you left her, and now you want pity? Kneel if you have to. Beg. Show us the man who deserves mercy."
So he did.
He dropped to his knees. His tall chest hunched. The market made a sound like a flock of birds at once; phones bobbed and the old men shook their heads.
"Please," he said again, to me, to himself, maybe to the whole village. "Forgive me."
Around him, people murmured with that dark pleasure that public spectacle occasions—some watching for justice, some for vindication, others for drama. Hands went to mouths. Someone began to film. The phone cameras were merciless. Victor's skin went clammy in a way I knew, because shame has a cold that no hearth can warm.
He cycled through reactions like colors at sunset: arrogance, then outrage, then fury, then denial. "That's not what I meant!" he insisted once, scrambling like a gull for midair footing. "You're lying!"
"Sit," I said simply, the word a drop of cool water. "A man who burns people with words then expects kindness should be the one to learn humility."
He shook his head, face blotchy. "You're all wrong. She—"
Someone in the crowd hissed. "You used her money!"
He staggered, eyes wild. "I—no! I didn't—"
"Tomas Daniels," someone called—Tomas is a brother-figure who had been faithful in his anger. "He asked you to account for your debts, Victor! Show us the ledger."
He had nothing to show. The ledger of moral debts is the kind no ledger keeps. He fell forward on his hands, the crowd's eyelids heavy with pity and judgement.
He begged. He blamed. He cried. He tried to rip off his own collar as if a costume could be cast off and another soul revealed beneath. A child in the crowd pointed, and laughter scoured his face into a raw, small thing. Someone in the back shouted for him to leave, but virtue is as varied as people; some were pleased enough to watch, some angry enough to cheer.
"Look at him," I said finally. "Do you want him to rise again and say nothing, or do you want him to learn?"
The women who had once spread the worst rumors crossed their arms like battlements. "He should leave," hissed one. "We don't forgive liars."
Another voice, softer, surprised me. "Let him leave with a warning," said Arlo quietly. "If he hunts you again, we do more than shame."
Victor made a last appeal, an ugly, rueful plea. "Please, Haisley."
I stepped down from the wooden stall. I reached out and took his hand, not to help him up but to press something into his palm.
"Leave," I said. I had never been a woman who enjoyed revenge that was purely cruel. "Go to the city where you think the rules are kinder. Pay back the money you owe and stop living on other people's sorrows. You will not come near us again."
He stared as if the sentence had cut a seam. He scrambled to his feet slowly, like one who had dislocated a shoulder but did not want help, and then he turned and went. The cameras kept humming. The village kept talking.
He left with the world watching, not because I wanted to humiliate him to pulp, but because I wanted a final act that taught: lies have a cost, and humility is earned, not demanded. He had been proud, then wounded, then pleading. That arc—arrogant to broken—was the punishment morbidly neat audiences prefer.
The next days were quieter. The market hummed a little softer. The rumor of Victor Banks's begging followed him like a shadow. People took the story home, smeared it on bread, chewed it. For once the village's cruelty had been turned on a man who had fed it lies. The public had seen him fall and had watched him plead. That was punishment enough for the gossip-mongers; their teeth were dulled by the spectacle.
Arlo held my hand through the fallout like a warm rope. "You might have broken a confidence," he said one night in the kitchen, "but you earned us a quiet."
"I didn't want to humiliate him," I told him, folding dough with a slower hand. "I wanted to end the story. Endings are important."
"So are beginnings," he countered, dipping a spoon and letting me taste. "And our business needs more sugar."
We laughed, and the laughter tasted of flour and future. We kept stirring the pot of ordinary life: our pastries, the secret jar of healing water, the small, stubborn plans for town shops and a busier future. We kept our promises to each other and to the house with the door that shouldn't have worked.
Months folded into each other and the market flourished. We hired mothers, we trained hands, we paid people fairly. We saved and hid, we gave and set aside. My secret space kept our lifesaving spices and strange modern things. It also kept a ledger of kindness I had never expected to have to balance: small acts that paid back tenfold.
When the city finally called Arlo's family home—news that his relatives had found jobs again—a panic whispered through my bones. I made plans with the steadiness of someone who's learned how to carry a house in a pocket and fold it out into a home. We would go, and we would not be at the mercy of rumor.
On the last night before we left the village a group gathered: the women who had cried foul voices, the children who had learned how to like a new pastry, the men who had carried our sacks. They stood in the square and handed us a wooden crate wrapped in cloth.
"You are our people," Susanne said, and her fingers were strong. "You left a village better. Don't forget us."
We left the river with packed boxes, with the green jade warmed in my palm, with the knowledge that some things bridge time: care, courage, and food.
When we reached the city, Arlo's aunt laughed and called me bold. "You brought a river with you," she said.
"No," I told her. "I brought a jar and a heart. Those are the same."
There were nights I would slip back to the house with the green light on my arm, and show Arlo how the backroom could feed us in ways a shop could not. We married in a way the book of my old life would never have allowed—a simple vow under a low sky, bread in our hands.
Victor faded into a footnote, a lesson in how cruelty sharpens into consequence. He left the village and the city had little patience for a small man who had made public spectacle of himself. He found survival had to be done by other means than the ones he had trained his voice to use.
We took everyone we could to the city, sold pastries at a small stall by the station, and taught our neighbors how to make something that tasted like home but spoke of possibility. The jade remained warm at my wrist. The river's memory was a hum behind everything. People who needed healing still came, and we offered what we had—water, bread, and a place to sleep.
"What's the thing you miss most?" Arlo asked once, sitting on a crate at night, watching the steam rise from pastry boxes.
"I miss the river when it sings," I said. "I miss the way people sit on a porch and complain and forgive. I miss how sometimes gossip can be sharp as a blade and then dull into a bowl of soup."
"And you?"
"I miss the quiet," he said. "But I don't miss being without you."
We kissed like people who had survived storms and walked out together.
When I think back, I see the green stone glowing faintly on my arm, and I see Victor on his knees like a lesson learned the hard way. I do not relish his pain. I only keep a clear memory of the day lies became visible, and the marketplace learned what truth looks like when it is not afraid to speak.
We kept making food. We kept our space. We kept a small jar of the river's water and tasted it in our sleep. It was enough. It was more than enough.
The End
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