SNEAK PREVIEW! THE FIRST CHAPTERS of The Art of Burning Heather: a Novel
First three chapters of The Art of Burning Heather - Releasing Dec 9, 2025
One week away, and you get a sneak peek! If you make it to the end, click a button or two.
(Side-note: in the world of publishing, buying the book in THE FIRST WEEK it’s out AT A PHYSICAL REGISTER IN A BOOKSTORE is the best way to support, followed directly by preordering. So, like, unless you want to call your local bookstore and ask them to stock some copies, preordering right now is the best way to support <3 )
(Also, this is all copyright and legally covered, etc. So. Don’t be weird about it. You’re getting an early look. Be cool.)
The Art of Burning Heather: a Novel
by Devrie Brynn Donalson
1
Twenty years ago
Scotland
“You’ll catch your death, Delilah!”
Delilah MacDonald kept running.
“Young lady, get back here!”
But her mother’s voice was fading as the endless green-and-rust streaks of the Scottish wild rose in front of her, daring her to go and go until she found where the world ended. Her cheeks stung as her pigtails whipped around her face, and still Delilah’s heart soared. She closed her eyes and threw her head back, laughing as the distance grew. She was only nine years old, but she knew the difference between being trapped and being free.
Delilah opened her eyes just in time to see the cliff’s end. Rocky earth bit into her palms and knees as she dropped and skidded to a stop with inches to spare, sending pebbles bouncing down the sheer stone face toward the slate colored sea. She listened to them fall until she couldn’t hear them anymore.
“Holy SHIT!” Delilah shouted. She sat on her knees, clasped her face in her hands, and cackled into the sky—because she had just cheated death and because she was not supposed to say shit. Someone spoke behind her.
“I thought Americans weren’t keen on swearing.”
She froze.
“You’re bleeding,” they said.
She spun around to find a boy, his head cocked to one side. He was skinny and short with wavy reddish hair sticking in every direction, but what stood out were his eyes. They were yellow, or maybe something like gold? Delilah had never seen eyes like those before.
He raised an eyebrow. “And I think you almost just died.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t die, did I?” She was glad her mom wasn’t around to call for an attitude adjustment. “I’m perfectly alive.”
The boy smirked and walked toward her all confident, even though he was smaller than she was. When her mom and grandma had taken her shopping for this trip, they’d given her another lecture about needing bigger jeans. No boy wants to date a girl that’s bigger than him, Delilah. Sometimes she looked at her thighs and wondered if a boy with bigger legs even existed.
His Scottish accent was thick. “Running with your eyes closed is a stupid thing to do.”
“Following girls like a super creep is pretty stupid, too.” She got to her feet and made a show of looking down at him, but he just stuck out his weirdly big hand.
“I’m Lachlan.”
Delilah scanned the bulky camera on his hip and his warm boots—nothing like the knock-off Converse with her big toe poking through that she’d snuck into her suitcase. His smile turned his eyes warm, like the honey Auntie Maureen—no, wait, Auntie Mo—liked to have in her tea.
“I’m Delilah.” She went to shake his hand but pulled hers back when she saw the blood smeared across her palm.
“Yeah,” he said as he observed her shocked reaction. “Did I mention that you’re bleeding?”
Worry shot through her. Blood was dripping from her knees in red paths through the soft hairs on her legs and staining her new white socks. She shrugged like it was no big deal. “It’s not that bad.”
“You should see your face.”
Okay, that was just rude.
“What is your proble—” Delilah started, but then remembered grabbing her cheeks before she knew she’d be smearing blood around. She must have looked like she’d just fought a bear or something! She rubbed her palms against the dark fabric of her shorts. “My mom is gonna kill me!”
“Why?”
She could not deal with this tonight—the last night before they had to go back to Los Angeles. The last night for her to be happy, unless she ruined everything by pissing her mom off. Delilah kneeled and rubbed her hands against a patch of damp grass.
“Because!” she cried. “Just look at me!”
Lachlan, the strange boy with the strange eyes, stood just above her with his hand still reaching down. “I am looking at you. Let me help you up.”
“I can do it myself.”
“I bet you can,” he said, but he didn’t withdraw.
Delilah hesitated. “My hand is gross.”
“I don’t mind.”
She felt like crying when he pulled her off the ground, but it wasn’t because of the way her hand hurt. He took a water bottle out of some pocket and poured it over a corner of his jacket.
“Here. Try this.”
Delilah rubbed the jacket against her face super hard. “Did I get it?”
Lachlan tilted his head again. “Almost.”
He stepped closer than Delilah remembered ever being to a boy before and took the jacket to press it against her cheek. Delilah went still, like a bee had landed on her. One time, when she had pneumonia and her parents were super worried, her mom had taken a cold washcloth and touched her face the same gentle way through the night until her fever broke.
He moved to her hands, and she realized this probably wasn’t good. What the heck was she doing letting a stranger give her a freaking sponge bath in the wilderness?
She snatched the jacket back. “I can do it myself.”
Lachlan gave her a weird look. “I know you can.”
Her skin got hot. “You don’t know me at all.”
“Not yet.” He shrugged. “But we have the whole walk back.”
“It’s not a far walk.”
“I know a longer way.”
Normally, Delilah didn’t have trouble speaking her mind. She knew exactly what she thought, which was a big problem for her, actually. Be polite, Delilah! But something about Lachlan was making her brain do things she didn’t have words for. She wished Chloe were there. She and Delilah would make a pillow fort with Aunt Mo’s old quilt and whisper way past their bedtime until they figured out what was happening with this odd boy Delilah had found in the wild—just like they always did when Chloe had a new secret boyfriend. But her best friend wasn’t there, so Delilah agreed to take the long way home in the hope of figuring him out.
But as they walked, and he asked her if she knew any movie stars back in California, and she asked him if he had a pet sheep there in Scotland, she forgot about finding answers. She told him about how she wanted to be an artist someday, like Frida Kahlo with all her colors, and he told her about how he wanted to take photos to remember everything, all the time—and she didn’t feel like he was a puzzle to solve or a game to beat for once. She was busy feeling, not thinking. Usually, Delilah was always thinking.
She gasped as they came over a hill and pointed to a sprawling purply-pink meadow that looked so bright beside the gray sea and sky. “What is that?”
Lachlan followed her finger. “What, the flowers? Wild heather.”
“Wow,” she whispered, and the sound got lost in the wind. She turned to find Lachlan watching her with that weird look again.
“What? Is there still blood on my face?” She touched a cheek.
“No, no, your face is fine,” he said, grinning. “It’s just beautiful.”
Delilah looked back to the lush blanket of tiny blooms covering the ground. “Yeah, it really is. Hey! You should take a picture! This has gotta count as something to remember, right?” The camera shuttered as she knelt to pluck a stem that wouldn’t come free. She watched a bud open into a small magenta colored bloom between her fingertips, like it had been waiting just for her. She tugged again. “These flowers are freaking tough!”
Lachlan’s cheeks were stained the color of crushed berries. “As tough as they are lovely.”
Delilah liked that. She straightened. “I wonder if they have these back home.” Then the thought of home cut through the moment, and she could hear the clock ticking in her mind. “Crap!” She grabbed Lachlan’s wrist. “We have to go!”
They ran, and too soon they were standing on the path to the bright red front door of the funny little cottage where her aunt was going to live now.
She toed the gravel with her shoe. “Well. I guess this is the last time you’ll see me.”
For a second, Delilah and Lachlan just sort of stared at each other in this way that felt like a balloon about to pop, so she started walking fast up the path without saying anything else.
“Wait!” Lachlan called. “Let me take your picture!”
Delilah stopped on a stepstone right in the middle of a patch of heather she hadn’t noticed before she’d met Lachlan.
“Why would you want to take my picture?” she shouted over the gusting chill.
“To remember!”
“Should I smile?”
“Just be yourself!” Lachlan raised the camera to his eye.
Herself. For the first time since she was very small, Delilah didn’t think about how much she hated being in pictures. She threw both her arms out and roared into the Highlands’ winter winds. The camera flashed.
Her mother’s voice yelled from the cottage. “Delilah? What in God’s name?”
She flinched. “You better go!”
Lachlan hesitated with a furrowed brow before he darted off, and she felt happy and sad at once. He was barely out of sight when the door swung open.
“Delilah, just look at you! You’re a disaster.”
2
Mo
Now
Fearnhall, Scotland
As a general rule, Mo McDonnell did not believe in looking back. You make your choices and keep on moving. It’s best not to linger.
But now and then, she had a dream.
That morning, Mo had jolted awake from chasing a girl through a field of purple flowers, melting green Popsicles on checkered linoleum floors, and a black stallion in a circle of white petals.
She was 90 percent sure it meant nothing, but the possibility stoked something in Mo’s soul back to life.
She paced back and forth in front of her glowing laptop.
It was nearly the twentieth anniversary of her move to Scotland. Perhaps that was why she’d dreamed of her niece, Delilah. Or maybe it was the moment the photo fluttered to the ground like an autumn leaf when the old magnet holding it had run out of juice. Mo had nearly missed the glossy corner jutting out from under the fridge.
She’d nearly missed what was happening now.
A hard knock on the door yanked her back into the room. “Oi, Mo! Tell me you’re decent!”
Mo threw herself into the kitchen chair and clicked frantically to wake the now-sleeping laptop. “Uh, yeah,” she yelled back. “Come in!”
The doorknob rattled, accompanied by a muffled, “Fuck me, these gloves.”
Her screen brightened with a rainbow wheel spinning in its center. Mo silently willed technology to work for her, just this once.
“Lend us a hand?”
“Whaaat?” She did feel guilty leaving him in the cold, but she needed to buy herself time. “I can’t hear you! The rain!”
“Oh, aye,” he mumbled. “The raaain.”
The wheel vanished and her draft reappeared. She held her breath with her finger hovering over the trackpad. She could turn back now and nothing would change. She would be safe.
Or . . .
Lachlan ducked inside from the black night in a flurry of frosty air—so unlike the skin-and-bones boy who’d first knocked at her cottage many years before. Mo slammed the laptop shut and stood, toppling her chair in her bid to seem casual.
His golden eyes narrowed as he stepped out of a heavy boot with a knowing smirk. “If you’re struck by lightning before morning, shall I clear your internet history?”
Mo’s shoulders bunched by her ears. “Guilty pleasure videos.”
He shrugged off his jacket. “Which ones?”
Mo thought of a lie. “Soldiers coming home.”
He tutted. “Propaganda.”
“Like I said. Guilty.”
Lachlan shook out his thick, auburn hair and held his woolly cap over his heart. “The ones with the dogs get me every time.”
Mo released her held breath. “Me too.”
“So, what’s it gonna be tonight?” He mimed great concern for the chair he’d recently refinished as he set it back on its feet. “Battleship? Or Scrabble?”
Mo set out two whisky glasses. “I’ve had enough of war for one evening.”
He squatted beside the crackling fireplace and ran his fingers along the stack of board games. “Battleship it is.”
3
Deli
Los Angeles
Deli MacDonald watched the blood trace a path down her foot and collect into a dark, glistening drop before it splattered against the white bathroom tile. She sighed, but it came out just like her mother’s, so she sucked it back into her face as quickly as possible.
Deli repositioned the shop’s communal tweezers in her hand, prepared to contract a tweezer-borne infection not seen since the freezing of the ice caps, and hissed as the metallic edge slipped against the brittle sliver of glass that had pierced straight through her sneaker. Dropping a vase and paying the price was a rookie mistake, but Deli had been distracted.
Too distracted.
She dabbed the wound with a piddly wad of single-ply toilet paper and collapsed backward with a frustrated grunt as she slid her phone from her apron—still open to the last text from Trey, which she’d read when the vase now in her foot was in her hand.
I can’t wait to see you tonight.
She read Trey’s words again as she felt her cheeks stain pink. After half a lifetime of knowing and loving the boy she’d met when they were teenagers, Deli MacDonald had a feeling. It was almost time, and she would finally be done waiting.
She opened a new text to Chloe.
Ugh, Chlo. Literally all he has to do is text me and I end up dropping everything and bleeding out.
Chloe wrote back in an instant.
Are you okay??
Deli rubbed at a bit of gunk on her screen.
There’s a vase in my foot.
She sent a screenshot of Trey’s text to her lifelong BFF.
Am I crazy for feeling like it’s happening? I know Trey and I talk every day, but not like this.
Deli played back the last six months of hazy push and pull between her and Trey in her head while she waited. She had begun to think Chloe might not respond when her phone chimed.
Has he brought up the kiss yet?
The words landed like a blow to her stomach.
No . . .
Deli studied the screen, waiting for her best friend to respond. A minute passed. Then another. Chloe probably needed more context.
But that’s what I’m talking about, you know? He’s going to. He’s ready to talk about it . . . about us. He just needed time.
She watched the three dots of Chloe’s response appear and disappear as a newly familiar unease pulsed alongside her heart. In twenty-five years of friendship, they’d never run out of things to say. Not until recently.
Something in Deli’s chest wilted, just a little, as she tapped on a new text from her mother.
Delilah, we’re here early. Please come as soon as possible. Your grandmother is already half a glass of wine in, and I’d like to get this over with.
Deli’s good foot tapped against the floor. Their reservation wasn’t for another thirty minutes.
Be there soon, Mom.
Chloe’s response came through.
I guess. I just think if it was going to happen for you, it would have already happened.
Her eyes watered as a fresh bead of blood quivered and fell to the ground. Chloe texted again with a link to a slinky backless dress that didn’t come in Deli’s size.
Do you think Jared will like me in this? I want to blow his mind for V Day.
Deli tried to turn off the unexpected and deeply uncool feelings that had been more and more common, and think. She filed the name Jared into her brain under “Chloe’s Boyfriends.”
From the moment Deli and Chloe met on the kickball court in first grade, they’d spent most lunches under their special sycamore tree, giggling while they braided each other’s hair and dreamed about make-believe worlds. The lunch tree was a magical haven for the two little girls, where impossible things felt real and growing up felt far away. Then, in third grade, Brayden broke Chloe’s heart when he didn’t give her a special valentine, and Deli had run to the bathroom to stuff her pockets with paper towels. Beneath where “C + D = BFFS” had been carved into the bark—the precursor to a collection of carved hearts with Chloe’s and a boy’s initials that would all eventually be scratched out—Deli held Chloe’s hand while she cried until her nose was rubbed raw. She’d learned to keep a travel pack of the tissues with lotion baked into them on her person at all times.
Since then there had been so many “lunch trees”: café tables, parked cars, beaches, and bedrooms—any place that had been turned holy by the sacred bond of girls’ friendships. For Deli, there was a stretch of curb in a high school parking lot—where she and Chloe had waited for their rides home, coloring in the checkers on their shoes—that had been sanctified with the first whisper of Trey’s name.
Deli reacted to the link for the dress with a heart and typed back:
He’ll die! See you in a few!
She checked the time and checked her email. Her foot stopped tapping. She had one new message from Maureen McDonnell.
Deli hadn’t spoken to her aunt in nearly twenty years. Had she missed all her other family members’ attempts to reach her? Had Grandma Rosemary finally succumbed to one of the many illnesses she insisted she was plagued with, and some poor EMT was currently trying to scrub her industrial-strength red lipstick off his face after giving her mouth-to-mouth?
To: Delilah MacDonald
From: Maureen McDonnell
Subject: Happy Holidays!
Hi!
Sorry for the late season’s greetings, but I was just
thinking of you. Big day, huh? Hope you’re thriving
in life!
Love,
Aunt Mo
Heat pricked her ears. When she was little, Deli had gotten in trouble at school for writing McDonnell instead of MacDonald as her last name on her homework, angry that her mom had married someone with a name so close to Auntie Mo’s but not the same.
But I just want to be like Grandma and Auntie Mo! she’d cried.
Well, you’re not, her mother had said. You’re just like me.
Deli scrolled to the bottom of the email and clicked on the first of two attachments. It was a photo of a little girl in front of a cottage’s red door under a blanket of heavy clouds as smoke curled from the chimney in the slanted roof. The girl’s belly poked out over the shorts bunching between her thighs. Her knees and socks were stained with something dark, and her head was thrown back in a laugh or a yell as the wind tugged at her tangled pigtails. Deli touched the screen with her fingertip. She didn’t remember it being taken.
She hadn’t thought about that little girl for a long, long time.
In the second photo, a group of people laughed in a pub with twinkling lights in front of a bar decorated with a string of ornament-dotted tinsel. Despite the great family fallout that had all but erased Aunt Mo’s face from memory, Deli still recognized her round cheeks and wide smile. A towering man squeezed Aunt Mo’s shoulder with a considerable hand. His smile crinkled the soft spray of freckles that crested his nose and disappeared into the stubble that matched his auburn hair, tousled into messy waves. Behind the sort of eyelashes women coveted but only men seemed to be born with, eyes the color of molten amber glowed with warmth. Something in Deli’s head fluttered against her memory, like a bird desperate to escape.
She could have sworn she knew those eyes from somewhere.
Deli’s boss pounded on the bathroom door as another text came through. “Deli, quit roosting. The sooner you get to dinner, the sooner you can come back, and we need every second before D-Day V-Day. Plus, Carol has to pee.”
Behind Paola, Carol shouted, “We’re about to have a situation, kid.”
“One second!” Deli called, imagining their seventy-eight-year-old delivery driver in her leopard-print spandex outfit, dancing from foot to foot with her fuzzy pen tucked behind her ear. Trey had just texted a photo of himself in the mirror—his sun-kissed skin and hair glowing against his cool gaze as he grinned in an expensive olive-green sport coat.
Is this the right color?
Deli forgot all about the pain in her foot and the golden-eyed man in a country far away.
She wedged a new wad of toilet paper into her sock and limped to the mirror. Two weeks of no sleep and treating iced coffee like a food group had taken its toll. Staring back at Deli was not the reflection of a twenty-nine-year-old spring chicken, but the sallow visage of a haunting swamp witch who had come to claim a mortal soul. Normally, Deli embraced swamp witchery, and Paola had long since stopped cringing at the slept-in ponytails and nacho-cheese stains on the apron of her best designer. But now Deli needed to be cute, and swamp witches were notoriously unsexy.
She tugged at the corners of her eyes and watched the wrinkles there smooth out and then reform when she released the tired skin. She could hear her mother’s voice: I told you to wear sunblock, Delilah. What type of retinol are you using, Delilah? She reached for the dry shampoo nestled in her bag next to her new dress and doused her head in a powdery cloud, then wrapped a paper towel around her finger to scrub at her teeth. She rubbed at the lily pollen staining her forehead, ditched the apron and sweatshirt she’d been wearing for two days to liberally apply deodorant, then slipped into the olive-green dress. She tied the ribbon around the middle into a bow, coaxing her waist out of hiding, and stood back for one last look.
Staring at herself in the mirror, Deli practiced her game face, tugging at the fabric as it tried to bunch. Then she slipped out the back of the flower shop. The bathroom door slammed in her wake as Carol shouted, “You look bangin’, kid!”
Deli got in her car and took a deep breath, bracing to face her family.
And to face the man she’d been secretly in love with for half of her life.