Forever Love at Wildflower Lock (The Wildflower Lock #4)

Chapter 58

58

Daisy didn’t look back. She knew Johnny was there behind her as she marched down the towpath and towards the car park and she would take him with her wherever it was she was going. She just hadn’t decided where that was yet.

Her first urge had been to kick her mother out of the September Rose, but then what? Her mum had drunk an entire bottle of her wine and likely a fair bit more before she had left Nicholas’s. There was no way she was in a fit state to drive. And Daisy couldn’t go back to Theo’s. The fact that he had been right about her mother didn’t make Daisy feel any better. If anything, it made her feel madder for not having noticed before. Going from one argument to another was not what she wanted, and that was what she knew would happen if she returned to the Narrow Escape . What she wanted was a safe place, a person she could talk to without fear or judgement, and so, as she opened the back of the car and clipped Johnny in, she decided she was going to London.

Rush hour had been and gone and so Daisy drove into the city at a near record speed. Her one aim was to get away from Wildflower Lock, but it was only when she reached the multi- story car park opposite Bex’s apartment block she realised there was a problem.

‘Come on, and be good,’ Daisy said as she hurried Johnny along on his lead. ‘I don’t think she’s meant to have dogs here.’

Daisy pressed the buzzer to Bex’s apartment, using her body to block Johnny from the road, in case there were any nosy neighbours, ready to accost her for bringing an animal into the building. She should have rung, she realised. She should have at least checked that Bex was home. Perhaps after a weekend on the boat, she had decided she wanted to go out for a bit of culture or city life, or to spend some time with whichever boyfriend she was seeing at the moment. Daisy pressed again, while simultaneously reaching for her phone to make the call she should have made an hour before. She had just swiped the screen when there was a loud buzz and crackle through the intercom.

‘Hello?’ Bex’s voice rattled through the line.

‘Bex?’ Daisy couldn’t stop the trembling in her voice, and once it started, there was no stopping it. All the tears she had stored up from the disastrous weekend and now the fight with her mother were bubbling to the surface, and there was nothing she could do. By her feet, Johnny was whining, pushing his body against her legs as he tried to comfort her, but it was no good.

‘Daisy, is that you?’

‘Bex?’ Daisy’s voice stuttered as she fought the tears that were rising through her throat. ‘Can I come up?’

‘Of course you can. What is it? What’s wrong?’

The air caught in Daisy’s lungs, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe, and yet she choked out the one word that summed up how she felt.

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Everything is wrong.’