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

Chapter 67

67

Heartbreak was such a funny term, in Daisy’s mind at least. Everyone who had ever said they were heartbroken knew that it wasn’t a physical ailment. Their heart was perfectly intact, pumping blood through their body the way it was meant to. And yet it didn’t feel that way. It felt like with every breath, sharp needles were puncturing your chest. As though every muscle behind your ribs had been ripped to shreds and would never repair. And for Daisy, the pain extended well beyond where her heart sat. Her head pounded while waves of nausea struck at the most random times, and more than once on the journey out of London, she had to stop to pull over just to let the tears out, like that might be the solution for all this hurt she was feeling.

‘You can stay here for longer,’ Bex said as she walked Daisy to her car, but Daisy shook her head.

‘There’s no point in not facing it,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to work out logistics. Johnny, living so close, that type of thing.’

‘Okay, but you can come back at any time you want. You know that?’

‘Thank you. Thank you for everything.’

Bex pulled her in for a tight hug, but even when they broke away, she held Daisy by the shoulders.

‘Think on this, okay? Don’t rush this decision. You can take all the time you want.’

‘Only that isn’t fair on him, is it?’ Daisy replied. ‘I get what you’re saying, but it’s okay. I’m going to be all right.’

As she climbed into her car and buckled the seatbelt, she wondered just how true that was.

‘This is for the best,’ she told herself repeatedly. ‘This is to make sure it doesn’t hurt even more in the future.’

Her lack of focus meant that Daisy was travelling out of the city bang on rush hour, although in some ways, she was grateful. She didn’t feel so bad crying when the traffic was moving so slowly. It felt far less dangerous than crying at speed.

Hundreds of thoughts were rolling through her head as she finally turned into Wildflower Lock, though the prominent one was that she hoped her mother wasn’t still in the September Rose . She had received several messages from her mum during the day, but she hadn’t read any of them. She hadn’t even opened her phone. There was no one she wanted to speak to.

Yet as she walked towards the September Rose and was flooded with the memory of how it looked only a few nights ago, covered in fairy lights with Theo kneeling on one knee with a ring in his hand, she knew that wasn’t entirely true.