Chapter Sixteen
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
O h, shut the fuck up, King Richard!” I moaned in my empty bedroom. The last thing I wanted was the ever-present reminder from that feathered tyrant that time didn’t stop. There wasn’t a way to magically freeze it so I’d never have to face the consequences of my actions. It would be even better to rewind it, to before I’d called Max, or before Teddy showed up in town, or even, perhaps, before I’d set foot in town because then I wouldn’t feel like my heart was being squeezed in my chest. My fight with Dan kept playing in my head in a never-ending loop. The look of betrayal on his face was burned into my memory.
It had been many years since I’d cried myself to sleep, but since I arrived at the farm, it had become more of a common occurrence, so I was completely prepared for the red-eyed, swollen-face disaster that greeted me in the bathroom mirror the morning after the festival. I was also still in the clothes I’d had on yesterday and had forgotten to tie up my hair the night before to complete the picture.
After splashing some water on my face, mostly to alleviate the dry and sore ache in my eyes, I flopped onto my bed and grabbed my phone.
“Hey, girl!” Max’s cheerful voice called from my phone screen. “Did your girl come through or did your girl come through?” She let out a high-pitched, triumphant laugh that made my eyes well up with tears.
“Max,” I managed to whisper.
“Em, what’s wrong?” Her cheerful tone immediately dropped to one of concern.
“The story, Max.” I cleared my throat and spoke again. “Do you think you can kill the story?”
“Baby, no,” she said, “it’s too late; the story has already spread. I pulled out all of the stops for this one. Plus, Dan’s ex-boss, this Wesley guy, is a beloved figure in the UK. He had some kind of TV show about flowers and plants that has aired almost every week for decades. He’s also dying of a terminal disease, which is why the story was able to get traction so quickly. Emma, what happened?”
I launched into a tearful recounting of last night’s events. I didn’t tell Max about Teddy’s impromptu visit to town because, despite having had forty-eight hours to process the information, I still couldn’t bring myself to speak the words out loud.
“Oh, shit, Em. I’m so sorry.” She let out a sigh. “And you haven’t talked to him at all?”
“No,” I croaked.
“Well, this guy sounds like a good dude,” she offered.
“He’s the best.” I sniffled.
“Definitely better than the last one,” she muttered, still never missing an opportunity to drag Teddy. This time, she didn’t realize how right she was. I wished to God I could bring myself to tell her. I felt like I was drowning, not sure if I wanted to let myself sink or fight to keep my head above water. “Do you need me to come out there?” she asked.
“No!” I said a little too forcefully and bolted upright in my bed. Maxima Clarke on the farm was the last thing in the world I needed. “No, no. I’m fine, Max. I can handle this.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, and I imagined her narrowing her eyes trying to discern some deeper meaning in my words.
“Of course. Unless you want to feed chickens and muck out stalls.”
“You know I don’t, but I will drive four hours to whup somebody’s ass if they’re messing with my work wife.”
I snorted a chuckle. It felt weird to find something to smile about when I felt that my world was crashing in on me.
“Let me go, Max. I’ll call you if anything else comes up.”
“You better,” she admonished. “Love you, girl.”
“Love you, too.”
I made my way down to the kitchen, hoping to find Dan leaning on the counter drinking a mug of tea, but the kitchen was empty. After making myself a cup of coffee without destroying the kitchen, I went to his apartment. The door gave way when I knocked, and I was shocked to find the apartment was empty. It wasn’t literally empty, just empty in the sense that Dan wasn’t in it. It felt like he was gone—not just doing chores or working in the greenhouse, but gone. I raced to his bedroom. The room was immaculately clean, and his suitcases were missing from the closet. His refrigerator had been emptied. There were no stray clothes strewn about and not even one errant teacup. He’d even taken his toothbrush.
Dan decided to leave early for his brother’s wedding and didn’t even tell me he was leaving. He didn’t even say goodbye. A thought popped into my head suddenly, and I made my way down to my grandfather’s study.
For the last three months, Dan and I had been playing the same drawn-out game of chess in my grandfather’s study, night after night, one move at a time. Either one of us could have ended the game months ago, but for reasons that clawed at my chest as I stared at my grandfather’s antique chess set, neither of us had. I hoped to find that Dan had answered my last chess move, letting me know that we were still playing, still together. What I found knocked the wind out of my chest.
Dan had laid down his king on the board.
It was a signal of the end of the game and, perhaps, the end of us. I guess Dan had said goodbye after all. I sank into my grandfather’s chair, rolling the king between my fingertips and feeling the tears roll down my cheeks when my phone rang in my pocket. My heart leaped, hoping that it was Dan, but it wasn’t. Just when I’d thought my morning couldn’t possibly get any worse, it had. I sent the call to voicemail, and it rang again. After ignoring the call a second time, I received a text.
Teddy: Em, answer your phone. I’m still in town and I need to see you ASAP.
There have been some new developments and we need to get on the same page. Call me back.
The next few days were a blur. The meeting with Teddy was uneventful, mostly because I couldn’t remember it. He’d asked me to meet him at a restaurant two towns away. I’d sat across from him while he ate and talked about his grand plans for us, the town, and my farm. My appetite had completely deserted me since Dan left, so I simply stared at Teddy’s mouth moving while I turned a glass of water in my hands to keep them occupied. I didn’t remember the ride home, but when I got there, I took a long, hot shower, put on my pajamas, opened my first bottle of wine, and before I knew it, three days had gone by.
Choosing to ignore the fact that the wonderful new world I’d spent the last three months building for myself was crumbling around me probably wasn’t healthy, but it felt better than facing the truth. If I’d talked to my therapist, which probably would’ve been a good idea, she’d have probably said that I was going through the first stage of grief: denial.
I stumbled into my grandfather’s study, still in my pajamas and holding a coffee mug filled with merlot. The chess set was still sitting on the desk exactly as it was three days ago. I grabbed my grandfather’s journal from the shelf and quickly left the office. After settling myself on the living room couch, I opened the journal and began to read.
Every word fueled my rage. I wasn’t sure how long I’d spent reading, but by the time I was done, the sun had set. I slammed the journal shut and threw it across the room, before pulling out my phone and dialing.
“You took us away from them!” I screamed through tears.
“Emma, what in the world—” my mother gasped.
“They loved us, and you took us away from them,” I repeated, feeling the slur in my voice, “because you were afraid of losing your medical license.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes,” I answered, unnecessarily. “I am very drunk, but you haven’t answered my question.”
“You haven’t asked me a question,” my mother retorted. “You called my phone and started shouting at me.”
“I read my grandfather’s journal. I know about the fight, the marijuana. Why did you take us away from them?”
“Emma, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know I don’t because you’ll never talk to me about it. You never talk about Annie. You never talk about our grandparents. Why won’t you just tell me the truth? What are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding anything. I did what was best for my family and my… children.” Her voice broke on the word children , but she steeled herself and kept talking. “If you’d really read that journal carefully, you would see that your grandparents were reckless and put you, Annie, and our entire family in danger. But of course, you want to make me the villain and blame me for everything that went wrong.”
“Why didn’t you let them go to the funeral?” I shouted. “For their own grandchild. What kind of a monster—” I was obviously very drunk by this point, and as I’d learned from past experience, alcohol made me say things I wouldn’t dare to even think about if I were sober. This time, my drunken words pushed my mother past her breaking point.
“How dare you?” she screeched. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about what my life was like and what I went through because I protected you. I protected you from everything. I will not allow you to sit there and talk to me this way. Your life is falling apart, and it’s your own doing. Now you’re dragging up painful memories from decades ago, trying to distract yourself from your own fuckups.” Her words shocked me into a brief moment of sobriety. “I’m hanging up, Emma. Don’t call here again until you have some sense.” My parents were two of the few people in the world that still used a landline phone, and the picture in my mind of her slamming the receiver into the cradle hanging on the kitchen wall matched perfectly with the jarring sound of plastic hitting plastic that burst through my phone, making me almost drop it.
I had no idea what I’d hoped to accomplish by calling my mother and confronting her, but this horrible sinking feeling that couldn’t even be dulled by the copious amounts of wine I’d consumed over the last few days wasn’t it. I wasn’t sure if drinking more merlot was the solution, but that’s what I did.
Welcome to the second stage: anger. Yes, I was angry. I was so fucking angry. I was angry at Teddy for being such a selfish, self-entitled asshole. I was angry at Dan for running out on me like a fucking thief in the night without a conversation or an explanation. I was angry at Max for being so fucking good at her job. I was angry at Nina and her fucking twenty-five-hundred-dollar soufflé, and at clients like Blake for not being able to resist fucking up their perfect movie-star lives because they know there are people like me around to clean them up. My rage extended to my mother for always managing to make me feel like an ungrateful piece of shit, when all I wanted were answers. I was angry at Annie for dying and leaving me alone and angry at my grandparents for even believing that I could navigate this mess. Most of all, I was angry at myself. After twenty-nine years spent being absolutely perfect, I’d spent the last three months doing everything wrong.
All the red wine in the house was gone, so I switched to white. After stomping into a pair of Wellington boots Dan had bought me as a gift because my other work boots were too heavy, I teetered out of the front door and onto the porch. My robe got caught between the door and the jamb when I shut it, and I swore loudly while tugging it free. I stumbled forward, falling to my knees but managing not to spill my wine—so, success.
A few months ago, Dan and I had planted a garden here. It was fall now, but the foliage was still fragrant, and the colors were still breathtakingly beautiful. I brought the bottle to my lips and took a big gulp as I continued to stare. Something made my head tilt as I gazed at the rosebush. Something was off. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a yellowish-green vine snaking its way around the base of a shrub, winding around, and invading the branches, threatening to ruin the beautiful and perfect thing that Dan and I created.
“Hey,” I shouted at the vine, “you don’t belong there.” I jumped to my feet and stomped over to the offending weed. Without thinking, I thrust my bare hand into the middle of the bush, wrapped my fist around the vine, and yanked as hard as I could.
“Shit!” I shouted. I’d managed to remove the vine, but I also succeeded in destroying half of the bush.
“Emma? Are you all right?” Ernesto suddenly appeared at my side. When I looked around, I noticed he wasn’t alone. A few of the farm workers had congregated a few feet away and were watching me with interest. I was suddenly aware that I was standing in the middle of the garden in pajamas, a robe, and knee-high rubber boots, holding a bottle of chardonnay in one hand and a fistful of vines, dirt, and branches in the other.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I replied with more confidence than I felt, though I clearly wasn’t. “I was just doing some work in the garden.” I waved the wine bottle at the destroyed rosebush before turning my back on him so he couldn’t see the tears rolling down my cheeks.
“Emma?” a familiar female voice called to me. I whipped my head around to see Erica rushing toward me. I shot the traitorous Ernesto a glare.
“Erica, what are you doing here?”
“Well, hello to you, too!” she said with a laugh, but her expression was full of concern. “I haven’t seen you in almost a week.”
“I’ve been busy,” I sniffled and tightened my robe around my hips.
“I can see that.” She nodded. “Why don’t we go inside, and you can tell me all about it?” She smiled and took a step closer, carefully approaching me like I might explode. “I brought you some waffles.” My stomach growled traitorously, making me wonder how long it had been since I’d ingested anything besides wine.
“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I have to fix this.” I gestured to the rosebush. “I ruined it, and now I have to fix it.”
Erica took a step closer and touched my arm, making me flinch and pull away from her. “Come on, Emma. Stop this. Let’s go inside. It’s gonna be okay.”
“No!” I yelled. “It’s not going to be okay. It’s never going to be okay. It’s over. Everything is over.”
“Emma, I know Dan was upset, but he really cares about—”
“No, the farm, the town. It’s over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Teddy. My ex-boyfriend. He knows about everything. He threatened me… everyone in town. I have to sell the farm to Preston or else he’ll… he’ll…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. Erica wrapped her arms around me, and I broke down sobbing before allowing her to lead me into the house.