What Love Can Do: O’Neill Brothers (Home to Green Valley Book 1)

Twenty

Lilly hung up the phone and sighed.

Immediately after confronting her mother in the vineyards, she’d set out to find her replacement. After speaking with several bakers, she realized what a hard task it’d be to pick one. All of them sounded fantastic. All of them were more than qualified. She’d set up interviews for the rest of the week—that way, Mom, Mellie, and Cook could all try their goodies and decide for themselves who would be the best candidate to replace her.

The wave of relief that washed over her at that moment was freeing.

Everything would be taken care of.

The world would not fall apart without her there, as her mother had made it seem.

She was on her way. Time to move on.

If it hadn’t been for Quinn, however, things could have ended differently. Internship or not, she might have stayed in Green Valley. She might have decided that Mom needed her more than Life did and given her internship away to someone else. She liked to think that wouldn’t have happened, that she would have found the strength all on her own to face her mother, but the point was, she hadn’t needed to. With Quinn’s support, she’d done it, and even though he hadn’t been by her side physically when she had, he’d been with her in spirit.

He was an amazing man. She loved him. And she wasn’t going to let things end this way between them. She had to find him, and there were only so many places he could have gone to stay. Assuming he’d stayed in Forestville, of course.

But before she started driving to a bunch of hotels in search of Quinn, Lilly needed to take care of a couple of things first. While the thought of not seeing Quinn immediately, especially after what had happened earlier, twisted her stomach in knots, she was comforted by the knowledge that he wasn’t going anywhere. His brothers weren’t due to arrive for another few days. And she wouldn’t be leaving for Miami until three days after that.

She had time to make things right with Quinn, and to prove she’d stand by him.

No matter what.

An hour later, Lilly drove toward Langley Bridge. It was a gorgeous October afternoon, the kind that bathed every hilly contour in golden autumn light and made Lilly want to bake up a pumpkin spice storm. She should enjoy the surroundings while she could, since Miami in the Fall meant hurricane season more than it did maple leaf season.

Driving along wine country roads, it hit her all of a sudden how much she was going to miss her hometown a week from now. Maybe she’d return here after her internship after all. It would all depend on what happened between her and Quinn, of course. Maybe that was wishful thinking but…

She glanced at Maggie’s journal lying on the passenger seat. It contained the voice of a thousand regrets, and Lillian knew, even though life had gotten too busy for Quinn’s mother to write in the journal past her first baby’s birth, that Maggie had regretted not making her dreams come true.

“Even though we didn’t know each other,” she spoke aloud to no one, her voice filling the confines of the car, sounding alien to her, “I’m going to make my life count, Maggie. I’m going to do what I love and I’m going to fight for the man I love. Thanks for the inspiration.”

If she listened intently to the silence, she could almost hear Maggie speak back.

Arriving at the bridge, Lilly parked the car and got out. A gust of wind blew through the valley, chilling her to the bone, so she pulled her sweater closer to her. Below the bridge, the water in the creek bubbled and rushed over the stony riverbed.

She wanted to take pictures of it and the surrounding area. She had other pictures, of course, but none taken after she and Quinn had been here, or spent that special time in the wood shed.

The memory of it made her arms tingle and her legs weaken.

No man had ever made her feel that way. No man ever would.

Pulling out her phone, she opened up her camera app and began taking pictures of the bridge, the surrounding trees, then she walked all the way to the wood shed and took pics of that too.

Pausing to stare at the spot where she and Quinn had laid down and made love formed tears in her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. She refused to accept she’d never be with him again.

Finally, she returned to her car, bowed her head, and lost it. She cried not because she’d lost faith in making things work with Quinn but because she’d let him down in the first place. No matter how much she’d done to try and make him feel at home—from driving him and his brother to the Pacific, to taking him on a tour of her family’s vineyard, to bringing him straight to his family’s winery door, it hadn’t been enough. That moment of truth mattered to him, and she’d dropped the ball. If only she could rewind the clock.

She couldn’t. But she could spend the rest of her life making it up to him. Starting with creating a photo book documenting the town in which his mam grew up. She’d make several copies. One for Quinn and each of his brothers. And one for her.

Calmer and more resolved than ever, Lilly scrolled through the photos she’d taken. Then, pulling it toward her, she flipped through Maggie’s journal, scanning her words again. Using little scraps of a napkin in her car, she marked important moments—the first time she’d kissed Grant O’Neill, the time he’d bought her flowers, and the time they’d stopped at the corner store to buy picnic items, and it’d started to rain, so he pulled her under the eaves, and they’d kissed for almost a whole hour.

Lilly put the car in reverse a minute then drove back to the main highway, hell bent on making use of the sunlight before it faded completely. Five minutes later, she’d pulled into Forestville Town Park and gotten out, smiling at the sounds of children milking the daylight for all it was worth in the playground. Two little girls swung as high as they could possibly go on the swing set, reaching for the sky.

Lilly watched them, remembering when life was simple.

She snapped a couple photos of the little girls playing, then she reread Maggie’s words about her first kiss: And there, underneath the park gazebo, he asked if he could kiss me…and then he lowered his head, and our lips touched. Like magic, sorcery, and kismet all rolled into one.

Lilly knew exactly where the gazebo was, in the back of the park, because she’d hung out there many a time long ago. It was a perfect place for kissing. When she arrived, she laid the old journal on the wooden seating, probably where Maggie had once sat, stepped back, and framed the shot, taking pics of the whole composition.

Satisfied with her photos, she walked back to the car.

From there, she moved on to the flower market down the road, purchased a small bouquet of sunflowers from Mrs. Garcia, and thought of another great photo. Laying Maggie’s journal on an old chair just outside the flower shop, she stepped back and framed another shot, taking pic after pic of the old diary in front of the store. Another historic Maggie-Grant spot.

After that, it was the bleachers behind Green Valley High School on the football field where their marching band was rehearsing for the big game this Friday. Lilly flipped open to the right page.

Andright there, Maggie had written, underneath the second column of the bleachers, Grant asked me to run away with him to Ireland. It was the single most romantic moment of my life. We etched our names for all posterity to see. Ha! Such rebels.

No mention of her father.

No guilt over the pain they might cause him.

Lilly took this as a sign of how deeply in love Maggie had been with Grant. She smiled at the words and at her own ability to forgive and forget and searched for the etched names underneath the bleachers, enjoying this post-mortem game of scavenger hunt. It took a while, but finally, on the underside of the bleachers, carved into thin, shiny metal were the initials MP 3 GO.

Lillian propped the journal up between two perpendicular beams and framed the shot. The marching band’s trumpet line blared the ending to a song, just as Lilly snapped the photo. The perfect finish.

“Gotcha.”

Putting her phone away, ideas for the album tore through her mind like a tornado, swirling up a cocktail of creativity. Tonight, she would compose these together for Quinn as a gift. If she knew anything about manly men, most wouldn’t take the time to compile the pics in any coherent way.

This way, he’d have a tangible memory of his time here in Forestville, of his “mam” and dad, and possibly of her too.

That evening, Lillian sat at her laptop, furiously working away at her photo project. She deeply regretted not standing up for Quinn at the most crucial moment and had to undo it somehow. This would be a start—a worthwhile peace offering. She wasn’t perfect, but she was doing her best to do right by him.

Listening to Billie Holiday with a glass of wine by her side, she listened to the lyrics as she worked and thought about how difficult some people had it, how hard they’d struggled in their lives for a measly salary, and she felt luckier than ever to have the opportunities coming her way. So in some ways, this photo album she was creating using Mosaic was a testament to dreams—Maggie’s dreams—and of keeping them alive.

She added in a few pics of them together for good measure, ones they had taken at the vineyard, at the hotel on the Pacific Coast, even the secret ones at Phillips Vineyard Winery. For fun, she included the shots she’d taken of him and Con stuffing their faces full of her muffins, and another one—a selfie of her holding his mom’s journal, and snuck that one in as well. Hopefully, he’d smile out loud when he saw them.

Finally, on the last page of the leather photo album, she wrote:

Love, Your Muffin Girl

– Lilly

Editing it one last time and putting it in her online shopping cart, she paid for overnight shipping, said a little prayer, and sent off the order. A happy face and thank you! popped up on screen. Lilly slowly folded her laptop.

“Well, that was that,” she muttered.

Throwing herself on her bed, she stared at the ceiling fan above and wondered what Quinn was doing at this very moment. Had he noticed the journal was missing but put off having to come back here? Was he missing her at all? Because she missed him terribly.

She missed his joking way with her, his dark brown eyes and the swoony way he’d look at her right before he kissed her. She missed his lips. She missed his strong arms, remembering how safe she felt in them. But most of all, she missed him—all of him.