Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
LEVI
The sun is barely up when I pull onto her street.
I’ve been awake for…I don’t even know how long. Time stopped meaning anything somewhere over Tennessee, when the pilot announced we’d be landing in forty minutes and I realized I still had no idea what I was going to say to her.
I drove straight from the airstrip. Didn’t stop at my place, didn’t shower, didn’t change out of the clothes I threw on in LA when Harper called to say the jet was ready. I smell like recycled airplane air and desperation, and I don’t care.
Her house looks the same as always, porch light on, Eleanor’s sedan in the driveway.
The azaleas by the front steps are blooming, pink and white, the ones Delilah planted last month because she said the house needed “curb appeal.” I remember teasing her about it, the dirt on her knees and the way she laughed when Ruffy tried to dig up what she’d just planted.
That was three days ago. It feels like a lifetime.
The Honda isn’t there.
Maybe she’s at the shop. Maybe she went to get coffee. Maybe there’s a completely reasonable explanation for why the spot where she usually parks is empty at six in the morning.
But I already know. I’ve known since she hung up on me last night, since my texts went unanswered, since I stared at my phone on that plane willing her name to appear and it never did.
She’s gone.
I’m out of the truck before I’ve fully stopped it.
The front door opens before I can knock.
Eleanor stands there in yesterday’s clothes, the same blouse I saw her wearing when I FaceTimed Delilah two days ago. Her face is pale, her eyes red.
She’s been crying.
“She’s gone,” Eleanor says. Not a question. She already knows why I’m here.
“Where?”
Instead of answering, she hands me a piece of paper. A note, written in Delilah’s handwriting. I’ve seen that handwriting before, on order forms at the shop, on the little card she tucked into my jacket pocket before I left for LA.
Had to go. I’ll call you when I figure things out. I’m sorry. I love you.
I read it three times. Four. Like the words might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense.
“When did she leave?”
“I don’t know exactly. I got home from bridge club around eight-thirty. The note was on the table. Her bag was gone. Ruffy was gone.” Eleanor’s voice cracks. “I’ve been calling her all night. She won’t pick up.”
I pull out my phone. Call Delilah. It rings once and goes straight to voicemail.
She’s sending me to voicemail. Actively rejecting my calls.
I try again. Same thing.
Again, voicemail.
“Levi.” Eleanor’s hand on my arm. “She’s not going to answer.”
“She has to answer. She has to let me explain...”
“She’s not ready to hear it yet.”
I stare at the phone in my hand. At Delilah’s name on the screen. At all the texts I sent last night that she never responded to.
Please talk to me.
Whatever it is, we can figure it out.
Delilah?
I just saw the photo. It’s not what it looks like.
She hugged me. I didn’t want it. I pushed her away right after.
Please let me explain.
All of them delivered. None of them read.
“Did she say anything?” I ask. “Before I left for LA, did she seem upset about something?”
Eleanor hesitates. “No. She seemed happy. That’s what I don’t understand. She was humming while she made coffee yesterday morning. She never hums.”
Happy. She was happy.
And then Penelope Waters walked into her flower shop with a photograph, and everything fell apart.
I know that’s what happened. I know it in my bones. Someone showed her that photo, the one of Mia hugging me outside the label building, and instead of asking me about it, Delilah decided she already knew the answer.
“I need to find her,” I say.
“Levi...”
“I can’t just sit here. I can’t...” My voice breaks. I hate that it breaks. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m standing in a kitchen falling apart like I’m eight again, watching my mom’s taillights disappear down the driveway. “I have to find her.”
Eleanor studies me for a long moment. Something shifts in her expression, recognition maybe. Like she sees something in me she understands.
Then she pulls out her phone.
“We share our locations,” she says quietly. “In case of emergencies. I didn’t check until later because I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but she was at some motel until about an hour ago.”
She turns the screen toward me.
There’s a little dot with Delilah’s face on it. Oakwood Cemetery. Asheville, North Carolina.
“Her father,” Eleanor says. “He’s buried there.
She always ran to him when things got hard.
” A pause, and something painful crosses her face.
“Even when he was alive, she ran to him instead of me. Robert never pushed her to deal with her feelings. He just let her be angry. Let her blame me for the divorce, for staying in Twin Waves, for everything.” She sets the phone down. “I suppose some things don’t change.”
I stare at the screen. At the little dot that represents the woman I love, sitting alone in a cemetery at dawn, talking to a man who can’t answer her.
“She didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
“No.” Eleanor’s voice is gentle. “She didn’t.”
“I would have told her about the photo. I didn’t even know it was out there until after she hung up on me.
Diane called me, and I googled myself, and there it was.
And then I tried to call Delilah back, over and over, and she just..
.” I stop. Breathe. “She just left. Without talking to me. Without letting me explain anything.”
“That’s what she does.”
“I know that’s what she does. She did it twice before. But I thought...” I can’t finish the sentence. I thought this time was different, that she was done running. I thought I was enough to make her stay.
Apparently I was wrong.
“Come inside,” Eleanor says. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I slept on the plane.” A lie. I stared at the ceiling of that jet for five hours, replaying every conversation we’d had, trying to figure out what I missed. What I could have said differently. Whether any of it would have mattered.
“Come inside anyway. I’ll make coffee. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
I don’t want coffee. I want to get in my truck and drive to Asheville and make Delilah look at me while I explain what really happened.
But my legs feel like they’re made of concrete, and Eleanor is already walking back into the house, and I don’t know what else to do.
So I follow her.
The coffee is terrible. Eleanor apologizes, says she can never get the ratio right, that Delilah usually makes it, and I tell her it’s fine even though it tastes like burnt regret.
I sit at the same table where Delilah ate dinner last night. Before she saw the photo. Before she decided to throw away everything we were building.
The casserole dish is still on the counter.
Untouched. A glass of water sits by the sink, half-empty.
There’s a dish towel draped over the oven handle, folded the way Delilah always folds them, in thirds.
Little signs of her everywhere. Little reminders that she was here, living in this house, sleeping in the room down the hall, and now she’s not.
“She didn’t eat,” I say.
“No. I don’t think she did.”
I stare at the empty chair across from me.
The chair where she should be sitting right now, rolling her eyes at something I said, stealing the last piece of bacon, being here.
I can picture her so clearly, the way she wraps her hands around her coffee mug and tucks one foot under her when she sits, the way she looks at me like I’m both the best and worst thing that ever happened to her.
My phone buzzes. Dean.
Jo says Eleanor called her last night. What’s going on?
I don’t answer. I don’t know how to explain any of this in a text. Hey Dean, your future sister-in-law showed my girlfriend a photo and now she’s sitting in a cemetery talking to her dead dad. How’s your morning going?
“I called Jo around midnight,” Eleanor says, reading my expression. “I didn’t know what else to do. She called Dean. I’m sorry if...”
“It’s fine.”
It’s not fine. Nothing is fine. But I don’t have the energy to explain that.
Another buzz: On my way over.
Of course he is. Dean has never been able to stay out of anything. It used to drive me crazy when we were kids, the way he always had to fix things, always had to have the answers. Now I’m grateful for it.
I set the phone face-down on the table and stare at the wood grain. There’s a scratch near the edge, and I wonder if Ruffy did that, or if it’s older. I wonder how many meals have been eaten at this table, how many conversations and tears.
“She saw a photo,” I say, mostly to myself.
“Of me and Mia Monroe. It’s not what it looked like.
She hugged me, I didn’t want her to, but the camera caught it at the wrong angle and now it looks like.
..” I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like.
What matters is that Delilah saw it and didn’t even ask me about it. ”
“She’s scared.”
“I’m scared too. That doesn’t mean I run.”
Eleanor is quiet for a moment. She refills her coffee mug even though it’s still half-full, nervous hands needing something to do.
“When Robert, Delilah’s father, when he and I divorced, Delilah was seven,” she says finally. “She blamed me. She thought I chose this town, this flower shop, over her. Over our family.”
I look up. Eleanor has her hands wrapped around her coffee mug, staring at something I can’t see.