Prologue #2
Unless someone dies, marries rich, opens a bakery with emotional seating, or my mother says my full name in a voicemail.
So, probably by Tuesday.
“Perfect,” I say. “Why have emotional closure when you can have a destination wound with foliage?”
“Day—”
“So is it Carla Alden?”
Carla Alden is elegant in a way that feels hereditary.
She probably wakes up in matching pajamas with her hair arranged by woodland creatures with graduate degrees.
I bet she owns thank-you notes so thick they could be used as coasters.
I bet her spice cabinet has labels. I bet her bras match her underwear on weekdays.
She has never, to my knowledge, spilled red wine on herself at a gala, cried in a public bathroom, or accidentally slept with someone’s fiancé.
Not accidentally, actually.
That feels generous.
She slept with mine on purpose.
“Yeah,” Soren says. “It’s Carla.”
Something hot moves behind my eyes, then retreats when I blink. Good. Fine. Wonderful. I can function with nearly any organ compromised, apparently, as long as my public face stays employed.
“Of course,” I say, and smile because Bea is watching me now with the attentive horror of a woman trying not to interfere. “That makes sense. She has excellent hair and the bone structure of a duchess who has never forgotten a password.”
“Are you okay?”
I look down at my apron.
My phone battery is at nine percent. My bank account has forty-seven dollars.
A pharmacy charge is lurking somewhere in the near future like a little financial gremlin in orthopedic shoes.
My mother is probably preparing a speech that starts with I only worry because I love you, and ends somewhere near Maybe it’s time to come home.
Home.
As if returning to Winterberry Cove wouldn’t be walking straight into a room where everyone remembers exactly who I was before I tried to become someone else.
“Absolutely,” I say, laughing lightly.
The sound embarrasses me. It’s too high and a little cracked around the rim. Very charming. Very woman-one-inconvenience-away-from-becoming-a-cautionary-chipped-mug-on-a-sale-rack.
“Don’t do the voice,” my brother says.
“What voice?”
“The one you use when you’re standing in the middle of a fire and complimenting the curtains.”
I press my lips together.
The worst part is that he isn’t wrong.
“I’m not in a fire,” I say. “I’m in a bookstore. Completely different emergency exits.”
“Mom will probably ask you to be there.” He clears his throat. “They’re marrying at the vineyard.”
For a second, I don’t understand the sentence.
Then I do.
“Why,” I ask carefully, “are we hosting the fucking wedding?”
See, I don’t scream with rage. Growth. Maturity. A woman evolving, probably.
I do, however, squeak on the word “wedding.” Not a dignified squeak either.
More like a dog toy discovering betrayal.
The woman at table four glances over her laptop with the nosy concern of someone who will absolutely tell her group chat, and honestly, fair.
I’d tell mine too if I had enough emotional stability to maintain friendships through regular texting.
Soren’s voice dips. “His mother requested it. They’re paying double the rate.”
“Double,” I repeat.
“Mom has to keep up appearances.”
“And the money is good,” I add.
He doesn’t answer fast enough.
There it is again. The little space where truth sits down and makes itself comfortable.
My family’s vineyard isn’t failing, exactly.
The Thorns don’t use words like “failing.” We use phrases like “lean season,” “cash-flow constraints,” and “community loyalty.” We put flowers on the table and pretend the table isn’t wobbling.
Very elegant. Very inherited denial with seasonal centerpieces.
Soren has offered to help Mom, and Mom has refused to accept said help. Her pride is a load-bearing wall no inspector would approve, but everyone keeps decorating around it like that makes the cracks less obvious.
“No need to keep me there, though,” I add, because my pride is an unpaid intern and still working overtime. I learned it from my parents.
You can call it “generational trauma, but make it artisanal.” We Thorns don’t ask for help. We quietly bleed into monogrammed napkins and call it tradition.
“You know how to do weddings better than anyone else who works for Mom.”
I close my eyes.
“She’s going to try to persuade you,” Soren continues. “Probably with a cut from the wedding.”
“I don’t need that.”
The lie is immediate. Reflexive. Practiced enough to deserve health benefits.
I do need it.
A good cut from that wedding could cover rent.
Maybe two months if I kept eating like a raccoon with access to coupons.
It could handle the pharmacy charge. It could let me stop calculating how long I can wait before replacing a boot that clicks like a tiny omen.
It could even allow me to buy produce without treating the price of berries like a personal attack.
Soren hears it anyway.
“You could help remotely and get your cut,” he says.
I open my eyes.
The café comes back in pieces.
Remotely.
A safe word, almost.
A way to touch Winterberry Cove without letting it touch back.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” I say.
“You’d be good at it.”
“I’m good at most things when emotionally cornered.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It was a little funny.”
“No.”
“Fine. It was theoretically funny.”
“Daisy.”
His voice has that older-brother edge now.
I glance at the romance shelves, at all those bright promises lined up spine by spine. Second chances. Secret weddings. Men who learn how to apologize in chapters twenty-six through twenty-eight. Women who get to be chosen without becoming a cautionary tale first.
My life, rude as always, refuses proper genre placement.
I swallow. “Eight months is plenty of time to organize a wedding.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
That should help.
It doesn’t.
Because of course I don’t have to. I don’t have to work two jobs. I don’t have to pretend Boston fixed me. I don’t have to be the cheerful daughter, the capable sister, the woman who turns heartbreak into logistics and then alphabetizes the guest list.
I chose it anyway.
That’s the humiliating part.
I choose being useful because useful has always been safer than needing things.
“I can do it from here,” I say.
“Day.”
“I can.” My voice firms, and for one dangerous second, I believe myself.
Soren says nothing.
“Nothing could go wrong,” I add.
Which is the sort of thing a woman says right before the universe pulls up a chair, cracks its knuckles, and opens a shared document titled Daisy’s Consequences.
So I decide, with forty-seven dollars in my bank account, a haunted boot on my foot, and my past sending save-the-dates, that I can survive anything if there’s a spreadsheet involved.
Which is not the same as being fine.
It is, however, how I’ve been doing the impression.