Chapter Two
Chapter
Two
Daphne Love hadn’t washed her hair in over two weeks.
Granted, her blond curls were naturally coarse and dry, requiring no more than a weekly wash day with some deep conditioning and high-quality gel, but by this point, she was far beyond the freedoms afforded by her hair type.
She sat up on Vivian’s tufted sky-blue couch and pushed off the mustard-colored fleece blanket she’d been sleeping under for the last month.
Her back screamed at her. Vivian’s sofa was definitely an aesthetic choice, the stylish tufts making Daphne’s body feel about two decades older than her twenty-five years, but it wasn’t as though she had room to complain.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Vivian said, glancing up from where she sat at the bar in her tiny kitchen.
She wore leggings and a wide-necked sweatshirt, revealing one smooth dark brown shoulder, and her long twists were piled on top of her head and secured with a mint-green headband.
She tapped on her phone and sipped her usual matcha latte—Daphne could smell the grassy aroma from here.
“I’m not sure awake is quite accurate,” Daphne said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The morning sun streaming through the windows in Vivan’s one-bedroom Boston apartment was so bright it made her teeth ache.
Vivian sighed.
Vivian had been sighing a lot for the last month, not that Daphne could blame her.
Daphne had been crashing on her couch since the end of April—something neither of them planned or wanted—and Vivian had put up with oceans of Daphne tears, at least a dozen pints of ice cream, days of staring into the void, and twelve-hour sleep cycles on the aforementioned couch, which was located in the middle of the small living room.
Needless to say, Daphne had worn out her welcome.
“I’ve got to get going pretty soon,” Vivian said, sliding off the stool and then hand-washing her mug in the sink. “So should you. Clover Lake is only a little over an hour away, but my aunt doesn’t appreciate lateness.”
Daphne nodded.
“Are you excited?” Vivian asked, shutting off the water and drying her mug with a pink towel.
Daphne forced a smile. “Absolutely.”
Vivian sighed. “Have you packed?”
Daphne nodded again, a bobblehead doll stuck to a car’s dashboard, before stopping abruptly. “Well, mostly.”
Vivian released her third sigh in the last ten minutes, then stepped over Daphne’s giant teal suitcase, which was one of the only things she owned other than her clothes and a few books.
It was a nice suitcase too. Elena had bought it for her about a year ago, though she’d never really had a chance to use it yet.
She sent both hands through her hair. Or she tried, but her fingers tangled in the myriad knots scattered throughout her curls. She grabbed a hair tie from the coffee table, secured her locks into a messy bun on top of her head.
Took a deep breath.
She had to get it together.
Had to.
Vivian was beyond sick of her, she knew.
Until a month ago, she’d only spoken to her college roommate sporadically since they’d graduated Boston University three years ago.
They’d been close during their shared time in the fine arts department—Vivian studying modern dance, Daphne visual art with a concentration in painting—but had drifted apart after they graduated.
Daphne wished she could say it was simply a natural progression of their relationship, a product of a transition in both of their lives.
Vivian got a job with a professional dance company in Boston, while Daphne…
Well, what had Daphne done, exactly?
She’d fallen in love.
That was it, the extent of her foray into adulthood.
She packed up her heart, tied it all up with a silk bow, and gave it freely to Elena Watson.
Sure, she had a part-time job at the renowned art museum where she’d interned her senior year (and met Elena), and she’d produced a lot of paintings in the last three years (mediocre, and which were probably tossed in the recycling bin outside of Elena’s penthouse apartment the second Daphne moved out), but mostly, Daphne had been a girlfriend.
And she’d been a great girlfriend.
She made dinner.
She ran errands.
She dusted and made their bed every morning.
She made sure Elena’s kitchen was always stocked with her expensive espresso and her favorite oat milk.
She was there for Elena.
Every gallery event, every art-world party, every quiet night snuggled on the couch together watching indie films Daphne secretly found depressing. Their sex life was incredible—at least in Daphne’s limited experience—and Elena had always held her close afterward, whispering how much she loved her.
Three years of domestic bliss, and then…
Daphne pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until color exploded behind her lids.
She’d been expecting a proposal.
That was the worst part.
Elena had taken her to Bistro du Midi, a fancy French place they’d only ever been to on birthdays or anniversaries, and the restaurant served the most decadent chocolate soufflé—it was so good, Daphne had dreams about it.
So on a cool evening near the end of April, when Elena came home and took Daphne in her arms, kissing her passionately and whispering “Let me take you out” against her mouth, Daphne had felt a zing of anticipation.
She’d smiled, pulled back so she could look at her girlfriend, so beautiful and elegant with her long dark hair and pale skin, her nearly black eyes, and a beauty mark right above the left side of her top lip, like that supermodel from the nineties whose name Daphne could never remember.
Her future wife.
And she thought, Wow, I’m so lucky.
Twenty-nine days later, she was waking up with chiropractic problems and questionable hygiene, three hundred bucks and some change left in her checking account, and exactly one friend, whom she hadn’t spoken to in six months before she called Vivian begging for her couch.
She’d had nowhere else to go. Contacting her own family was out of the question, and Vivian was the only person she knew who wasn’t inside Elena’s art-world bubble—literally every one of Daphne’s “friends” from the last few years was Elena’s friends, and they’d clearly chosen her in the split.
And why shouldn’t they?
Daphne was twenty-five, unemployed, inexperienced, and was starting to suspect she’d been the equivalent of a trophy wife for the last three years.
She’d spent the first few years of college in a kind of bubble too.
After high school, she’d left her small Tennessee town with a full scholarship for tuition, but that hadn’t covered room and board, textbooks, supplies, toothpaste, face cleanser, and new underwear when the pairs she’d had since she was sixteen grew too thin and worn to be considered practical, so she’d waited tables at a middling Boston restaurant at least twenty hours a week.
When she wasn’t in class or serving medium-rare steaks, she focused on her art, trying to produce good work.
Sometimes, she managed to hang out with Vivian’s friends, watching their community with wonder, trying to figure out what kind of queer she wanted to be.
She’d known she was a lesbian from age nine, then spent the next nine years hiding it from her preacher father and rigid mother.
Finally letting herself out was terrifying, and while she went on a few dates here and there in college, she always managed to get in her own way when it came to sex, or even making out.
And then she met Elena Watson, the curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, where Daphne had landed a coveted senior-year internship.
The rest, as they say, was very depressing history.
The only glimmer of light in all this gloom was her summer job. Vivian’s aunt Mia lived in a small town in New Hampshire, close to where Vivian had grown up, and she was opening a lake resort this summer.
Tomorrow, in fact.
By some miracle, Vivian had managed to convince her very generous aunt to hire Daphne to teach art classes.
Daphne had no idea why Mia agreed. She hadn’t even talked to Daphne, really, but Daphne suspected it had something to do with Vivian’s desperation to get Daphne out of her hair, and the fact that there was another art instructor on staff as well, a local person Mia knew and trusted, and with whom Daphne would also share a cabin.
All of which was very, very fair.
On top of that, Mia had emailed Daphne a few days ago to see if it was okay to share her digital portfolio—which Mia had at least requested before hiring her—with a guest named Nicola Reece, who had asked about the art instructors’ work.
A curator at a museum in London, no less.
While this information had sparked a bit of interest in Daphne—curators had the power to make or break careers in the art world, after all—she was also quite tired of, well, curators and their power to make or break careers in the art world.
Elena had made it very clear over the course of their doomed relationship that Daphne’s career would not be made.
Regardless, as Daphne stretched her arms into the air, she tried to drum up a little excitement for her summer ahead.
She’d googled Cloverwild and it was beautiful, every photo featuring a sparkling sapphire lake and bright green trees, a veritable paradise.
She could almost smell the fresh air already, and she knew she needed to get out of Boston.
So while the job didn’t pay all that much, she at least had a roof over her head, and three whole months to figure out what to do with her sad, single, solitary life.
“You almost ready?” Vivian asked, coming out of her room with her dance bag slung over one shoulder. “If you want me to drop you at the train station, we need to leave now. I’ve got rehearsal in an hour.”