Chapter Six
Chapter
Six
Daphne felt herself go still, but it took a second for her brain to catch up with what her body was already processing.
“Her name is…” She trailed off, because the name April said couldn’t be right. Or it was just a massively ironic coincidence. “Elena.”
April nodded, her eyes a little glassy.
Daphne took a breath. “Elena—”
“Elena Watson,” April said. “Yes, that Elena Watson. Your Elena Watson.”
Daphne blinked rapidly. “Wait…what are you saying?”
April blew out a breath. “You really didn’t know?”
Daphne tried to swallow but couldn’t. “Know what?”
April just stared at her.
Daphne felt her world shrinking.
Or expanding.
Exploding.
She dumped me like a piece of trash three years ago.
“Wait,” Daphne said again, as though asking the truth to back off and hang on a second would actually work.
Three years ago.
“How…” Daphne said, but didn’t know how to finish the sentence. How to finish any sentence. “Why…when…”
“Three years ago,” April said. “I’d met her three years before that in Boston. We lived together here and in the city. She asked me to marry her. We were happy, and then—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Daphne said, holding up a shaking hand. “You’re talking so fast.”
April stopped, but only for a second. Her voice was soft, but her words felt like bombs detonating. “You really didn’t know that she—”
“No, no, I didn’t know anything,” Daphne said, then pressed her hands to her ears. She was sure she looked ridiculous, like a little kid, but she couldn’t help it. The universe was flying, spinning, and she just needed a second to breathe, to think.
April gave it to her.
They sat silently while Daphne tried to understand the meaning of letters, syllables, words.
Three years ago.
That could mean any time in the year she’d met Elena. It didn’t necessarily mean it all overlapped, that Elena had—
She met April’s eyes again, so dark, like pools of ink rimmed in black liner, and she knew it all matched up perfectly. The puzzle pieces of the last two days locked into place, creating the full picture—April’s immediate animosity toward her upon meeting, her sharp tones that bordered on mean.
Angry.
Hurt.
“You knew who I was this whole time,” Daphne said. It wasn’t a question. “That’s why you’ve been so awful.”
April fiddled with the crescent moon ring on her middle finger, one of the several silver rings she wore.
“I was surprised,” April said. “I never expected to meet you in person, and then I couldn’t believe that Elena never…” She trailed off. Daphne could’ve sworn her lower lip wobbled a little, but in the next second, April’s jaw was steel and iron. “That you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” Daphne said. “I swear.”
April released a loud breath. “Yeah. I can see that now.”
Daphne didn’t know what to do. What to feel. What to say or think or be.
Elena had cheated on someone.
With her.
Elena had cheated on her fiancée, the woman sitting across from Daphne right now in this canoe, with her.
She stood up suddenly, the paddle thumping into the bottom of the boat. The canoe pitching wildly.
“Whoa, hey,” April said, gripping the sides.
“I need to get off this boat,” Daphne said. Her airway was closing. Her heart felt too large in her chest. “I can’t breathe.”
“Okay, okay, just sit down,” April said, leaning over for the paddle. “I’ll get us back.”
Daphne nodded, but she couldn’t get her legs to bend. She felt locked, frozen, couldn’t get her brain and body to connect. She looked down at her sandaled feet, the skirt of her dress fluttering in the breeze. She started to ease down, but she lost her balance and tilted too far to the left.
“Shit, Daphne,” April said, reaching out for her.
Daphne’s arms, however, were too busy flailing. She wasn’t even sure how it all happened, but one second she was pinwheeling, and the next she was in the lake.
It was freezing.
And wet.
And completely humiliating.
Daphne had barely come up to the surface, still sputtering water, the mineral scent of the lake clinging to her hair and skin, when she heard another splash.
She yelped, eyes still closed as something came close, brushed against her back.
“Oh my god!” she yelled, imagining some lake creature ready to devour her.
“Daphne, stop!”
April’s voice, close and panicked.
Daphne forced herself to slow down long enough to see April in the water next to her, April’s arm around her waist.
“What are you doing?” Daphne asked, legs frantically treading water.
“What am I doing?” April asked. “You’re drowning.”
“I am not! I’m just—”
But she wasn’t sure what she was doing. She was in the lake fully clothed, a mere twenty feet or so from the dock, with her ex’s ex-fiancée floating next to her looking like a drowned rat, mascara streaming down her cheeks.
“Why did you jump in here?” Daphne asked.
“I didn’t know if you could swim,” April said, wiping the water out of her eyes. “And you were in shock. It’s deep in this part of the lake.”
“You’re an idiot,” Daphne said, but she started laughing.
“Me?” April said, splashing her. “You’re the one who fell in a lake.”
Daphne laughed harder, which was not very conducive to keeping herself afloat.
“God, don’t drown now,” April said, tugging her toward the canoe. Her arm was tight around Daphne’s waist, her face close as she directed them both.
It was no small feat getting back into the canoe without tipping the whole thing over. It took a few tries, Cloverwild guests observing from the dock with glasses of champagne as though watching a show.
Finally, they managed to spill onto the boat’s floor like slippery eels, lying next to each other and breathing hard, their limbs entangled and soaked to the skin.
Daphne looked up at the sky, stars spread over the dark like glitter.
For a second, she understood why April loved them so much.
They made her feel small and big at the same time.
Inconsequential, just a cluster of cells riding around on a rock in the middle of space.
But also, a point of life in the middle of all that chaos.
A being.
“Show me something,” she said, waving her hand at the sky.
“What?” April said.
“A constellation. A star. Anything.”
April was quiet for a moment but then lifted her hand and pointed. “You see that line right there?” She traced the sky, dragging her finger down and to the side. “Then how it forks, like an upside-down V?”
Daphne squinted, following April’s fingers as they outlined the shape again, stars forming what sort of looked like a broom.
“I see it,” Daphne said.
“That’s the crab.”
“The crab?”
“Cancer,” April said, turning to look at Daphne. “You.”
Daphne met her gaze. “Me?”
“At least, that’s your moon sign,” April said.
Daphne’s mouth dropped open a little. “How did you know that?”
April smiled softly. “I have a knack. I’m still working on your sun and rising.”
“I could just tell you.”
“Nah,” April said, sitting up and carefully moving herself to the bow seat. She picked up the paddle and started rowing them back to the dock. “I like figuring it out.”
Daphne said nothing as the boat moved through the water. She stayed prone at the bottom, her soaked dress growing cold on her skin, watching as the crab blurred across the sky.
“You know, Elena is why I even know anything about my signs,” she said, eyes still on the stars. April stayed silent, the paddle pulling through the water the only sound. “Did she learn all of that from you?”
April sighed. “Probably.”
“My family wasn’t into astrology at all.” She laughed, a sort of exhausted giddiness filling her chest. “Actually, that’s an understatement. They thought it was evil. Divination. The Devil with a capital D.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly.”
April huffed a tiny laugh, which somehow worked to settle the swirling feelings around Daphne’s heart.
“So you grew up Christian?” April asked.
“Also an understatement,” Daphne said, eyes blurring on the pinpricks of light now. “My dad was the pastor of the Baptist church in our town.”
“What town was that?”
“Crestwater, Tennessee.”
“How did you end up in Boston?”
Daphne released a breath and squeezed her eyes closed, Elena and April and the last three years washing over her like a wave in a storm.
And then she started talking. Because talking was the only way to quiet her thoughts, and maybe, just maybe, if she laid everything out for April, she’d figure out how she got here too, how she ended up in this canoe with the person whose heart she unknowingly helped break.
“I was fifteen when my mom found my sketchbook,” she said.
April sucked in a breath but said nothing as she paddled them closer to shore, so Daphne kept talking.
It had been ten years, but the day she walked into her room to find her mom sitting on her bed, her posture impossibly straight, flipping through the pages slowly, methodically, still felt viscerally recent.
Pages that held drawings and journal entries of all of Daphne’s secrets.
Secrets she had to tell someone, something, and the god her parents worshipped wasn’t listening.
She didn’t even have a best friend to trust, to whisper to, because all her friends went to her family’s church, and they all loved church, felt right at home lifting their hands and singing in the choir, while Daphne just felt invisible.
“This isn’t who we raised you to be,” her mother had said then. “This isn’t what a daughter of God should be.”
And that was it—two sentences that broke Daphne’s heart in two, the truth of what her parents thought about her after so many years of fearing exactly that.
That she was wrong.
That she was only lovable if she fell in line, fit a certain mold.