Chapter Two
T he first week of school was always a little dramatic, but Marigold Rivers didn’t mind.
She loved that her daughter told her everything. That she gave her the rundown on all the drama. Hers, her friends’, everyone’s. Marigold had not told her mom anything. Because she had been a sullen and withdrawn teen still recovering from her brother’s death and had kept all of her feelings and bad behaviors to herself.
She was thankful Lily didn’t do that. Lily told her about all her classes, about all her crushes, about everything.
This week, though, had been light on the drama. Senior year was starting off relaxed.
Marigold was almost grateful for that.
Even as the idea of her daughter graduating in nine months made her want to curl into a ball and howl.
In some ways, she supposed she was lucky to be thirty-three with her daughter very nearly out of the house.
All the dating and everything she had mostly missed out on as a young mom could commence. She could travel. Could engage in wild one-night stands with hot mysterious Greek guys, just like the women in her favorite books.
Of course, in those books, the woman was usually virginal—lord, that ship had sailed—and usually ended up pregnant. Marigold had seen that film before. The guy didn’t stick around.
Or, maybe it wasn’t fair to compare the actions of a nineteen-year-old boy to the actions of thirty-year-old men who were billionaires. And fictional. There was that.
Whatever.
In a few short months, Lily would be off to college. And yes, there was anxiety associated with that. With applying for schools, financial aid, all of it. And, of course, worrying about whether or not Lily was acclimating to her new life, new friends, new environment. Marigold would be missing her so much that she would probably wish she was dead, but at least there would be freedom. Probably.
Mostly, she felt sad that this stage of her life was over already.
Being a teen mom had been hard. But nothing was harder than this—preparing to say goodbye.
She schlepped half the load of groceries inside and called up the stairs. “Lily, I’m home.”
Lily drove herself to school now, and that had been a big adjustment too. Her daughter having freedom. Her own car. She had gotten her license a little late, because of course Marigold was paranoid about teen driving. And teen drinking. And teen sex.
Her family was a deeply unfortunate after-school special.
Her brother had decided to drink and get into a car with another boy who had been drinking. So many kids made that mistake. Her brother had paid for it with his life.
She’d had unprotected sex. She’d gotten pregnant.
And while she didn’t think of Lily as a consequence —at least not these days—she certainly didn’t want the same thing for her daughter.
As a result, while she did her best to be the kind of mom who fostered open communication, she was also...well, she had been very honest with her daughter about life’s dangers.
She had tried to do it in a way that wasn’t just about making rules, but that also explained her experience. She’d done a lot of work on herself since she was seventeen. After her brother died, she’d lost herself. She’d been angry. Looking for someone to blame—and she’d found him.
She’d never forget the day she’d confronted him in the middle of town, screaming at him, blaming him for her brother’s choices. Something she realized now hadn’t been fair. Her brother had been a ticking time bomb back then.
She’d been looking for something—anything—to make herself feel better. Older guys had made her feel validated. The attention she’d gotten from them had been a temporary bandage. And then she’d gotten pregnant.
She’d realized she needed her parents. She’d realized she needed to actually heal some things inside herself instead of simply trying to make herself feel better for a moment. She’d gotten good therapy. She’d started to live intentionally, instead of in a reactionary way.
Thankfully, she and Lily had a really open line of communication.
Their life had been a good one. It’s just that it was changing.
Today’s grocery haul was intense, as it always was. Her meal prep business had grown exponentially in the last couple of years. She had started making food as a means of supporting herself and Lily when Lily had been small, and now she was doing weekly meals for so many families in town she could hardly keep up.
But it was great. She got to do something she was good at, at home, in her modest house’s certified kitchen, and make a decent living at it.
“Lily!” She said her daughter’s name again.
There was still no answer.
She set the grocery bags on the counter and started up the stairs. She texted Lily on her way up, to see if she could get her attention that way. Odds were, she was sitting in her room with her earbuds on, but she most definitely had her phone, and she had her read receipts on, so Marigold always knew when Lily had seen a text from her.
No reading.
She frowned. She knocked twice on her daughter’s bedroom door, and then pushed it open without waiting for a response. She was greeted by a flurry of movement. By Lily practically doing a dive roll off the bed, and a boy Marigold had never seen before in her life standing up quickly and pulling his shirt into place.
“What the... What the hell is going on?” she said.
And somewhere in the back of her mind was a calm, rational, healed voice that said she needed to react calmly so Lily would talk to her. That she needed to be rational, so her daughter wouldn’t be shamed. So she would know Marigold wasn’t angry, just concerned.
That voice was far in the distance, and Marigold was somewhere else entirely.
That calm, still voice had no hope in hell of winning.
In general, Marigold fancied herself somewhere between crystals and Jesus. A little bit woo woo, a little bit traditional. But right now, she was straight into fire and brimstone, do not pass the rose quartz, do not collect spiritual enlightenment.
“Who is this?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Lily said, in the grand tradition of every teenager who had ever been caught doing stupid shit. But Marigold knew, she knew , that it was always what it looked like.
She’d had the positive pregnancy test at sixteen to prove it.
“Oh please, don’t treat me like I’m an idiot,” she said, and found that was what actually bothered her the most.
“I’m not. It’s just it’s not like... We were just...”
The boy was looking at Marigold with the appropriate amount of fear, so there was that at least. He was a boy she had never seen before, tall and exactly the kind of handsome tailor-made to get nice girls like Lillian into trouble.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Colton,” he said.
Colton . Of course his name would be Colton.
Colton sounded exactly like the kind of boy who would get you pregnant and disappear off to college, leaving you to deal with the consequences.
Her own Colton was actually named Christopher. Same dude, different font.
“Well, Colton, we are going to go have a talk with your parents.”
“Mom!” Lily looked horrified.
She rounded on her daughter. “We’re going to have a talk later. Have I taught you nothing? Have I taught you nothing about safe sex ?”
“We weren’t having sex,” Lily said, looking filled with horror.
“Oh come on,” Marigold said. “Do you think that’s where he was going to stop?”
“Hey,” Colt said. “I am very serious about consent.”
Lily looked up at him. “So you mean that is what you wanted?”
Colton suddenly looked trapped. Good.
“It’s what they all want,” Marigold said.
“Mom,” Lily said. “Can you please leave your teen trauma in the past?”
“No,” Marigold said. “I can’t. Because the result of my teen trauma is standing in front of me making more trauma. Let’s go, Colton. I’m taking you home. Since I can see that your car is not here.”
“Mom...”
“You’re certainly not driving him home.” And suddenly, she had a horrifying image of her daughter doing something drastic, running away or worse, if she were left unattended. “You’re coming with us.”
“Mom, I...”
“First of all, Lily Rivers, if you are going to mess around with a boy, you better do it when your mother isn’t about to come home. Keep track of the time.”
“Are you lecturing me now for not being sneaky enough?”
“I don’t know. Maybe .” Marigold had never been caught with a boy once.
“It’s not like I thought you would care that much,” Lily said. “I thought you would understand.”
“Just come with me.”
She led the two sullen, silent teens down to her car. They both sat in the back seat, and she didn’t argue, even though part of her wanted to. “Give me directions to your house.”
“I don’t know the number yet. We just moved here.”
“Are your parents home?”
“My dad is,” he said. “I mean... I only have a dad.”
“Okay,” she said, doing her best not to feel sympathy for him. He was a sexual predator. Well. He wasn’t a sexual predator. But she still felt wary of him.
“I can give you directions,” he said.
“Good. Please.”
She was filled with adrenaline. And anger. And she hadn’t really thought through what she was going to say to Colton’s dad when she showed up. Something along the lines of... Keep your kid away from my daughter or I’ll castrate him? No. There had to be something less psychotic than that. Maybe.
She followed his directions out of town and off toward the mountains. Then she turned onto a dirt driveway, her car jumping around in the potholes. “You really live out here?” Maybe he was trying to get them lost.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know, it sucks. There’s not anything to do.”
She heard him cut his sentence off just before the last word was out of his mouth, which was the only thing keeping her from leaping into the back seat.
She had spent all of Lily’s life being both mother and father to her daughter. So it seemed completely right in that moment that she had felt very Liam Neeson. A particular set of skills, etc. But because she was a mother, her ultimate response had been less violent. Still, it included shaming him.
This felt like action, anyway, because when she was done with him, she was going to have to deal with Lily and having a very real talk about contraception and safety and all kinds of things she had sort of thought she had already done. Now she worried it hadn’t been enough.
Finally, they pulled up to a very nice-looking, newly constructed ranch house backed by the mountains and pine trees.
“Well,” she said.
And that was it. Because she didn’t want to compliment the kid.
There was a gorgeous, brand-new truck sitting in the driveway too. So he was a rich kid. Likely why he thought he was entitled to whatever he wanted.
She felt no small amount of irritation regarding that.
She and Colton got out of the car, leaving Lily in the back seat, and Marigold walked up to the front door, Colton slowly trailing behind her.
“You can go ahead and knock,” she said to him.
He did, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She felt right then like her mom powers must be functioning at a really high level, because truly, this kid hadn’t had to do a single thing she said, and he didn’t especially look like he wanted to, and yet he was obeying.
She appreciated that she incited this level of fear.
She heard heavy footsteps on the other side of the door, and then it jerked open.
And her heart tumbled down all the way into her toes. Because she knew this man. This man standing in front of her with a tight black T-shirt, a cowboy hat and an expression too grim to be real. He was still outrageously handsome, but he had settled into his looks. No longer a smooth-faced, cocky teenage boy, he was weathered now. He was...
He was gorgeous.
He was also the man who had nearly torn her family apart. The man who had been the source of her unfettered teenage hatred.
Buck Carson.
The man who had killed her brother.