Chapter 15 Deli
Deli
Deli collapsed into her train seat, rubbing her ankles and remembering the days she couldn’t gauge her hydration level from her eye bags.
A peal of squealing laughter tugged her attention across the aisle.
A boy no older than twenty stood on the platform with a lopsided smile as he pressed his hand to the glass.
The young woman opposite Deli giggled as he finished writing something in the dust. The train began to roll, and he jogged alongside the girl’s window until he ran out of platform.
Right before he was out of sight, Deli saw him mouth the words I love you.
Well, she thought, swallowing a lump as she logged on to the train’s Wi-Fi, good for them.
Two message alerts obscured her phone’s wallpaper of her and Trey at a New Year’s party a few years before—hair mussed and cheeks aglow with champagne. Her arms were flung over his shoulders and his were wrapped lazily around her hips while they laughed. Chloe had taken it.
The first text was from her mother.
Delilah, I am shocked and disappointed by your choice. I’m worried sick! You know my sister is not a good person. And what will Grandma think? Did you even call her? You need to come home.
For one staggering moment, Deli was gripped with the compulsion to get off at the next stop and turn around—to apologize for her selfishness and accept all the relationships she’d ruined. Her eyes stung as she clicked on the next message from her dad.
Go get ‘em, kid.
It was just enough to keep her on the train.
Deli checked her texts, calls, and socials for anything from Chloe, and each sent a new spike of worry through her heart.
The unnamed problem felt like constant, low wind in a house that wasn’t meant to be empty—whistling through the windows and drafty hallways, calling for someone who should have been home.
So dramatic, Delilah, she thought, but still.
Chloe’s absence was never completely silent.
And Trey . . . Deli hadn’t spoken to him since she’d told him she loved him and he’d told her he was in love with someone else.
She hadn’t told him she was leaving, and so far, he hadn’t noticed, even though they’d never gone this long without talking.
She put her phone screen-down on the tray in front of her and buried her face in her hands, exhausted.
Deli woke with a start only a few stops from hers, on a train much less crowded than it had been when she boarded.
The girl across the aisle who had seemed so in love was gone.
Lush countryside blurred by as a sunray poured through the window, covering the empty seat with a sheet of golden light.
It lit the words the boy had written in the dust—scrawled across the glass in messy, large letters.
I miss you already!
Flashes of her life with Trey came to her in a sudden, uncontrollable supercut—learning her favorite song of the week on guitar, laughing beside her at their high school graduation, holding her hand at her grandfather’s funeral—each with their shining moments of intimacy.
Then came the horrible scenes from the night at Trey’s—whispering apologies into her neck before he turned cold and said Scarlett’s name.
Deli reached for her passport and gingerly slipped the photos from between the pages.
She wondered if anyone else ever looked at pictures of their childhood selves and felt they were peering in on someone else’s memories—on some child they’d never known.
She remembered the cottage and shady images of Scotland, but she didn’t remember ever being the girl with bloody knees and a fierce cry.
Her Aunt Mo had gone away so long ago Deli couldn’t remember why.
Her mom and grandma always recoiled and snapped when she asked, leaving her with some invisible welt or another.
Now Deli tapped her fingertip lightly against the woman’s picture and wondered how much time it took before the people you once cherished became strangers.
Of course, staring at a tiny Aunt Mo didn’t feel like staring at a stranger, despite the great purge of Aunt Mo photos that came when they’d returned to California without her. But staring at the ocher-eyed man beside her didn’t feel like looking at a stranger, either, and that was impossible.
Deli and Aunt Mo had managed to exchange two more emails with bare details—which train to catch and where to get off, arrival date and flight number—but that was all they’d had time for before Deli’s phone was in airplane mode.
The other passengers getting off at her stop had begun to gather at the train doors.
By the time Deli was standing on the platform with all her bags, she’d lost one wheel, run over two feet (belonging to different doomed locals who had tried to assist), and broken what felt like three sweats.
She wiped her upper lip and smoothed her flyaways as a man with white hair and kind eyes smiled.
“Do you need a hand with those bags?”
She tossed a glance at the station doors, glowing with the cool winter sunlight. “No, no. I’ll be fine, thank you. I think my aunt is here.”
He nodded at the wheel clutched in her left hand. “Your aunt must be a strong woman.”
Deli swallowed. “I hope so.”
She was hoping so many things she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud, but if everything went okay, she should be on her way home to people who missed her in no time. Nerves gripped her as she wheeled her way toward the exit.
Deli figured it was the shock of the cold air that stole her breath as she stepped into the Scottish Highlands—not the dark mountains rising on either side of the tracks that instantly made her feel like magic was a thing she could reach out and pluck from the sky, and she was always meant to pluck it.
And it definitely, probably, wasn’t the honey-eyed man with wind-tossed waves of burnt umber, standing in a fairy-tale land holding a piece of cardboard with Delilah written in deliberate strokes.
He was studying his watch with a furrowed brow and such intensity he startled when Deli said, “Um, that’s me.”
He whipped his head up, and Deli was struck with a sense of déjà vu so potent it reached into her mouth and stole the words she’d been about to say—like a dirty thief made of time and trickery.
His square jaw was peppered with reddish stubble over the cranberry flush in his cheeks.
And his eyes—like sunlit amber or hazel glass.
During her Twilight phase, she would have swooned for the color alone.
He blinked down at her, jaw closed tight. Deli pointed at the sign in his hands with one finger and tugged her scarf up with the other hand, hoping to cover the mutinous blush she could feel climbing her skin under his scrutiny.
She cleared her throat and nodded toward the name she couldn’t bring herself to claim.
“I think I’m the one you’ve been waiting for?”