Chapter 53 Deli
Deli
“Looks like Mo packed you a surprise.”
Lachlan held out Aunt Mo’s leather jacket, and they walked until he stopped her and took a few steps back to survey the location. Deli took her denim jacket off and slid the leather one on. It was soft with familiarity and comfort. It never tugged or pinched.
Just like everything else in Aunt Mo’s house, it never hurt.
Deli thought of her life back home—of how impossible it was to meet her family’s ever-shifting standards, of how Chloe had vanished, and of Trey.
Trey, who was happy to have Deli as his best friend and support, his partner in so many ways—but who, she was starting to think, may never want to be hers.
For the first time in her life, Deli MacDonald wondered if perhaps she wasn’t falling short of the love she wanted. Perhaps the love she wanted was falling short of her.
The thought of it turned her chest into a sudden, stabbing vise. Then a bird nearby chirped for a friend or a lover while the small waters trickled on and the wind tousled Lachlan’s hair as he straightened the collar of Aunt Mo’s jacket, and the pain got a tiny, beautiful bit smaller.
Lachlan knelt and pulled the knife from his boot to cut a cluster of heather free.
“Here.” He tucked her hair behind her ear and pressed the bouquet of white and lavender into her palm. His voice was soft. “You’re gonna break his heart.”
Deli shook her head. “I don’t know if there’s much of a point. I think maybe . . . it’s time for me to let Trey go.”
For a long moment, Lachlan became a study in strained intensity. Finally, mercifully, he spoke.
“Even so, will you still help me dust up? I haven’t touched a camera in ages.”
“Of course.”
“Alright, stand just there.” Lachlan turned Deli’s shoulders gently into profile and appraised the scene. “Don’t move.”
She watched him retreat toward the camera, his calves defined and shoulders broad as he cut a path through a fairy-tale sort of place—a place where he belonged.
The light was starting its journey from day to night as he knelt to the viewfinder, rotated something on the lens, and looked back, and Deli was hit with the strongest sense of déjà vu she’d ever felt.
It was impossible, but she could have sworn . . .
“Alright,” he called. “Here we go!”
And Deli . . . froze. She felt very alone all of a sudden, standing in the wild magnified under a lens. Lenses were never very kind to her.
Lachlan walked back to her with a frown.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “You should have had Douglas be your model. He’s got the gams.”
“Douglas does have great legs, though he pales in comparison.”
Deli’s laughter came out sour. “I’m sorry I’m not photogenic.”
His frown deepened. “Who told you that?”
“Tyra Banks.”
Lachlan’s gaze remained. He didn’t laugh. Deli felt the truth rising like a bubble.
“My mom.” She tried for a Lorraine impression. “It’s simply math, Delilah. Calories in, calories out. It was all anyone could talk about when I was growing up—” Deli studied her palms before she pressed her fingernails into them. “She had her reasons.”
Lachlan didn’t speak. She released a pent-up breath and looked to the sky.
“I’m always a bit too . . . I think I was born just a little disappointing.
All the time, in every way. It’s like I get so close to getting it right, then—” She snapped her fingers.
“I thought coming here might prove I was wrong—that maybe I was being hard on myself. My mom and Trey and Chloe would realize that I wasn’t so bad.
That they, you know . . . But . . .” Deli shrugged, surprised to find her eyes were perfectly dry.
At the pity in Lachlan’s, she felt shame and regret curdle her words before they could even be carried away.
“Oh god, sorry. What an overshare. Forget I men—”
“My father wanted me to take over The Wallflower.”
He’d begun so abruptly she heard her teeth collide as her mouth shut.
“I was the oldest son. He had a temper. He wasn’t . . . He loved us, but he was a complicated man. I tried to distract my wee brother, hide him away, stand over him while he slept, but I couldn’t hide my mum. I was so angry Da was just allowed to be that way. Cruel.”
He watched his hands turn to fists.
“He had all these rules. I had to be home, washed, and sitting for supper before the sun went down. Anything I did, he acted like withholding punishment was a mercy, and everything I did was wrong. So I stopped trying. I was reckless. One night I stayed out well past sundown to take a”—his eyes flicked to hers—“long walk. I could hear him yelling from down the street, and I got so angry I felt like I was gonna explode. So I tracked mud in on purpose with a big smile. Then I saw that he had my mum by the arm. She begged him to let me leave. But he didn’t even look like my dad anymore.
He smiled at me with these black eyes, then punched Mum in the face. ”
Deli’s hand flew to her mouth.
“He knocked her into the wall, and a framed photo of our family fell off and shattered. I should have stopped him, but I was too scared to move. He pushed her down into the glass on her hands and knees and said, See, boy? Look what you’ve done. You break everything you touch. So . . .”
Lachlan stared at a fixed point behind her.
“Mum still has the scars on her palms. I fell in line.”
Deli opened her mouth to say how untrue it was, but stopped at the look in his eyes.
“I met Mo soon after that night. She gave me project after project, putting things together—creating and making and fixing with my hands. She taught me kindness. She tried to show me that I could be trusted with things that were precious. I don’t know who I would have become without her. Or maybe I do.”
A thousand thoughts vied for Deli’s attention. I met your mom. What happened to your dad? Where’s your brother now? Did my aunt talk about me? How did you survive it? How do you keep going? How do you love somebody when love is a weapon? But what came out was, “Fuck that guy.”
His laugh was genuine. “Indeed.”
“How old were you? When he hurt your mom?”
The look in his eyes was pleading, and the thing that had been gnawing at her since Aunt Mo’s email was more frantic than ever. “About thirteen.”
“What did you want to do before The Wallflower?”
“Photography.”
“Did he ever hit your mom again?”
Lachlan shook his head, his eyes wandering toward the sky.
“No, he never did. He did a bit of groveling, renamed the pub for her, he said, and she forgave him. Started playing along, even. But I think it was my growth spurt that helped. He knew if he hit her again, it might be the last thing he’d do. ”
The light was starting to tint pink where it painted the lazy clouds traveling in packs across the blue.
Deli looked at the heather in her hand. Wishes come true. Protection. Healing from within.
“Lachlan, do you know what wallflowers symbolize? What they say?”
He shook his head.
“Fidelity in misfortune.”
Lachlan watched a passing cloud. “Loyalty. Duty. Those are good things.”
Deli saw his pulse jump, so slightly, under his jaw. “Loyalty to what? To whom? How long?” He dropped his eyes to hers, and she hoped she was talking to the boy inside the man. “And at what cost, Lachlan? When does fidelity become a betrayal?”
Deli stared openly at Lachlan as rose gold sun fell across his face. Even his sweep of eyelashes seemed to glow like they were made of cinders.
“I met your mom. It was an accident. She was just there standing in the garden, lost, and you . . .” She tried to speak fast enough to outrun the panic that flooded Lachlan’s face. “You have her eyes.”
His head dropped like the rope that held it up was severed with a blade. Deli knew what she said next could slam the door on whatever trust they’d built, but it had to be said.
“It wasn’t right that she let you believe your dad’s anger was your responsibility. She should have protected you, Lachlan. It wasn’t fair.”
“She didn’t know any better. But I knew better, and I made the wrong choice. I live with it. I’m past it.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Lachlan, you didn’t break anything. And you didn’t deserve to be told you did.”
A long look passed between them.
“Your mum was wrong about you, Deli.”
For a moment, Deli thought Lachlan was about to say something huge and important. Instead, he reached for her hand and squeezed it, lingering before letting it go.
“The light is leaving and the rain is coming. Let’s do the ones together first, then I’ll snap a few closer portraits of just you to brush up on details if we have time.” He turned and walked toward the camera.
Deli exhaled in a gust, shaking off the weight of the childhood pain two adults hadn’t learned how to carry.
“Oh, I got you something,” Lachlan called. He returned, holding out a cashmere scarf in the pattern of his kilt. “You don’t have to wear it. It’s just a silly thing.”
She took it from his hand. “Your family’s tartan?”
He shrugged. “I thought it might sell it a bit more.”
“I love it.” Deli wrapped it around her neck, savoring the feel of cashmere against her skin. “How’s it look?”
Lachlan adjusted it with both hands, tucking it under the lapels of the leather jacket and hiding the tag. The cold had colored his ears pink. “It suits you.”
She reached for something light to say. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Lachlan’s smile turned somber. “Deli, there are no other girls.”
A tingling feeling coursed through her. He’d said other.
They went through a series of poses as Lachlan triggered the camera via a remote control concealed in his hand.
Each time they moved, she could feel it to her bones.
Normally Deli felt a sort of permanent lag between her brain and her body, like they were two unrelated departments in a corporate office.
But his arms around her from behind, his breath on her neck sent a buzz across her skin.
It was easy to follow and fall into him.
She forgot to worry about how her clothing hung or how her chin looked from different angles. She simply . . . was.
“Alright,” Lachlan said after taking a few tight shots of their feet together sitting in the brush, her hand on his kilted knee. “Are you ready for your close-up?”
She stood, fidgeting, until he took a few paces away and raised his camera.
“What should I do?”
Lachlan peered at her over the lens, his eyes a flash of gold against the changing sky.
“Just be yourself!”
The memory that had been fluttering around in the back of her mind broke free.
And suddenly, Deli MacDonald was nine years old again on a heather-sown path leading to Aunt Mo’s red door, bloodied and wind chapped and alive, looking at a boy named Lachlan and his camera.