Chapter 84 Deli
Deli
Deli walked and walked, trying to decide.
She ached for her life before Scotland. She used to be so sure.
Deli remembered reading about a memorial in Edinburgh to honor the dog who lay by his owner’s grave until the day the dog could join him in the ground.
She’d cried as she gazed at the photo of his small statue, nose rubbed brassy by millions of grief’s pilgrims—a hero for those whose loyalty would not yield to death.
Who was she if Trey only loved her when someone else might take her away?
And who was she if Chloe didn’t love her at all anymore?
Deli wasn’t left behind by death’s cruel choosing. She was an old dog with tired bones, unwanted and abandoned in an unfamiliar place, hoping for a way home.
And she suddenly knew without any question—there was no path home.
Her life as she’d always known it was a haunted house—pale and empty except for her and her imaginary friends.
Trey was asking another girl to marry him when Deli had thought for so long his heart lie waiting for his head to see the light.
How silly she’d been to think Trey would ever wake up.
She thought of her mother and felt her knees threaten to go weak.
Her mother, whose unconditional love she pined for in the very core of her.
If only she’d never tasted it, she might have found peace in the empty place.
But her mother did love her, and Deli did have all-consuming memories—moments of being a girl with a mom who never bit.
It wasn’t that Deli was entirely neglected that caused her phantom heart to ache.
It was that her mom loved her so much, Deli feared it made her animal.
Still, her stupid, reckless hope refused to stay unborn. Each time, Deli passed it, so vulnerable, to her mother’s hands. Each time, Deli’s hope was left bleeding, ready to be buried.
It all, of course, had led her to Chloe. A family she had chosen and that kept on choosing her. Sometimes, in the wrong light, Deli looked at her best friend and saw her mother—but then a cloud would shift and Chloe still loved her, and everything was fine.
Deli didn’t grow up in a house where people knew her.
But Chloe did. Chloe knew Deli’s first crush, where she hid the keys to her fuzzy diary, and which Powerpuff Girl was most like her.
Chloe knew Deli’s favorite color when they were six, then twelve, then fifteen, then twenty-five.
Chloe knew that when Aunt Mo left, Deli had drawn a map in the clover-speckled dirt and made a plan to escape, too.
SATs, driver’s licenses, bad bangs, and first rent checks—there wasn’t a bit of Deli’s life Chloe hadn’t witnessed.
There wasn’t a single other person who’d known every Deli that had once lived, back through time.
If Deli MacDonald had built her life upon pillars, Chloe had been one of them.
Now it had crumbled, and Deli was scrambling for purchase in the world as she fell.
How much easier it would have been to know what to do now if she could call her best friend and talk it through.
How quickly would Deli make a decision if she hadn’t been so wrong about the best friend she’d loved so long?
Best friends are different than romances.
Chloe had moved into Deli’s heart, and Deli had never planned for what would happen if she left.
If Deli hadn’t watched the person she was most sure of in her life drive away and leave her on the side of an unfamiliar road, would she already know if she should stay or go? She had been so, so wrong in a way she’d never even thought to question. Deli wasn’t reliable.
Deli, and whatever broken part of her chose which people to love, could not be trusted.
Even so, she would have given the world to sit under the lunch tree again.
She wanted to find that little dog and lay in a graveyard beside his small warm body with a heart shaped crooked like hers. Two living beings, loyal to ghosts.
And there on the road alongside the sea, Deli sat on the ground and gave in to the anguish.
It was the sort of thing that swallowed up every inch of space in a person—an onslaught of hungry, desperate longing.
Deli cried until her fingertips went numb in the cold.
She wrapped her arms around her middle and rocked herself in a patch of white clover.
She listened to the water and let the wind carry her tears in wild paths and away.
She stayed there until she felt a sudden warmth and wet on her hand.
“Angus! You scared me. Are you lost?”
The dog walked a few feet up the road and paused.
“You want me to come with you?”
Angus huffed. Deli slipped her phone from her pocket, hoping for service, but found none. She saw a small mailbox ahead of them and walked toward it. Angus’s eyes were focused as he flanked her, like he was driving her somewhere with urgency. Her heart picked up as she neared the mailbox and read.
Campbell Farm
“Angus—what’s wrong, boy? Where’s Cairn?” Deli jogged behind Angus toward the bend ahead of her. The wind came to life and brought a smell so familiar but so out of place she couldn’t name it. Then she saw, and she knew.
A great plume of wildfire smoke was rising from the hills of Cairn and Douglas’s land.