Chapter 87 Deli
Deli
Deli neared the cottage where her bags were packed, replaying her conversation with Grandma Rosemary on the cliffside.
“Listen, here,” Grandma Rosemary said after she’d lowered herself to the muddy ground and hung her feet over the edge, like a woman who’d never been sick a day in her long life. “Delilah, there are many things to say.”
“You don’t need to, Grandm—”
“Hush.” She pressed an elegant finger with a slightly chipped nail to her lips and took a swig of the rained-down wine. “This may be my last chance to set things right.”
Deli took the glass back.
“The silly thing about dying, if you’re lucky—which I do consider myself—is that it gives you brilliant vision, but so few days to see.
Don’t cry, darling.” Grandma Rosemary ran a thumb under Deli’s left eye, and Deli could feel her hand shaking.
“This is life. And I need you to pay attention. That’s important. God, Deli, I wish I’d paid attention.”
Then, in just thirty minutes, her grandmother did what Deli would come to understand as one of the most courageous acts she’d ever see. Rosemary McDonnell named the many things she believed she’d gotten wrong.
“Do you remember when I used to throw you tea parties? With that miniature plastic set I got you for your birthday?”
Deli nodded as she passed the wine back over. “Except we had juice instead of tea.”
“Yes, well”—Grandma Rosemary held the wineglass up to the moonlight, tilted the dark liquid back and forth—“besides the taste, I was terrified of what caffeine would do to you. You were already so wild.”
“I know.” Deli watched the charcoal horizon going black. Her grandmother passed her the glass. “You always made me brush my hair.”
Then Grandma Rosemary gripped Deli’s wrist and clutched her hand.
“I should have never made you brush your hair, Delilah. I mean it.” She touched the dark, dripping ends of what had been Deli’s curls with an adoration reserved for things set apart.
“Oh, Deli . . . I should have never made you brush your hair.”
They had walked arm in arm back to the cottage, but they didn’t go inside. Grandma Rosemary wanted to search for something she’d buried in the garden.
“You really haven’t seen it? Just a small pile of stones, about that high?” She kneeled to show the lost marker’s height, squinting into the dark.
“No, Grandma. It’s been a long time for something like that to still be here.”
“What a shame.” Grandma Rosemary looked so fragile under the silhouette of Highland mountains.
“You think you’ll stay who you are when you’re young forever.
And those special moments that stop time .
. . You think, of course, you could never forget them.
God, how much I have forgotten, Deli. How many versions of me I have forgotten, too. ”
Just before they went inside, Grandma Rosemary took Deli’s hands. As she met her grandma’s eyes Deli could see who her grandmother must have been as a little girl. And Deli knew she would have spent hours with her in the garden, telling tall tales and dreaming up worlds.
What was it called, she wondered, to ache for a childhood friendship forbidden by place and time?
“You still have time, Delilah. Time to live, like you truly mean to be here. I was too much a coward, it turns out.” Rosemary laughed, her faded lipstick cast pink in the window’s glow.
“But you? I have never been more sure I’ve known a lion’s heart.
” Grandma Rosemary pressed her palm to Deli’s chest. “Delila—Deli? My brilliant, wild girl . . . Please tell me it’s still in there? ”
They had booked flights home that night. Grandma Rosemary insisted on paying and selected the refundable option for Deli’s ticket. Now, as she walked through the magical garden and while heather smoke still tinged the air, leaving was less than an hour away.
She slipped in the back and went straight to the room she was sharing with Aunt Mo while the family was there to hide in case they were around, but the cottage was empty. Deli decided to spend her last moments adding the final flowers from Scotland to her dictionary.
She had just finished white clover (will you think of me?; I promise) when her aunt, mother, and grandmother came in with rustling shopping bags from their last minute trip for “suitable airplane snacks.” She kept quiet where she sat in her room.
“Where’s Delilah?” her grandma asked.
“Out for a walk,” Aunt Mo said.
Lorraine sighed. “If she makes us miss our flight, I swear to—Oh! What’s this?”
There was a rustling sound, then one like paper being ripped.
“Where did these come from?” Lorraine sounded suspicious.
But Aunt Mo’s voice was warm. “They must be from her and Lachlan’s photo shoot.”
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Grandma Rosemary said.
Deli’s eyes widened and her pulse quickened at the thought of anyone else seeing those shots—the way Lachlan had looked at her.
He rolled through her heart like thunder.
“Hmm,” her mother mused. “These are good photos of her, actually. Maybe I should use one when I send the follow up to that gossip magazine.”
“What?” Aunt Mo’s voice was hard.
Deli heard a photo hit the ground and her mother’s response.
“What is this doing in here?”
“What do you mean ‘follow up,’ Laurie?”
“Hmm?” Her mother sounded distracted as she turned another page. “Oh, I sent off those photos of Deli and William.”
Deli went still. She had blamed Lachlan—had thought he had been so wrapped up in the tension with his brother that he’d used her as a pawn in an endless chess match and told himself it was for her good. But if it wasn’t Lachlan . . .
She thought back through his reaction on the dance floor, his reaction when he thought William was going to walk in on them . . .
Lachlan, as a boy hiding his brother in quiet rooms.
Lachlan, as a boy who couldn’t protect his mother.
Lachlan stepping between her and a parent’s rage. And she had punished him for it.
But perhaps more than realizing it was her mother who had sent the photo for some reason Deli was sure she didn’t deserve, it was hearing her mom call her Deli, not Delilah—only when she thought Deli wouldn’t hear—that finally made it clear.
The three women jumped at the sound of Deli’s bedroom door slamming against the wall with the force of her anger. Her mother tried to hide the photos behind her back.
“It was you?”
Lorraine’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, hi. We didn’t think you were home.”
“Why, Mom? What could I have possibly done to deserve tha—” Deli saw the envelope, torn and discarded, on the table. Something blue and papery was still inside. She pushed past her mother and picked it up.
Her name was written on the front in Lachlan’s handwriting. Inside was a small note and something that drifted into her hand.
Deli,
May you know a love deserving of you.
May you see yourself as you are.
May you forever be free.
In her palm was a pressed, single bloom with scalloped edges. A Scottish bluebell, turned inside out. Deli knelt to retrieve the photo her mother had discarded where it lay upturned between them.
“Now, Delilah, I know the way you get! Don’t be upset at me. It’s not my fault I had to go to such lengths when you refused to listen to reason!”
Deli held a new print of the first photo Lachlan ever took of her—a larger and sharper shot of the little girl and the cottage by the sea. She could see him behind the camera.
Just be yourself!
She spun on her mother. “Those are not yours.”
Lorraine gasped and jerked the photos away as Deli reached for them. They flew from her grip and scattered across the floor.
Grandma Rosemary’s tone was sharp as she said, “Lorraine, please. Control yourself.”
The three unexpected knocks on the cottage door were sharp, too.
A voice Deli could have recognized anywhere called her name. Lorraine’s face lit up with recognition. She strode to the door while Deli remained glued to the spot.
How? How could he be there?
“Oh my god! What a sight for sore eyes!”
If someone had asked Deli to guess what was about to happen, she would have never gotten it right.
Even though she heard his voice. Even though she could kind of see him on the other side of her mother.
Even though she knew, logically, he was there.
There was simply no part of her that could believe Deli MacDonald was living in a timeline where Trey Evans was, once again, standing in her doorway.
Lorraine threw her arms around Trey Evans’s neck as he smiled and laughed, but his eyes went straight to Deli. Ice shot through her in jagged lines that, for once, only felt cold.
“Trey, what are you doing here?” Deli asked as he stepped in, ignoring the hissing cat hiding under the couch. Trey plucked a photo from under his shoe. Deli watched his eyes splinter as he held the print of Lachlan’s kilt and her hand clutching a small bundle of heather.
Protection.
“Deli, hi.”
“Trey, what are you doing here?”
Trey reached for her arm, but she recoiled just enough that he stopped.
“Um, can we talk in private, please?”
She cast her eyes around the small home. “There is no private here.”
“Outside, then?” he whispered. “I need to talk to you.”
Deli narrowed her eyes in sync with Aunt Mo. “Uh, sure.”
Lorraine tapped at her watch. “We need to leave in a few minutes!”
Deli followed Trey out the door and closed it behind her. He stopped on the heather-sown path and turned, holding out a thistle. “This is for you.”
She didn’t want the bloom that cried retaliation.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Trey, again, finding her at the eleventh hour when he was sure she was about to quit him.
This time, on the other side of the world.
And this time while he had at least a girlfriend, probably a fiancée, back in Los Angeles.
“Again, Trey,” Deli said. “What the fuck are you actually doing here?”
“Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“Aren’t you engaged?”
“Well, I . . . not yet . . .”