Chapter Seventeen
Daisy woke to the unmistakable sound of Nathan attempting to be subtle.
Unfortunately, her brother had never possessed much talent for subtlety.
Somewhere downstairs, a cupboard door slammed hard enough to rattle the kitchen shelves.
Another followed. Then came the scrape of a chair dragging across the floorboards, accompanied by a long, theatrical sigh that floated all the way up the staircase.
Daisy pulled the blanket over her shoulder and stared toward the ceiling.
The sigh came again. Louder this time. If Nathan had attached a brass band to it, the performance could hardly have been more obvious.
She groaned. "Nathan, please."
The noises downstairs stopped at once.
A few seconds later, his voice drifted up from the kitchen. "You're awake."
"I was asleep until someone started rearranging the house."
"I wasn't rearranging anything."
Daisy shook her head to herself. "The chair might disagree."
She heard him huff out a laugh.
Then came the question she'd been expecting. "Would you like breakfast?"
Daisy closed her eyes. There it was, the reason for the performance.
Her birthday.
She'd almost managed to forget it.
Three years ago, birthdays had been impossible to ignore. Clara would have appeared before breakfast with flowers and gossip. Ruth Callahan would have insisted on enough food to feed an army. Wyatt would pretend he wasn't participating while somehow being involved in every surprise. And Flint...
Flint always had a plan.
Not expensive gifts or grand gestures. Somehow, those never would've suited him. Instead, he'd spend weeks listening for some small thing she'd mentioned in passing and then turn it into a surprise she never saw coming.
For a moment, she lay still, wishing it didn't hurt quite so much.
"Coffee," she finally called.
Nathan sighed again. "Coffee isn't breakfast."
"It can be if I drink enough of it."
"Daisy, one day you're going to discover vegetables exist."
"Not today."
Nathan couldn’t hide his irritation. "You've become impossible."
A smile tugged at her mouth. "You raised me."
"I absolutely did not."
"Then who spent most of my childhood threatening people who made me cry?"
"That was brotherly concern, Daisy."
"That was intimidation."
"It was effective intimidation."
His tone carried enough pride that Daisy laughed.
By the time she made her way downstairs several minutes later, the kitchen smelled of fresh biscuits, bacon, and coffee. The familiar scents wrapped around her immediately, comforting in a way she hadn't realized she needed.
Nathan sat at the table with a stack of medical notes spread beside his plate.
Flint occupied the chair across from him.
Daisy halted just inside the kitchen doorway.
The room had gone quiet so abruptly that she almost laughed. She had heard the low murmur of conversation. Now there was nothing except the faint crackle from the stove and the sound of Nathan turning a page far too deliberately.
A smile tugged at her mouth. "Oh no."
"What?" Nathan asked.
The answer came so quickly that she didn't bother hiding her grin. "You've been discussing me."
"No, we haven't."
Daisy tilted her head. Nathan's voice always climbed half a note when he lied. It had done so since childhood, which made his continued confidence in the strategy all the more baffling.
"You have."
Across the room, Flint shifted in his chair.
Nathan apparently decided retreat was impossible and chose a different battlefield. "We discussed several things."
"One of them was me."
"We discussed the weather."
"It's June."
"The weather still exists in June, Daisy.”
Daisy laughed. "Was I before or after the weather?"
Nathan muttered something beneath his breath that sounded suspiciously like a complaint. That alone was enough to convince her she was right.
She crossed toward the table and settled into her chair, smiling the entire time. "You've planned something."
"We have not."
"You hesitate before every answer."
Nathan exhaled sharply. The sound of defeat.
Daisy reached for her coffee. For a physician, her brother was remarkably easy to diagnose. "You're getting worse at this."
Across the table, Flint's attempt to suppress a laugh failed spectacularly.
Nathan immediately rounded on him. "You are not helping."
Daisy nearly laughed into her coffee.
The two men could not have been more different if they tried. Nathan approached every argument as though preparing a legal defense. Flint treated them like unexpected storms. Something to endure until they passed.
Unfortunately for both of them, they had underestimated the disadvantage of trying to hide things from a blind woman.
Most people spent too much time watching faces.
Daisy listened.
She listened to the tiny pauses between answers. The way Nathan kept finding reasons to continue talking while avoiding the actual subject. To Flint's poorly concealed amusement. To the nervous energy lingering beneath the entire conversation.
Whatever they were hiding, they were terrible at it.
"You know," she said pleasantly, "the longer this continues, the more convinced I become that I should be worried."
Neither man answered.
***
The morning passed quietly inside the workshop.
Normally, birthdays made Daisy nostalgic. They left her thinking about old memories, old mistakes, and all the places life had carried her.
This year seemed determined to make her restless instead.
The Sheridan House order had given her more work than she knew what to do with, which should have been a blessing. Instead, she kept finding her attention drifting when it ought to have been fixed on stitching and measurements.
Part of it was the memories that always surfaced around her birthday.
The rest of it was Flint.
Mostly Flint.
Over the last week, Flint had become increasingly difficult to understand. He wasn't rude or cold. Just careful.
When the workshop door opened, she knew immediately who it was.
Flint had developed a particular way of entering rooms lately, as though he expected trouble to be hiding behind every piece of furniture. "You missed a spot."
Daisy looked up from her work. "A good afternoon to you, too."
His footsteps crossed the room. "The shelf."
She raised an eyebrow. "What about it?"
"It leans."
"It's been leaning for two years."
"That doesn't seem safe,” Flint continued.
"It survived two winters."
Flint grunted, apparently unimpressed.
Daisy listened as he examined it anyway. Wood creaked. Something shifted. A muttered curse followed.
A smile tugged at her mouth. "Did the shelf offend you, too?"
"No." He answered far too quickly.
"It sounded personal."
"It was poorly constructed."
"Julian built it."
Flint cleared his throat. "It has admirable qualities."
The words sounded physically painful.
Daisy bit the inside of her cheek as a suspicion she'd been nursing for several days suddenly sat up and demanded attention.
She waited.
Across the room, Flint apparently realized the trap too late. "Structurally speaking."
Daisy nearly laughed out loud. Instead, she lowered her attention to the labels she was sorting and kept her voice perfectly innocent. "Oh?"
"Yes."
"How generous of you."
Flint muttered something she couldn't quite make out.
It sounded remarkably like a man regretting every decision that had led him into this conversation.
Good. Let him suffer a little.
He'd been making her miserable for days, and she felt no particular obligation to rescue him now.
As she returned another label to its stack, the last pieces finally clicked into place.
Julian.
Of course, it was Julian.
Looking back over the past week, every strange mood, every carefully measured word, and every moment of stiffness whenever Julian's name came up suddenly made sense.
Flint was jealous.
The realization sent an unexpected rush of satisfaction through her chest.
Well, that explained quite a lot.
***
She cornered him that evening.
Nathan had ridden into town to check on a patient, leaving the house unusually quiet. Daisy found Flint behind the shed shortly before supper, where he appeared to be taking out his frustrations on a stack of firewood.
The steady crack of splitting logs echoed across the yard. Each swing landed with enough force to suggest the kindling had personally offended him.
She stopped several feet away and listened.
Another swing.
Another sharp crack.
Then silence.
He'd heard her.
"Daisy, we need to talk."
A brief pause followed. She heard the axe handle scrape against a log as he set it aside.
That wasn't a promising sign.
"What have I done now?"
Daisy folded her arms. "You've been avoiding me."
"No, I haven't."
The denial arrived so quickly that she almost smiled. "You have."
"I live here."
"You hide here."
The silence that followed stretched just long enough to feel guilty. "That's not the same thing."
"It is when you're doing it on purpose."
Somewhere nearby, a horse snorted from its paddock, and the evening settled around them in a brief, expectant stillness.
"You've been jealous."
The accusation hung in the warm evening air.
Flint groaned like a man watching disaster approach from miles away and realizing there was no possible escape.
Daisy smiled. There was her answer. "You have."
"No," he continued to insist.
"You just groaned."
"That proves nothing."
She laughed softly. "I think it proves quite a lot."
"Daisy."
His voice carried the weary patience of a man losing an argument and knowing it.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The evening breeze stirred through the trees overhead.
Then Flint sighed. "Julian's useful."
The words caught her off guard. The smile slowly faded from her face. That wasn't the answer she'd expected.
She stood quietly, listening to the roughness in his voice and the weight behind the simple statement.
And suddenly she understood.
This wasn't really about Julian.
Or not entirely.
Julian was simply the measure Flint had chosen. A respectable merchant. A man who helped her business grow. A man who belonged in the life she'd built.
While Flint, for all his strength and loyalty, seemed unable to see himself as anything but a source of trouble.
The realization tightened something deep inside her chest.
"You think that's what this is about," she said softly.
"What?"
"Being useful."
The axe handle creaked beneath his grip. Flint didn't answer. He didn't have to. The silence stretched between them, carrying more truth than any explanation could have. Daisy could almost feel him withdrawing behind it, convinced she already knew the answer.
"I don't care about Julian's contracts."
"You should."
The quiet certainty in his voice made her chest ache.
"I care about you."
The words slipped free before she could stop them.
Neither of them moved.
The evening breeze rustled through the trees overhead, and somewhere beyond the pasture a horse shifted in its stall. Yet the yard itself seemed to hold its breath around them.
Daisy swallowed hard. There was no taking the words back now. "When I'm frightened, you're the person I look for."
She could hear Flint breathing. Could hear her own heartbeat thudding beneath her ribs. The silence that followed wasn't awkward or uncomfortable. It felt fragile somehow, as though one wrong word might shatter something neither of them fully understood yet.
"I don't ask Nathan to sit with me when Amos is on my mind," she said quietly. "I don't wait for Julian to come home." Tears stung the back of her eyes. "I wait for you."
The words lingered, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.
When Flint finally broke the silence, his voice sounded different. Quieter. Almost disbelieving. "Daisy..."
She shook her head before he could say anything more.
"No." This time, she wasn't going to let him hide behind excuses or good intentions. She'd spent too many years watching him carry burdens that weren't his alone. "You don't get to decide what matters to me."
The evening breeze brushed across her face, cool against her warm skin. Nearby, Flint released a slow breath.
The sound seemed to carry everything he couldn't quite say aloud. Relief, longing, uncertainty, and something that felt dangerously close to hope.
For the first time in days, he no longer sounded like a man searching for an escape.
And for now, that was enough.