Chapter 55
THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR HAS BEEN THERE ALL ALONG
Oliver
Of everything I expected when I planned my road trip to find where I wanted to settle, not wanting it to end wasn’t a possibility that crossed my mind.
But I don’t know if another week will be enough.
We’ll run out of cash to give away, but I can get more.
I’d want to upgrade my car to something electric, or at least hybrid.
We might plan to stay in the same place for two nights instead of being in this much of a rush to see as much as I can of the country.
I keep falling asleep in the car regularly when Daphne’s been driving for the two- or three-hour stretches between our giveaway sprees the past couple days, which isn’t surprising.
Now that I’m getting more than four or five hours of sleep a night, my body’s craving sleep in a way I’ve never felt before.
Making up for what I missed.
From the small bit of research I’ve done, I expect it’ll take me a year or more to fully be normal again.
But tonight, I’m in my happy place. It’s a happy place I didn’t even know existed, yet here we are.
Daphne’s telling me stories about her adopted hometown and her adopted family as we sit by the fire, sipping the rich, decadent Chateau Cheval Blanc out of red Solo cups and roasting marshmallows after eating our fire-roasted hot dogs and corn on the cob.
Crickets are chirping.
A light breeze fans our campfire.
Stars sparkle overhead with only a half-moon interrupting their glow.
It’s a near-perfect night.
“—so Simon’s kids got skunked out when he was supposed to be taking Bea out for tea, and it reminded me of the time I was out supervising a job and a whole family of raccoons got into my lunch.”
“What do you do?” I ask her. “Your job. What do you do?”
“Whatever they need me to do.”
“Who, though?”
There’s the barest hesitation before she peers at me in the firelight.
“My nonprofit is called Beeslieve. We do some animal habitat restoration, like in places where there are abandoned buildings or where we could restore wrecked habitats for bees and butterflies, and we also do some work with the state department of transportation, making the roadways safer for animals and cars alike with natural boundaries to direct wildlife to better crossings.”
“I feel like I’ve heard of this.”
“You’re our major donor. Through Miles2Go.” She looks down at her marshmallow. “That’s what I want money for. To make sure that even when your father revokes our funding, we can keep going the way we have been.”
I rub at my chest.
“I was hired with those funds,” she adds quietly.
“And it’s—working at Beeslieve has been—it’s been everything I needed.
It gave me a focus for my energy where I can see for myself, every day, that we’re doing good.
That we’re improving the world. You know.
In ways that sending a bunch of air conditioners to the North Pole wouldn’t have. ”
My heart thumps erratically.
She has a life she needs to get back to. I can’t keep her on the road with me indefinitely.
I mean, I could.
But I’d have to ask her to give up her job to come with me.
I’d have to be enough all by myself.
Daph would be happy seeing the world, but we haven’t seen the results of our efforts the past few days.
We’ve dropped bucketloads of cash into random communities along the way, anonymously supporting fundraisers for playgrounds and kids’ sports teams and fire station upgrades and museum expansions and pet shelter support.
We’ve left large tips at small family restaurants and dropped ridiculous amounts of change into charity donation jars at grocery stores and a few other ValuKarts.
And we’ve dashed off quickly everywhere before anyone could realize how much we’d donated or left behind.
I know she doesn’t need the credit, but I think she needs something more concrete than holding onto empty suitcases that used to be filled with money.
Her heart has always belonged to animals. To the environment and the world.
The donation we made at the only open pet shelter we’ve stopped at was the hardest.
I could tell she wanted to pet the dogs, but she faked an allergy attack as soon as we were in the door.
It’s the first time I’ve wondered how much she still hides of herself.
How much she’ll bend over backward to protect her own heart.
When I first heard she’d been disinherited, I didn’t think much of it. Couldn’t, really—not with the situation my father was in and the subsequent situation he’d thrust me into at M2G.
But now—now I think it was far more than a simple disinheritance.
Her parents abandoned her.
They left her to survive on her own without any resources because they never understood her.
Never understood what she loved and cared about.
How deeply she felt about her causes.
Something new flickers to life deep in my chest.
Anger.
Fury.
Rage.
Not at Daphne.
At her parents.
Somewhat at Margot too.
She stayed. She stayed at the family company. Stayed working for people who probably don’t care about her interests outside of work either. Unless it aligns with their own.
If my father hadn’t been sent to prison, if I hadn’t broken up with Margot because I couldn’t handle the obligations of maintaining a relationship on top of the expectations from Miles2Go, if I hadn’t learned so quickly that I wasn’t built for the life I’d been trained for, would I have been one more person carrying on like normal when my sister-in-law was abandoned?
All they had to do was listen.
Listen and try to understand.
Instead, they wrote her off like she was the problem.
Daphne stirs beside me, pulling her marshmallow off the fire and sliding it onto a graham cracker already loaded up with a Reese’s peanut butter cup.
“I know enough about fundraising at this point that I know Beeslieve will be fine. And I’m good at it.
I could shift to fundraising full-time. But when you can put your efforts into the work itself instead of into asking for donations—it makes such a difference on what you can accomplish for the animals and the environment.
And I’d—I’d miss being outside and seeing the work as much as I do now too. ”
“Is a million enough?”
“I could ask Margot for funding too. I’ve been letting my pride stand in my way, and I need to stop that. I’ve made my point, you know?”
“Daphne.”
“The world doesn’t work the way we’re raised to think it works. But the world I’m in now—I like it better. Even if it’s harder. It’s worth it.”
“Daphne.”
“I’m telling you that I don’t need your money, okay? This trip—this adventure—it’s been reward enough, and I’ve learned enough the past few years to appreciate it for what it is.”
I grip her wrist, noticing for the first time how small it is.
Delicate.
Nothing about Daphne has ever struck me as delicate, but I think I never looked closely enough.
“Are we friends?” I ask her.
She eyes me while she takes a giant bite of her s’more.
“Because I think we’re friends.” At least. At the very, very least.
Regardless of where I end up and how long she’s with me on this road trip, she’s become my friend.
Something more than my friend.
Something much, much more.
She licks at the marshmallow oozing out of her s’more and continues to not answer me.
I’m still holding her other wrist. “Daph, friends don’t abandon friends.”
That gets me a lot of blinks that come with quivering nostrils and an uneven inhale. “I don’t use my friends for money either.”
“You’re not using if it’s being offered.”
“You offered it before we were friends. If we’re…staying friends…then I don’t want it anymore.”
“What about your coworkers? The whole organization? Can I help them?”
She shoves the last bite of s’more into her mouth without answering me.
I let her wrist go and take another sip of wine.
Contemplate roasting another marshmallow.
Eye Daphne while she actively avoids looking at me.
Enjoy the crackle of the fire.
Panic in my own head that I’m missing some kind of subtle clue that I’m supposed to pick up on beyond the obvious, which is that she has a very different relationship with people and with money now, and this isn’t about me.
Except maybe it is?
And if it is, what do I do about it?
This Daphne? This woman who’s been with me this past week?
I like her.
I more than like her.
And I don’t know what to do about it because this road trip will come to an end, and she has a day job that she clearly loves, and this can’t last forever.
Eventually, she sighs. “My parents used their money to try to control me,” she grumbles.
“I know.”
“You’re from that world.”
“Was. Not anymore.”
“Oliver. We’re drinking a bottle of wine that probably costs half my annual salary. With hot dogs and s’mores.”
“I might keep some parts of the old world.”
Her lips tip up, but she’s also half scowling at me.
“I’m not expecting anything from anyone that we’ve left cash with the past few days,” I tell her.
“I know.”
“Maybe I’ll get a list of all of the nonprofits M2G donated to in the past few years and use the rest of my fortune keeping all of them going.”
She stares at me.
Not blinking.
Possibly not even breathing.
“You’d do that?” she whispers.
The reverence in her voice—like I’ve proposed a way to save the polar bears—it makes me squirm even as the answer—the only answer, the absolute truth—comes out of my mouth.
“Yes. Of course.”
“You’d keep funding going for every nonprofit Miles2Go contributed to on your own if they cut it off?”
The math isn’t hard.
M2G wasn’t very profitable when I took it over, and though profits—and thus charitable donations—grew significantly in the past two years especially, I can afford to make sure none of the nonprofits suffer if things don’t go my way when my resignation and recommendation are formally submitted to the board of directors in a little over a week.
“I don’t want or need that much money, Daph.
If it makes you feel better about me donating to Beeslieve for me to donate to all of the rest of the nonprofits that the M2G Foundation funded too, then it’s an easy yes.
I picked all of them for a reason, and I hadn’t considered the potential that they’d have their funding cut without me there to oversee things.
I hadn’t—you’ve helped me see through the fog I was living in.
See the difference I made. The difference I want to keep making. ”
She’s staring at me in the firelight, and maybe it’s the wine making everything seem softer, or maybe it’s the crackle of the fire mixed with night insects setting the mood beneath the half-moon and the stars, but in this moment, everything feels perfect.
Exactly as it’s supposed to be.
I’m who I’m supposed to be. I’m with who I’m supposed to be with. We’re exactly where the universe wants us, and this is right and good and everything.
Daph moves her red Solo cup further from her body.
She turns to me, takes my cup, and sets it aside too.
And then she cradles my face in her hands while she shifts her legs to cradle my hips, and she presses the softest kiss to my lips.
It’s a thank you kiss.
A you see me kiss.
An everything has changed kiss.
Even when she deepens the kiss, when slow strokes of her hand under my shirt become frantic movements with both of us rushing through stripping each other’s clothes off—it’s different.
Deeper.
More.
Everything.
She’s my old world and my new world clashing together into the right world.
Chaos and fun with conviction and drive.
She pushes me back onto the blanket, hovers over me, and then takes me into her hot, slick heat, and I know.
I have to change my plans.
I have to find a way to keep her.
Not because I want to make love to a woman in the moonlight.
Because I want to make love to Daphne in the moonlight.
Not because I know all the answers of who I want to be and how to get there.
Because I want her with me while I sort it out.
I want her laugh. I want her smiles. I want to pick her brain and I want her to tell me when I’m wrong and I want to bask in the exquisite joy of her enthusiasm for finding and doing what’s right.
She rides me like we’re in the final, desperate stretches headed for home, kissing me as if I’m her oxygen, and when her inner walls squeeze me and I let myself go inside of her, I feel her heartbeat as if it’s my own, feel the breath in her lungs as if it’s my own, and I know.
I am head over heels in love with Daphne Merriweather-Brown.
This is the last thing I ever expected at any point in my life, but the peace—the peace that comes as she sags against me, the last of her orgasm leaving her, mine still pulsing out of me—the peace and the happiness and the freedom—this is it.
She’s the one.
The one who’s been there my whole life without me ever knowing she was exactly what I would need.
Exactly what I’d want.
Everything.
She pants against my chest and presses a kiss to my neck. “Thank you for being you,” she whispers.
My eyes sting while I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight. “Thank you for being you.”