Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
DELANEY
E ven as I walked through town the next day, I was still in shock from seeing Trace the day before. And at our pond, of all places.
Of course, it had been inevitable that we’d run into each other at some point. I’d been so worried about it happening that I didn’t even stop to think about what would happen. Curling up in his arms while I cried over the loss of my father was something I definitely wouldn’t have guessed.
My cheeks heated at just the thought of it. Out of every single person in town, it had to be Trace that I’d lost my composure in front of.
What must he think of me?
I hadn’t expected him to want to speak to me again, though. Perhaps he just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to expose him for what he’d done. After all, I might have signed the paperwork, but I think we all knew it wouldn’t stand up in court for even a second. I’d been sixteen years old, for crying out loud, not to mention the fact that his mother had basically coerced me into signing them.
Surprisingly, even though I was absolutely mortified about crying all over him, I hadn’t felt the anger I’d thought I would. Ten years was a long time, and we’d both changed a lot. I hadn’t really had a choice but to grow up. And now, I wouldn’t have changed anything. I loved my son and the life we had together.
Trace and I were just kids. It was better that we found out then that we weren’t as meant to be as our teenage hearts had thought. Yes, at the time, it had been the worst thing that ever happened to me. He blew up my entire life, and it had taken a lot for me to get over it and build a new life for myself.
But out of it all, I’d gotten Cade, and I could never regret that. That kid was the best thing I’d ever done, and even though it had been hard in the beginning, I’d found true happiness with my son and the family we pulled around us. I had regrets, but show me a single person on the planet who didn’t have them, and I’d call them a liar. Yet, we had a good life.
Maybe it was time to put it all behind me. When I set aside the feelings of teenage me and just looked at this now as the adult I’d become, there genuinely were no hard feelings toward Trace. He might not have wanted a child, but being a mother was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
When I reached my car, I opened the trunk, dropped the catering paperwork for the funeral that Marie had gone through with me into the box I’d grabbed, and then slammed it closed.
I could do this. One thing at a time was how I’d survive the day.
Flowers.
That was the next thing on my list. I’d spoken with the funeral home this morning, and they’d offered to arrange all the flowers, but I wanted to order an arrangement from Cade and me. There were some things that just felt right, and this was one of them. They should be personal, and I wanted to do this myself. For some reason, my brain had fixated on it, and I was just going where the grief was taking me at the moment. There didn’t seem any point in fighting it.
I jogged across the road, heading down Main Street to the florist. This place was so familiar it was eerie. Now that I’d had some sleep and wasn’t running on caffeine alone, I could see the slight changes from ten years ago. But they were so small. Willowbrook had hardly changed at all. It was like stepping back into my childhood, and it was raising so many feelings I didn’t have the capacity to deal with right now.
A few people raised their hands to wave in surprise when they saw me, and I just politely smiled and kept going. I wasn’t ready to have the difficult conversation about where I’d been and why I’d left so suddenly. Marie had already told me during our meeting that she’d started to put the word out about my father’s passing, but she also warned me that people were asking questions. My father might have filled her in on mine and Cade’s life, but the rest of the town was blissfully unaware. It would come out eventually. I just didn’t know how to approach it. Perhaps I should have told Marie to just tell them. At least I’d escape their questions and awkward silences then. But I couldn’t put Marie in that position when she was doing so much for me already.
The obituary would be in the local paper tomorrow, so at least that was done. The funeral home had already arranged for it all before I’d spoken with them. I didn’t even have to write the thing. One more thing my father had ticked off the list for me before he’d even died. It was all starting to feel a bit creepy. I knew he’d thought he was helping, but it was bad enough that he’d spent the last months of his life alone. He shouldn’t have had to arrange his own funeral as well.
As the flower shop came into view, so did one change I hadn’t realized had taken place. Next door was the office front of Farrington Holdings. It matched the business card that Trace had given me yesterday.
I hadn’t called him yet. Another conversation I didn’t know how to have, so of course, I was avoiding that one as well. I guess I could nip in now and get it over with. Instead, I ducked into the flower shop, closing the door quickly behind me and praying to all that was holy that he hadn’t seen me before I had.
I stayed close to the door, peering through the glass to see if there was any sign of him stepping out of his office. When he didn’t emerge, a strange feeling pressed against my chest, and I wasn’t sure if it was relief or regret.
My head was a complete mess right now.
“Can I help?” a voice asked behind me, and I whirled around, realizing exactly what it was that I was doing.
“Yes, sorry. I…I wasn’t sure if I saw someone I knew,” I said lamely, waving a hand over my shoulder at the door as if it hadn’t been obvious that I was hiding inside.
The lady behind the counter smiled politely at me and a rush of relief swept over me when I realized that I had absolutely no idea who she was. Apparently, there had been a few other changes around here.
“Delaney!” I turned toward the gasp and came face to face with Mrs. Shulster who had been my fourth-grade teacher. “Oh, my dear, I just heard about your father.”
I found myself at a complete loss for what to say.
My spine snapped straight, and I had the sudden urge to check my hair. I was pretty sure I had a clean shirt on, and as my gaze dipped, I wanted to wince at the fact that I had my scruffy trainers on and not proper shoes.
Mrs. Shulster had this effect on nearly everyone in our town, given that she’d taught most of us. It wasn’t that we were afraid of her as such. She was the best teacher I’d ever had. But the idea of letting her down, of not being worthy of the time she’d invested in me, was enough to make me want to sit myself outside of the principal’s office while I thought about what I’d done.
She looked exactly the same as I remembered her: plaid pencil skirt, white blouse, and her hair tastefully tied back without a single hair falling loose. The only difference was the small dog tucked under her arm whose head lolled to the side, its tongue sticking out with a bead of drool dripping dangerously close to that pristine white blouse.
In fact…was it dead?
“Erm, your dog.” I pointed at the strange dog, wondering if it could be stuffed because I was pretty sure it wasn’t breathing, and its glassy eyes seemed to be looking in two different directions.
“Oh, don’t mind Titus. He always gets sleepy after he eats.” She jostled the little potentially dead dog in her arms, and it just bounced before lying draped over her arm again.
Yeah, I was pretty sure Titus was no longer with us, and from the smell that was now floating in my direction, he could have been that way for a while.
I looked around, wondering where the woman from the counter had gone and if I should be doing something. Was I supposed to tell someone about Mrs. Shulster and her dead dog? I had absolutely no idea what I should do in this situation.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said sympathetically, gently rubbing my arm. “You look so lost without him. Losing someone close to you is the hardest thing you’ll ever go through, but you’re not alone, Delaney. We’re all here. We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
She sounded so genuine, and it made me forget about the potentially dead dog that was now way closer than my nose was comfortable with.
This was what I’d missed about Willowbrook. The people in the city were nothing like those who lived in small towns. I’d missed the community that came from a place like this. When I was a kid, it had been so annoying that everyone was all up in my business all the time. There was nothing we could get away with. Someone always reported back to our parents, no matter how careful we thought we’d been.
But there was something about being here that always felt safe. It was why we’d got into as much trouble as we had. Because we weren’t afraid to be kids.
“Thank you,” I told her, genuinely meaning it. “I’ve…I think I’ve missed this place.”
“And we’ve missed you too, Delaney. Now, is there anything I can do to help you make arrangements?”
The sound of a folder sliding onto the counter drew my attention to the florist, who’d returned already knowing why it was that I was there. Even if I had been trying to avoid a certain someone, it was still a job on my to-do list.
“I think I’m okay for now, but you’ll be the first person on my list if I need some help,” I promised.
She nodded sadly, stroking my arm again, and I nearly jumped a foot in the air when Titus finally lifted his head and belched in my direction. A wave of rotten fish smell rushed over me, and it took everything in me to keep the polite smile on my face and not gag at the stench.
Dear God, Titus may be alive now, but something inside him had to be dead or dying. How was it possible for such a smell to come from one tiny animal?
The florist cleared her throat politely and then flipped open the folder, moving it to the corner of the counter. “Why don’t you have a look at some arrangements while I serve Mrs. Shulster?” She gave me a knowing smile, and I resisted the urge to drop to my knees in thanks for the save.
Those two steps of distance between me and what I was now thinking was the reanimated, zombified dog in Mrs. Shulster’s arms was enough to place me in clean, fresh air, and I pretended to look completely engrossed in the folder before me as I blindly flipped through it.
It didn’t take long for Mrs. Shulster to buy her roses and then excuse herself with another sympathetic arm rub and wave of rotten dog corpse smell. As soon as she stepped out of the store, I let myself take a gasping breath as the woman behind the counter finally snorted in amusement.
“Oh god, how does she walk around with that thing in her arms?” I gasped dramatically, feeling the need to open every available window even though the animal was finally gone.
“My husband and I have a running bet about whether it actually has legs. I’ve never seen it on the ground. She rescued it about five years ago, and we were convinced it was halfway dead then.”
“Well, at least she’s not alone,” I added with a wince.
Mrs. Shulster was one of the kindest people I’d ever met. She’d helped my father a lot after my mother had passed. She made arrangements with some other women in the town to come to the farm and make sure the fridge was stocked, the laundry was done, and the house was clean. My father had told me the story so many times of how he was so crushed after my mother died, and he had this tiny baby to take care of, and then the next day, there she was on the porch, watering the plants and setting things straight. She never mentioned it, never made him feel like he was being coddled. They all just took care of the extras around the house so he could spend his time getting to know his baby daughter and learning how to be a lone parent.
That was just how Mrs. Shulster was. She saw when someone was in need, and she made sure it was filled.
I should probably stop mentally making fun of her dog. That would be the decent thing to do.
I hadn’t realized that I’d fallen quiet until the woman at the counter politely cleared her throat again. “Have you seen anything that caught your eye?” She nodded to the folder that I was still holding onto the edges of.
“Erm, yes.” I flipped back a couple of pages to something I saw earlier. “This one looks perfect.”
It was bright and bold, nothing like the flowers the funeral home had told me they were doing. But they reminded me of the flowers that Dad had always insisted grow on the porch and around the farm. They were the ones my mother had planted, and he’d meticulously replaced them every spring. It only seemed right that we should say goodbye with the things that had meant the most to him in life.
I could feel that telltale itch gathering behind my eyes and took a deep breath to push the tears back. I didn’t have time for a breakdown at this point in the day.
“That’s a lovely choice.” She smiled at me, and it struck me as strange that it felt genuine and wasn’t filled with the sympathy I’d been expecting to see on every face. “Do you have a date for the funeral yet?”
“Thursday.” It didn’t seem real, even as I said it. The same numbness filled me that had at the funeral home, and I clung to it, knowing it was the only thing that would get me through.
“Okay, well, that’s plenty of time to have these prepared. I can have them delivered to the funeral home for you.”
“Thank you. I’m Delaney, by the way.” I stuck out my hand, and she smiled again.
“I know. The gossip in this place is quicker than any news channel around.”
I laughed then. “Yeah, I can remember. Do I even want to know what they’re saying about me?”
“Well, from what I heard when I was getting coffee this morning, you mysteriously disappeared as a teenager, and once everyone was satisfied that you hadn’t been taken by aliens, they were fairly convinced you’d joined a secret government agency because apparently you were smart enough for that sort of thing.”
I was stunned into silence by that one. She couldn’t be serious. Honestly, a secret baby was the only sensible and obvious answer.
“Wow…that’s not at all what I was expecting.”
“No, but to be fair, that was the most outrageous one and my own personal favorite. The other was far more boring and that you’d got a scholarship to a better school in the city and gone to stay with your aunt. But boring! Am I right? I’m Emma, by the way.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Emma. I hate to disappoint, but there were no governmental agencies recruiting me as a spy.”
“Bummer. Well, I guess you can be boring like the rest of us if you really insist on it.” She laughed as she pulled a notepad out from beneath the counter and started taking notes on the arrangement I’d selected before writing down the funeral home details.
“I know I’d remember you from school, so I’m guessing you’re newish to Willowbrook.”
Was that a lame thing to ask someone? I was so used to everyone being wrapped up in their own business in the city that I’d possibly lost the ability for small talk.
“Yeah. I met my husband in college, and we came back to visit his folks. When I saw the florist shop was going up for sale, it was kind of like fate. Flynn wanted to come back home anyway, and I fell in love with this place as soon as I stepped foot out of the car.”
“Willowbrook can have that effect on you. Wait, Flynn? You’re married to Flynn Dunn?”
“Six years now. I take it you knew him?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s hard not to know everyone when you grow up somewhere like this. But I remember Flynn from school.”
Emma leaned her elbows on the counter as she moved closer. “I’m going to need some of those stories to use as ammunition.”
“Well, I have some amazing ones. Consider yourself the winner of every argument for the next six months because if you want dirt on Flynn, I’ve got just the stuff.”
She moved to the register and rang me up as I passed her my card.
“We should grab coffee so I can take detailed notes,” she said as she passed me her card. “Are you sticking around after the funeral?”
Was I? My first reaction was to say no, but then I remembered what Cade had said that morning on the phone.
“I’m not sure?” I had no idea why that was a question, and Emma cocked her head to the side as she stared back at me.
“Sounds like you want to,” she pointed out. “What’s stopping you? Job? Husband? Kids?”
“I have a son. Cade. He actually wants to move here. But…Willowbrook is so small, and I left so I could… They always know everything about you. There’s no…” I knew what I was trying to say, but no matter how I tried to say it, I couldn’t get my thoughts lined up.
She nodded thoughtfully, reaching across the counter and squeezing my hand. “I get it. I grew up in the city. No one cared about you enough to get into your business, and with it comes freedom. It’s kind of lonely, though too.”
She was right.
“Damn, truth bombs this early in the day. I feel like I’m going to need alcohol and not coffee to go with a conversation with you.”
Emma laughed but then started giving me a look that bordered on scary. “You might be on to something there.”
I shook my head in exasperation. “I can’t wait for you to meet my friend Blake.”