Chapter 22
JOY
The first few things that happened were ordinary.
A customer called with a panic order. Britney spilled a bucket. A delivery came with two bruised peonies that made my eye twitch. The day moved the way days always moved—tiny demands, tiny fixes, tiny little proofs that life didn’t care if your insides were rearranged.
But my body did.
That was the part I couldn’t get used to yet—that I could stand behind the counter at McKinley Flowers with my apron tied the same way I always tied it, smile the same way I’d always smiled, and still feel like I’d crossed some invisible border I could never uncross.
I wasn’t who I’d been last week.
I wasn’t the woman who had never been touched like that. Who had never let a man see her undone. Who had thought intimacy was mostly a concept—romantic, distant, tucked into other people’s lives like a song you only heard in passing.
Now it lived under my skin.
Micah lived under my skin.
Even when he wasn’t here, I felt him in the way I moved—more aware of my hips, my mouth, the heat that could wake up in me with no warning. I felt him in my patience, too. In the way I didn’t flinch as easily anymore, like something in me had decided fear wasn’t the only option.
That should have made me feel powerful.
It did, but it also made me feel exposed.
By midday, my phone buzzed for the third time with a message from him.
Micah: You good?
I stared at it longer than necessary, thumb hovering.
He’d been protective before. Instinctively, quietly. But after Dominion Hall—after his father’s name became something real and breathing in the same city as us—his vigilance had sharpened. Like the world had moved from theoretical danger to confirmed.
And I had become a variable he couldn’t control.
That didn’t sit easily with a man like Micah.
It didn’t sit easily with me, either, if I was being honest.
I typed back.
Me: Busy. Fine. Don’t start.
A beat.
Micah: Not starting. Just checking.
My chest tightened in a way I didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t swooning, either. It was that strange in-between feeling of being cared for and resenting how much you wanted it.
I pocketed my phone and forced my attention back to the eucalyptus I was bundling, the clean green scent clearing my head.
Wadmalaw was scheduled for tomorrow.
I’d already told Momma I’d be out again, walking the fields and checking what would be ready when we needed it. We’d done this dance a hundred times—my parents growing beauty with their hands, me turning it into arrangements for people who wanted a feeling they couldn’t name.
But now the Montana job had a different weight.
It wasn’t just scale. It wasn’t just money or logistics.
It was the quiet, relentless sense that I had stepped into a world where flowers were not just flowers. Where weddings were not just weddings. Where names—Dane, Dominion, Vanguard—meant things you didn’t say out loud unless you were prepared to pay for it.
I tried not to think about any of that.
I tried to focus on stems and ribbon and the familiar pleasure of making something perfect.
It worked—until my phone rang.
Not a text this time. A call.
Momma.
My stomach dropped before I even answered.
“Hey,” I said quickly, stepping into the back room and shutting the door behind me. “Everything okay?”
There was noise on her end—voices, the distant bark of Sunny, the clink of something metal. The sound of my childhood in motion.
But my momma’s voice was tight.
“Joy,” she said, and the way she said my name made my skin go cold. “Where are you?”
“At the shop,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“We have … we have a woman here.”
I blinked. “A woman?”
“Yes.” A pause. “She’s not here to buy flowers.”
My pulse skittered.
“Momma, who is she?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And that alone was wrong. My mother knew everyone on Wadmalaw. She knew their families, their dogs, their gossip, the history of their grudges.
If she didn’t know someone, that someone was either a tourist—lost and harmless—or trouble.
This didn’t sound like a tourist.
“She asked for you,” Momma continued. “By name.”
My throat tightened. “How—”
“And,” Momma added, her voice dropping, “she asked about a man named Micah.”
The air left my lungs the same way it had in my shop when that first woman said his last name. Could it be the same woman?
“Momma,” I said, forcing the word out carefully, “put Daddy on.”
“He’s right here,” she replied quickly. “He’s—Joy, honey, don’t—”
“Put him on,” I repeated.
A rustle. A muffled exchange. Then my father’s voice, low and controlled.
“Joy,” he said. “Where are you?”
My eyes stung instantly, not from fear exactly, but from the sudden comfort of hearing him steady. “At work. What’s happening?”
“There’s a woman here,” he said. “Claims she has business with you.”
“What kind of business?”
He exhaled through his nose. “The kind that doesn’t belong on my land.”
Sunny barked again—sharp, aggressive. Not his playful bark. Not his hello bark.
My grip tightened on the phone. “What does she look like?”
My father paused. “Mid-sixties, maybe. Dark hair with silver streaks. Dressed like she’s not from around here. Like she’s dressed for a city that doesn’t have mud.”
That description could have been a lot of women.
But my mind still snagged on the memory of the stranger who’d walked into my shop—polished, calm, asking questions she had no right to ask. The way she’d said Micah’s name like she already owned a version of the story I didn’t know.
The unease settled deeper, sharper now.
I swallowed. “Is she threatening you?”
“We’re not letting her inside,” he said. “She’s out by the driveway. Your brothers are here. Your sisters. We’re all here. But she keeps—” His voice hardened. “She keeps saying your name like she’s entitled to it.”
A chill slid down my spine.
“Joy, honey,” he said, softer now, “don’t come out here if you don’t have to.”
I closed my eyes.
Because if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t.
But I did.
I could hear my momma breathing on the other end, the contained panic in it, the instinct to protect her child even though I was grown.
And somewhere under that, another truth rose up—quiet and undeniable.
This was my life now.
Not the safe little loop of shop-to-condo-to-family dinners and predictable days.
This was the world Micah lived in. The world that had already reached into my shop once and now had its fingers on my family’s front gate.
I swallowed again, forcing calm into my voice. “I’m coming.”
“Joy—” Momma started.
“I’m coming,” I repeated. “Do not open the gate. Do not let her on the property. Keep everyone inside the line. Keep Sunny close.”
Sunny was a sweet dog. Loyal. Gentle.
But Sunny would go for blood if he thought one of us was in danger.
I didn’t say that out loud. Momma didn’t need the image.
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “Call me if anything changes.”
“Joy—” Daddy started.
“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” I said, and hung up before they could talk me out of it.
I stood in the back room for one long second with my hand pressed flat to my stomach, breathing hard, trying to decide whether I should call Micah.
I thought about his eyes. The way they went cold when he felt threatened. The way he’d said no one gets to say that to you.
If I told him, he would come.
Immediately.
He would come like a storm.
And the idea of Micah on my parents’ land, in the middle of my siblings, with a strange woman at the gate asking about him by name …
It felt like dropping a match into dry grass.
I wasn’t sure what would burn first.
So, I didn’t tell him.
Not yet.
I grabbed my keys, told Britney I had an emergency, and didn’t stop for questions. I just went.
By the time I hit the bridge, Charleston fell behind me in its pretty, curated way, and the world opened into marsh and sky.
Wadmalaw always did that to me—made me feel like the air was bigger, like life didn’t have to be so tight and complicated.
But today the marsh looked different.
Not peaceful.
Watchful.
The road to our farm was a familiar ribbon through live oaks and palmettos, the kind of drive I could do blindfolded. I’d done it in tears, in laughter, in anger.
But I had never driven it like this.
My hands gripped the wheel like I was steering myself through a new version of my life.
And as the trees thickened, I realized something I hadn’t admitted yet.
I was different going back.
Not because I’d slept with a man. Not because I wasn’t a virgin, anymore, like that was some magical badge of adulthood.
But because Micah had forced me to see myself without my own careful filters.
He had seen me want. He had seen me shake. He had seen me choose.
And once you saw yourself like that—raw and real—you couldn’t fully go back to being small.
Even on the land that had raised you.
When I turned onto our driveway, I saw the problem immediately.
A sleek black car sat just outside the gate, parked like it belonged there. Like it was used to gates opening for it.
The gate was closed.
My father’s truck was positioned sideways inside the entrance, blocking any attempt to force through. Practical. Stubborn. Very McKinley.
Mason and Bo stood near the gate, arms folded, shoulders squared, both of them wearing the particular stillness that meant they were braced for trouble.
Cassie hovered a few steps back, phone clutched in one hand like she was ready to call for help—or record evidence—while Lily stayed close to Momma, fingers knotted in her shirt.
Sunny strained against the leash at Cassie’s side, his body low and rigid, ears pinned forward, a warning growl rumbling in his chest as he looked on.
And then there was the woman.
She stood just outside the gate, one hand resting lightly on the metal as if she might push it open with two fingers if she felt like it.
She was beautiful in a way that felt engineered.