18. Lili #2
I found myself in Mama's garden at dawn, attacking the weeds that had dared to invade her prized tomato patch like they were personally responsible for every bad decision I'd made in the past month.
My hands were already caked with earth, fingernails black with dirt, and I could taste salt on my lips from tears I didn't remember crying.
"Plants don't lie to you," I said to the morning air, not caring if talking to vegetables made me sound crazier than a peach orchard boar.
"They don't have secret agendas or family empires to protect. They don't pretend to be your friend while using you as a pawn in some twisted chess game where all the pieces are people and all the rules change depending on how much money your great-great-grandFather had."
A shadow fell across my row, and I looked up to see Mama standing there with two steaming mugs and the kind of patient expression that meant she'd been watching me have my breakdown from the kitchen window.
"Mind if I join you?" she asked, like finding your daughter having a philosophical argument with tomatoes at six in the morning was just another Tuesday.
I wiped my face with the back of my dirt-covered hand, probably leaving muddy streaks across my cheeks. "I'm fine, Mama. Just needed to—"
"Baby girl, you haven't been fine since you got home.
" She knelt beside me in the dirt, her work clothes already as stained as mine, and handed me one of the mugs.
The coffee was strong enough to wake the dead and sweet enough to rot your teeth—exactly how I'd learned to drink it at her knee.
"But fine is overrated anyway. Some of the best folks I know have never been fine a day in their lives. "
We worked side by side in comfortable silence, something that would've been impossible in London's constant performance.
There, even private moments felt staged, like someone was always watching, always judging whether you were being appropriate enough, sophisticated enough, enough enough.
Here, love was shown through shared work, through callused hands and patient presence and the willingness to kneel in the dirt at dawn because your daughter needed you to.
"You know," Mama said eventually, wrestling with a dandelion that had put down roots like it was planning to homestead, "your daddy used to say that you could tell everything about a person by how they treated a garden.
Whether they tried to force it into something it wasn't meant to be, or whether they worked with what was already growing and just helped it along. "
I paused, a handful of chickweed clutched in my fist. The morning sun was climbing higher, painting everything gold and green and peaceful in ways that made my chest ache. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, nothing special. Just making conversation.
" But her smile suggested otherwise, the kind of knowing look she'd been giving me since I was old enough to lie about whether I'd brushed my teeth.
"Though I will say, it's mighty nice to see you getting your hands dirty again.
You always did your best thinking in the soil. "
I looked down at my hands—really looked at them.
One week ago, they'd been soft and manicured, suitable for holding champagne flutes and signing charity auction paddles.
Now they were rough and real and useful again, with dirt embedded so deep under my nails that it would take a sandblaster to get it all out.
The question was whether I missed the softness or was grateful for the honesty of calluses.
Rosie's Diner at high noon was exactly what it had always been—a place where the vinyl booth seats were held together with duct tape and good intentions, where the coffee could strip paint and the air conditioning sounded like it was fixing to give up the ghost any day now.
Sue Ellen Martinez had been serving the same five-item menu since before I was born, and she could remember your usual order even if you hadn't been in for three years.
"Well, I'll be switched," Sue Ellen said as I slid into my usual booth by the window, the one with the rip in the seat that caught your jeans if you weren't careful. "Look what the cat dragged in. Heard tell you went off to England to hobnob with fancy folks. How'd that work out for you, sugar?"
"About as well as you'd expect from someone who thought she could play in the big leagues," I said, and she nodded like that explained the mysteries of the universe.
"Meatloaf today's fresher than yesterday's, if that tells you anything worth knowing. You want the usual?"
The usual. Meatloaf that would make Gordon Ramsay weep, mashed potatoes from a box, and green beans that came from a can that tasted like childhood and not giving a damn about anything fancier. Food that would probably send Lady Victoria into cardiac arrest but felt like a hug from the inside out.
"Yes, ma'am. And sweet tea, if you don't mind."
"What kind of establishment you think I'm running here? Course I got sweet tea. Made it fresh this morning, sweet enough to float a horseshoe."
I smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks.
This was the anti-London—no Michelin stars or sommeliers or waiters who looked down their noses if you used the wrong fork.
Here, food was comfort, not performance art.
Sue Ellen didn't care about my romantic scandals or my visa status or whether I knew the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork.
She only cared whether I wanted extra gravy and if I had room for pie.
The meatloaf arrived with a side of local gossip about Mrs. Henderson’s new hip replacement and speculation about whether the Henderson boys would finally sell their daddy's farm to that developer from Austin.
Normal problems from normal people living normal lives where the biggest scandal was who'd been seen at the Walmart in the next county over, buying their groceries instead of shopping local.
"You seem different," Sue Ellen observed, refilling my tea glass without being asked.
"Older, maybe. Or just tired down to your bones. Both, probably."
"Hmm." She studied me with the practiced eye of someone who'd been reading customers' troubles for longer than I'd been alive. "Whatever happened over there in fancy land, it wasn't all bad, was it?"
I thought about Edward's hands on my face, about the way he'd looked at me like I was something precious and impossible and worth protecting.
About Daphne's laugh during our late-night conversations, about feeling like I belonged somewhere for the first time in my life, even if it had all been built on lies and manipulation and my own willful blindness.
"No," I admitted around the lump in my throat. "It wasn't all bad."
"Well then," Sue Ellen said, patting my shoulder with a flour-dusted hand that smelled like honest work and uncomplicated kindness, "maybe it wasn't all good either. Life's got a way of being complicated like that, mixing up the sweet with the bitter until you can't tell which is which."
I ate my meatloaf and watched the familiar rhythm of small-town life through the diner's streaked window, trying not to think about how exhausting it had been to constantly be "on" in Edward's world.
But also trying not to think about how much I missed the intensity of it all, the feeling that every moment mattered because it might be the last one where he looked at me like I was his salvation instead of his downfall.
Back in my room that evening, I faced the devastating reality I'd been tap-dancing around for three weeks. I had lost Daphne. Not just because I'd fallen in love with her brother, but because we'd both been lying to each other from the moment I'd set foot in that manor.
I pulled out my college photo albums, the physical ones from back when we still printed pictures and put them in books like civilized people, and spread them across my bed like evidence of a friendship I'd thought was real.
Spring break in Cancún, both of us sunburned and grinning with questionable tequila decisions written all over our faces.
Late-night study sessions in the library, surrounded by empty coffee cups and her organic chemistry textbooks that might as well have been written in ancient Greek for all I understood them.
Graduation day, our arms around each other, caps askew, both of us crying happy tears about the future stretching out ahead of us like a promise someone actually intended to keep.
But there was one photo that twisted the knife.
Daphne holding my hand in a hospital waiting room the night Mama had her scare with chest pains that turned out to be heartburn but felt like the end of the world when I was twenty-two and broke and terrified.
Daphne had driven three hours in the middle of the night just to sit with me, brought me coffee that tasted like motor oil and held my hand while I fell apart in a plastic chair that squeaked every time I moved.
"You're not alone," she'd whispered when I'd finally stopped crying long enough to breathe. "You'll never be alone as long as I'm alive."
Had that been real? Or was I just practice for the performance she'd give years later when she needed someone to play the perfect houseguest while she conducted her secret affair?
I traced my finger over her face in the photo, both of us looking so young and innocent and convinced that friendship meant something.
We'd sworn we'd be each other's maids of honor, that our kids would grow up together, that we'd be two old ladies sitting on a porch somewhere comparing arthritis medications and arguing about whose turn it was to water the plants.
My journal lay open beside me, and I picked up my pen with hands that shook between anger and grief: