Chapter 35
CHAPTER 35
“ D ad wrote letters to you that he never sent. Nonna helped me find you on the internet.”
Cal’s voice was small, like he was afraid of the consequences of snooping around in his things. More than that, Rafferty was concerned that Cal might have read the letters—some of them were pretty inappropriate—and also surprised that he’d gotten his great-grandmother to help him look Daisy up on the internet. This whole time he thought they’d come to Wildes because it was close enough to New York if they ever wanted to go back. To think that his nine-year-old orchestrated this whole thing so Rafferty could reconnect with his long lost love was stupefying.
“You brought us here on purpose?”
Cal nodded, eyes fixed on the floor. “I heard you talking to Grandpa about being lonely and thought being close to someone you loved would help.”
From the day his son was born, he did everything possible to make sure that Cal never knew what he was going through. Bad days, rough calls, struggles with work and Zara, losing Nonna and Poppy; he kept all of it close to his chest. His son deserved the happiest and simplest life, not something filled with worry and pain. Apparently all his hard work at keeping those things out of Cal’s line of sight was pointless because he’d figured it out anyway.
After Zara left, he had been lonely. There were nights when he’d lie awake and watch his son sleep, trying to understand how someone could walk away from such a beautiful child. He knew that holding his ex responsible wasn’t fair to her either. Because if he’d forced her to stay, she might have been unhappy for the rest of their lives. And she deserved to find her joy, like he did.
He’d also come home after a fire and wish he had someone waiting for him, someone who would hold him and remind him that he was doing something good. Until he got to Wildes, he didn’t have that. His father and grandparents did the best they could, but it wasn’t the same thing.
Their love was unconditional.
Daisy’s love was different. It was heady and powerful and unlike anything he’d felt before.
She touched his back and he glanced at her, seeing the unshed tears in her eyes. Ever since their second first kiss, they’d been at the edge of what their relationship meant. He’d decided he wanted to marry her, but he’d never said it out loud. The feelings were intense and bigger than both of them. Then the Fourth weekend and Cal almost calling her mama sent him deeper into this spiral of what they were. It was in all the unsaid things, if he was being honest.
“Don’t be mad,” Cal whispered.
“I’m not mad, son. I wish you had told me.”
“I know. Grandpa said I should tell you as well.”
“Grandpa knew?”
He nodded, lifting his eyes carefully. “They all helped me plan everything.”
Of course he had the whole family in on this. They would have done anything to make him smile, make him happy and put some joy into his life. The fact that all of them knew Daisy would solve his problems was an even bigger sign that this was where they were meant to be. His grandparents had adored her when she lived next door, they’d taken such good care of her and loved her like their own. His father had done the same, especially considering she was the daughter of his best friend. He should have known that the first chance his family got to bring the two of them back together, they would take it.
“How did you find the letters?”
“I hid under your bed during hide and seek and found the shoebox. There were so many letters.”
“How many?” Daisy asked, finally breaking her silence.
Cal smiled. “Hundreds. He really loves you.”
“Always have, always will.” He turned to his son. “Do you still have the letters?”
“Yes. I put them in a different shoebox so you wouldn’t find them.”
Crafty kid . “Can you get them for me?”
Cal nodded and started to go, but stopped and turned to them. “Are you angry with me for taking something that didn’t belong to me?”
The right answer was yes, but he could see the earnestness in his son’s eyes. He could see that he’d done this simply because he thought it would help. So instead of nodding, he shook his head. “No, but I might not be as understanding next time.”
“Okay,” he said softly and charged off, Boots following him down the hall.
Daisy stared at where Cal had been, her eyes wide. “You said you wrote me letters, not hundreds of them.”
“I did say they were like a journal.”
She shook her head. “Your son brought you here because of those letters.”
“I did picture fate a little differently.”
“Raff,” she said softly, a few tears dripping down her cheeks. “This isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little funny, sweetheart.”
She shook her head, swiping at her tears. “This is…I don’t even know how to put into words what all of this is.”
Shifting so he was able to spread his legs out on either side of her, he reached for her hands and drew her eyes to his. “No matter what brought us here or how it came to be, I have never been more glad for a change of scenery.”
“Am I the scenery?”
He laughed softly, cupping her face to bring her closer to him. “You’re the whole damn landscape, Daze.”
She met him halfway, their lips barely brushing when the sound of Cal running broke them apart. He returned with a shoebox and set it between them. Daisy stared at the box and patted her lap. Without hesitation, his son curled up against her.
“Wanna read them to us, hotshot?”
He shook his head at the question, not sure he wanted to revisit a time in his life when he wrote the most romantic things to the woman sitting in front of him. Boots was also settled on the floor, his head resting on Cal’s lap as the three of them watched him.
Realizing they weren’t giving up, he pulled the box towards him and flipped it open. And there, clear as day, were multiple envelopes in different colors, some with only her name, others with her address in Greenville, but not a single one had stamps or any other signs of him ever even attempting to send them. When he first started writing, the letters had been on sheets from a yellow legal pad. He switched to randomly colored paper after that, then wrote on scraps, napkins and even the back of receipts, and still put them into envelopes. Numbering them came much later; he didn’t realize how many he’d written until he started adding the count to the right corner of each envelope.
“Do we have a preference?” he asked.
“What are my choices?”
“I guess you could pick a color.”
She smiled over Cal’s head and pointed. “How about that blue one?”
He picked up the envelope, marked with a number in the two-hundreds, flipped it open and sighed softly. He’d written the letter on a napkin from a diner where he’d sat by himself for hours, building the courage necessary to ask Zara to marry him.
“This is not a good one.”
“Read it to us, Raff,” she urged him softly.
He cleared his throat and smoothed out the flimsy tissue against his thigh and slowly started to read, “Dear Daisy. I’m about to ask my girlfriend to marry me. I feel like I’m betraying you, like I’m cheating on you by being with someone else. But how can that be when we never had anything more than a few years and the best summer of my life? I sometimes lie awake at night and wonder what our lives would have been like had you not left or if I had followed you to Greenville. Do you think we’d love each other? That we would last forever? It’s silly, I know, to think about what could have been, but it’s impossible to not think about you at all.
“Zara is amazing and I think you’d like her. She’s nothing like my old girlfriends and in fact, she reminds me of you sometimes. When I told Nonna this, she said that it was wrong of me to be with someone because it makes me feel closer to you. But how do I explain to her that you—” he choked on the next words and closed his eyes, realizing that even then, he’d held her so high on this pedestal, everyone else paled in comparison “—that you might be the love of my life? Is it wrong of me to be with someone else when I sometimes compare her to you?”
He looked up and she nodded, eyes brimming with tears again. It shouldn’t have surprised him how deep he got in these letters, how honest he had been when writing to her.
“I love her, I swear. But it’s a different kind of love,” he continued, chest aching with how sincere he was being. “I do want to marry her, not because I can’t have you, but because a life with Zara will be good. I know that a part of me will always wonder why it wasn’t you, though. Anyway, this is probably the last letter I’ll write and not send. It feels wrong to still be thinking of you every time something happens when someone else is waiting for me at home. I hope that wherever you are, Hero, you found your field of flowers and you’re in love with every single color and petal and stalk. I hope that they make you feel like you deserve every flower in the universe too.
“Yours, forever and always, Rafferty.” He folded the letter up and tucked it back into the box. He didn’t know what other kind of confessions he would stumble across by reaching for another one, or if it would be so painful that he would hate himself for writing it down. There had been a few letters where he made it seem like the reason he was miserable was because of Daisy, that her leaving had turned him into this grouchy human.
Truth be told, after she left, he had become angry and irritable, and everyone noticed it. They approached him carefully, like a skittish horse they didn’t want to spook. It took him years before he was able to shed all of that and focus on the good stuff, like Zara, then Cal, and having his family with him. His son was the only reason he hadn’t fallen apart after his ex left. He couldn’t hate Zara for the choices she made and the way she felt, because as someone who struggled with his mental health now, he understood it. He’d held so much resentment for the two women he loved, even if he felt about them so differently.
“You don’t have to read anymore,” she offered. “But I’d like to read them later?”
Do I want her to read these innermost thoughts? My deepest and darkest desires and secrets?
“Can you read one more, Daddy?” Cal asked, blinking at him like he hadn’t just learned that his father didn’t love his mother.
“Wanna pick one?”
Cal grinned and sorted through the envelopes, and held one out to him. This time, he sat on Rafferty’s lap and leaned back against his chest.
Based on the creases and folds of the paper, it was clear that it had been read multiple times. But it was also a shorter letter, one with only six or seven lines. Even skimming through it, he knew what the letter would say and his breath caught at the emotions in his written words.
“What I’m about to read is…intense,” he warned her and she nodded. Clearing his throat, he looked down at his son and at the letter before the words flowed out of him. “I can’t remember if I said this in an earlier letter, but I love you. It’s crazy to admit that I loved you from the minute I met you because we were kids. But I have loved you for so long that I woke up this morning feeling heartbroken that I’d never get to tell you. Maybe one day, our paths will cross and I’ll be able to stare into your eyes and say—” he looked up, their gazes clashing as her soft lips parted slightly “—that I will never love anyone the way I love you, because you are my soulmate and my one true love.”
A lone tear slid down her cheek as they stared at each other. He could hear Cal saying something, but the words didn’t register. All he could focus on was Daisy and the way she was looking at him. He knew that if the roles were reversed and she’d said something like that to him, read the words a younger version of herself had written, he’d probably look as stunned as she did right then.
“See, you were meant to be here,” Cal’s voice broke through the quiet.
Daisy smiled, wiping her face. “I agree, kiddo.”
His son leaped from his lap into her arms and they hugged, swaying and laughing. His chest was so full, ribs on the verge of cracking with how much love he was holding inside of him. When they parted and Cal was on his feet, Rafferty nodded without really listening to the question. Seconds later, kid and dog were running out the back door, barks and squeals echoing in their wake.
“I can’t believe you actually wrote me letters,” she admitted, pulling the box towards her. “There’s so many.”
“Started the week after you left and kept going. It felt therapeutic, getting all these feelings and words out, expressing myself even if you never got to know how I really felt.”
She nodded and he allowed himself to look her over. Her clothes weren’t anything fancy, but his eyes snagged on the singular gold necklace she was wearing—the wildflowers he’d gifted her.
“Were any of these angry?”
Her question made him wince, but he nodded. “There were some days when I felt like I had no control over anything and would pour my rage into the letters.”
“Were you angry with me ?”
“I don’t know. I was just angry. If you ask my father, I was quite miserable to be around after you left. I hated that I never told you how I felt and I didn’t know how to handle that. I only had the memory of our kiss and the way you felt in my arms, but it wasn’t enough.”
She smiled sadly while neatly stacking the letters together in the box. “I was angry too, for a while. Because I waited too long to express my feelings and when I finally built up the courage…it was too late.”
“It felt that way back then, huh? Look at us now.”
With a hum, she closed the box and tilted her head. “Are we going to address the fact that your son orchestrated this whole thing in the hopes of us getting married?”
“And you becoming his mother? No, we’re not. I didn’t want to talk about it unless you were ready to do so.”
They’d talked about babies a few times already, so he knew that she had hopes and dreams, but the likelihood of that happening was also pretty low. They’d also addressed the whole mama thing, so none of this was a surprise. The fact that his son knew what he wanted and wasn’t shy to ask for it was absolutely astonishing. In one day, Cal had asked Daisy for everything that Rafferty never had the courage to ask her for.
“Is that what you want?”
“What?”
She smiled, because of course he was playing dense. “To marry me and make us an official family.”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation.
“ Raff . Be serious.”
He pushed the box aside and with his hands under her knees, tugged her forward so that she was half-straddling him. “Seriously, Hero, I want to marry you. We don’t have to rush into it or make some big announcement, but I know I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Would you like to do this with me?”
She nodded, cupping his face and grinned widely. “Marry you? Yeah, I think I’d love to do that. I don’t need anything fancy, I only need you.”
“You’ve got me, darlin’.”
“Then let’s get married, hotshot,” she teased and pressed her mouth to his.