5. Daisy
five
Daisy
Poppy rings the doorbell but doesn’t wait for an answer before she walks into my new place. She has a foil-covered plate in one hand and a bottle of red tucked into the crook of her arm. There’s concern written all over her face.
“Charlie sent me,” she says as she sets the plate beside my whirring laptop. “I’ve got orders to feed you, water you, and pester you until you tell me what’s up.”
I lift the cover off my dinner, and a warm cloud of garlic and tomato makes my mouth water. “What makes her think something’s up?”
My bestie stares pointedly while I examine my pasta like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.
“Renovations on the barn house wrapped up weeks ago, but you didn’t want to move in,” she says. “Now you’ve slept here two nights in a row. You’re avoiding Charlie or me or all of us at the main house. Something’s definitely up.”
I’m parked in a folding chair in front of a card table in what’s supposed to be the living room of my new home.
The restored barn house is beautiful. Bright and open with high, beamed ceilings, dark hardwood floors, and massive windows that flood the space with sunlight during the day and encase it in stars at night. It’s very big and very, very empty.
I glance around for a fork, and Poppy whips one from the pocket of her denim cutoffs. I smile my thanks and dig in while she drags a beanbag across the room. She plops into it, then does a good job of judging me from a position better suited to teenagers playing video games.
“Does this have anything to do with your meeting with Charlie?” she asks, knowing how anxious I’ve been about winning my sister’s approval. “Your text said she agreed to everything, but by the way you’re acting, something doesn’t add up.”
“It went fine,” I say. “Better than fine. Charlie signed off on all of it. You’re looking at the new operations manager of the Silver Leaf trail rides and stable.”
“That’s wonderful! I’m proud of you, Daze.” When I don’t match her enthusiasm, her smile fades. “Why aren’t you happy?”
I crook my fingers at the wine bottle in her lap. “If we’re going to talk about this, I’m going to need that.”
She hands it over, and I twist the screw cap, then drink from the bottle. When I finish, Poppy’s watching me with a worried tilt to her head.
“So?” she says. “What’s going on?”
I say it before I have time to think about it. “Beau’s here.”
Poppy looks puzzled, but then her eyes grow wide. “Beau’s here?”
My best friend is the only one who knows about Beau, and she only knows part of the story. She knows I loved him and that it ended with Beau gone and me broken enough to come home after a decade of chasing my dreams. But she doesn’t know everything.
“Yep.” I poke at my dinner, looking for an appealing piece of penne, then drop my fork and push the plate away.
“But… how? Why? I thought—”
“It’s a total coincidence.” The fact that Beau didn’t scour the earth looking for me to show up in a blaze of love-and-regret-fueled glory hurts more than I care to admit.
I let out a brittle chuckle. “He had no idea Silver Leaf is mine. He needed a job. Charlie hired him on a recommendation. And now I’m stuck with the consequences. ”
Poppy’s expression softens. “When did this happen?”
I shrug. “Two days ago. After my meeting with Charlie.”
She releases a whoosh of a sigh. “Daze. I wish you’d told me.”
“I’m still processing.”
“I don’t blame you. So Charlie hired Beau to—what? Replace Finn?”
“That’s right. He’s got the experience and wants something permanent. It’s a good match on paper.”
“And Charlie didn’t fire him when you told her who he is?”
“I’m in charge of staff now, so I told her I would do it,” I reply.
“But you didn’t?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Daze. Come on. The guy broke your heart.” She scowls like the best friend she is. “I wish I’d been there. I would’ve kicked his ass all the way back to the rock he crawled out from under.”
“Yeah, well, that was the plan until he told me he’s got a kid.”
Poppy blinks. “He’s got a what?”
“A ten-year-old boy, Ollie, and he’s here too.”
She studies my face for signs that I’m telling a bad joke and can’t find them. “You never mentioned anything about Beau being a father.”
“Because he wasn’t one when we were together.
” I rub my eyes, suddenly exhausted. “Beau’s sister is, well…
I’m not sure, but Ollie doesn’t have his mom anymore, and Beau has guardianship.
” My voice catches, and I clear it quietly.
“You should see the kid, Poppy. He’s adorable.
All long limbs and freckled cheeks and big brown eyes. What was I supposed to do?”
Poppy sinks deeper into the beanbag and drops her head back. “That complicates things.”
“Don’t I know it.”
She rolls her head my way and gives me a sad smile. “You’re thinking about your mom and dad, aren’t you?”
“Trying hard not to.”
“Got it.”
Poppy and I have been best friends forever—our mothers met in the hospital, where we were both born only a few days apart—and she almost always knows what I’m feeling without my having to say it.
I wish I could tell her everything, but some wounds are too deep to share, even with the person who knows me better than anyone.
I need to be closer to her, so I slide from my chair to the floor, then move at the speed of a sloth to the beanbag. Poppy shifts so I can burrow in next to her, where I lean my head against hers. I offer her the wine bottle, and she takes a drink.
“Do you remember doing this when we were seventeen and the barn was abandoned?” I imagine the roof the way it used to be, broken in places and open to the sky, the stars winking as they listened to our secrets.
“Stealing wine from the Silver Leaf cellars. Snuggled up on old blankets while we talked about boys.”
“Dreaming about the adventures we’d have and the men we’d leave weeping in our wake,” she adds.
“Yeah.”
Poppy hums with a smile. “What do you think our seventeen-year-old selves would say if we could go back and tell them they’d end up back here where it all started?”
“I’d slap myself,” I say, and Poppy laughs as she nudges me with her elbow. “What? I’m a drunk teenager with no emotional regulation skills. What do you expect?”
She chuckles again, then sighs. “Would you tell us not to leave at all?”
I stare at the ceiling beams. “No. I’d tell teenage Daisy to chase adventure, but I’d warn her that when a dark-haired cowboy with a sexy southern drawl tries to sweep her off her feet, she should run. Fast.”
Poppy twists onto her side. “Well, since you don’t possess the skills to invent a time machine, you’re going to have to figure this out. Do you have a plan?”
“I told him he can stay for a week while he makes other arrangements.”
“Is that… wise?”
I laugh weakly. “Probably not. But on the one hand, I’ve got Charlie watching to make sure I handle this like a level-headed businesswoman. On the other, I’ve got a little boy who needs a home, and none of this is his fault.”
“I know,” Poppy whispers, like she can see the trap ahead and no way to avoid it.
“I came back to Silver Leaf to get over Beau,” I say.
My thoughts have been on a loop since Beau walked into Charlie’s office, and it’s a relief to get them out of my head.
“And to figure out what my life will look like without him in it. It took a year to get close to the answer, but now that he’s shown up here out of nowhere?
Now I know for sure. Silver Leaf is my focus.
Our family and this business are my only priorities.
There’s no room for anything else, especially not silly dreams of romantic adventures and falling in love. ”
Poppy threads her fingers through mine. “Explain?”
My thoughts are muddled, which means my answer is a little winding. “When we were kids, our plan was to get out of here, right? We wanted to see the world and experience great romances and become the women we were meant to be.”
Poppy sighs her agreement. Like me, she spent a decade away from Aster Springs, and like me, she returned last summer with hurts that needed to heal. But unlike me, Aster Springs turned out to be her ticket to a happily ever after.
“But what I found out there was Beau,” I continue. “That man was my world for more than a year, until one day, he wasn’t. I woke up one morning and he was just… gone.”
“I’m sorry, Daze.” Poppy wriggles closer to me. “I’m so angry at him for doing that to you.”
“I know, and I love you for it, but seeing him unexpectedly after all this time made me realize something. In one way or another, my whole life has been about Beau—or the idea of him. Fantasizing about him. Finding him. Then loving him and losing him. Most recently getting free of him. Beau, or the idea of Beau, has always been my compass.”
Poppy is quiet for a long moment, then she says, “That’s how I feel about Dylan.”
“Difference is, my brother is one of the good guys.” I squeeze her hand to let her know how much I love having her as my sister and how happy I am that at least one of us got everything we wished for. “But now you know why I need to be done with Beau.”
“Because it’s no good loving someone who doesn’t love you back?”
The truth of that makes it hard to swallow, and I cover the catch in my throat with a dry grin. “You’re not just a pretty face, my friend.”
“Beau left you,” she says gently. “You don’t owe him anything.”
“I know.”
“And Silver Leaf is yours,” she adds. “You could tell him to leave tomorrow.”
I shake my head. “I already messed up when I lost my temper yesterday. If I force him to leave now, it’ll seem like I still…”
I don’t want to finish that sentence, but I don’t have to.
Now it’s Poppy’s turn to squeeze my hand. “And do you?”
I stare at the ceiling and wonder what it would be like to no longer be consumed by this ache in my chest.
“No,” I say. “Worse. I hate him, and I can’t live with that either. There’s only one way to get over Beau, and that’s to figure out a way to feel nothing for him at all.”