Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Forrest
We leave Boston at four-thirty in the morning, which is not a time so much as a consequence.
It was Daisy’s idea, technically, though she framed it as mine the way she frames most things: by saying it out loud with enough confidence that reality got embarrassed and adjusted.
We’ll go up Saturday. First thing. Beat the traffic.
I agreed because beating traffic is reasonable, and because the alternative was driving up Friday night, which meant arriving in Winterberry after dark, with one of us in a guest room and the other in a question neither of us wanted to answer.
So.
Four-thirty.
The traffic we are beating doesn’t exist. There’s no one on the road but us, one trucker, and the darkness that makes a man too honest if he isn’t careful.
Daisy sits in the passenger seat with a travel mug she hasn’t touched and a notebook she hasn’t opened, both held in her lap like talismans.
She’s wearing leggings, boots, an oversized sweater the color of burnt sugar, and a scarf looped around her neck like she’s trying to hide from the first real cold snap of October.
Puck is in the back, stretched across the whole bench, snoring with the abandon of an animal who has never worried about family gossip, career damage, or where he ranks in a woman’s fake relationship rollout.
Lucky bastard.
“You can sleep,” I tell her.
“I don’t sleep in cars.”
“Everyone sleeps in cars.”
“I have trust issues with momentum.” She turns the mug in her hands.
“Also, if I close my eyes, I’ll start thinking, and if I start thinking, I’ll remember that we’re about to walk into my mother’s vineyard and pretend we’re romantically involved before seven in the morning.
Then I’ll have to open the door and roll out of a moving vehicle, and you’ll have to explain that to Puck. ”
“He’s asleep.”
“He’s sensitive when awake. It’s a whole thing.”
I keep my eyes on the road.
The headlights pull the highway out of the dark a piece at a time, and I think—not for the first time and not for the last—that this is the longest I’ve ever been alone with Daisy where neither of us has an easy exit.
At the café, she can go refill something.
At the counter, I can take Puck outside.
In a car, there’s nowhere to retreat unless someone wants to make local news.
“Why seven?” she asks suddenly.
“You said first thing.”
“I said first thing. You did math and landed on seven like a serial killer with a planner.”
“Seven means we can help your mother at the vineyard and have dinner at Mom’s.”
She goes quiet.
“Umm, we never said we’d have dinner at your mom’s,” she says. “I thought it was lunch with her.”
“Lunch is inefficient.”
“Lunch is socially normal.”
“Dinner gives us more time.”
“For what? Emotional collapse? Because I’ve blocked out twenty minutes after meeting your mother, but I can move things around.”
“Let me guess, you promised dinner at your family’s,” I say.
“I did not promise dinner. I said if we visit your mother, we’d have to visit mine. That is a warning label, not a calendar invite.”
“Your mother will want to feed us.”
“My mother will interrogate us over something seasonal and pretend the napkins aren’t listening.”
“Still counts as feeding us.”
“Still a felony against my nervous system.”
“Day.”
“What?” Her voice goes light. Bright. The version she uses when she’s hiding the real one under too much polish.
“I’m admiring the engineering. You solved an entire emotional problem with a departure time.
That’s efficient. Almost romantic in a deeply avoidant way.
We should put it in the rules. Rule Eleven: Forrest manages all proximity through logistics. ”
“Sounds accurate.”
“Also, next time we should agree on where we’re eating before you arrange my family like a meal-prep schedule.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Lunch with my mother,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“Dinner with yours.”
She turns her head slowly.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No, because if we eat dinner at my mother’s, she’ll do the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where she asks a casual question that is not casual and then looks at my face like she’s trying to read the footnotes of my soul.”
“Sounds efficient.”
“It is not efficient. It is maternal surveillance with wine.”
I glance over.
She’s staring through the windshield, jaw set, travel mug untouched, fingers curled around the notebook hard enough to crease the cover.
“Lunch with your mother,” I say. “Late afternoon at the vineyard. Dinner somewhere neutral.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “Neutral where?”
“Public.”
“In Winterberry, public is not neutral. Public is an audience with scones.”
“Then we get takeout.”
She blinks. “Takeout? We’re supposed to leave tonight. No way we’re staying—we leave.”
“After dinner.”
“No. Before emotional curfew. I have one. It’s legally binding, personally invented, and expires the second my mother says, ‘Just one more thing.’”
“Day.”
“I’m serious. We arrive, we perform casual romantic stability, we visit both mothers, we do not sleep within town limits. That’s how horror movies start. First, you agree to stay the night. Next thing you know, someone’s aunt is asking why you don’t wear more cream.”
I glance at her. “Cream?”
“It’s a lifestyle color. Don’t engage.”
Before I can answer, the sign appears.
WELCOME TO WINTERBERRY COVE
EST. 1798
POP. 4,200
It doesn’t say small enough that they know when you’re lying, but it should.
Winterberry knew my career was on fire before I admitted there was smoke. Winterberry had opinions before I had a plan. Winterberry probably still has opinions organized by family, property line, and whether someone’s grandmother once lost a pie contest unfairly back in the 80s.
The pie contest comes up more than it should.
I’ve heard people discuss it more often than actual crimes.
The sky starts going pink at the edges when we turn off the main road.
“You’re doing the jaw thing,” Daisy says.
“I don’t have a jaw thing.”
“You have a whole jaw situation. It’s load-bearing. You’re holding the car together with your molars.”
I say nothing.
Mostly because she’s not wrong, and I hate rewarding accuracy before noon.
She shifts toward me, and there’s enough morning now that I can feel her looking. “Hey. Wolfe.”
My grip tightens on the wheel.
She’s never called me that.
The hockey name. The locker-room name. The one guys used when they wanted to get my attention before a faceoff or warn me before a bad hit. It shouldn’t sound like that in her mouth. It shouldn’t sound careful.
“Where’d you get that nickname?”
“Winnifred.” A pause. “She has a dossier. There are tabs.”
“Of course she does.”
“She also ranked your emotional availability by era.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You peaked in the dog adoption chapter.”
“Sounds right.”
“Is it weird?” she asks.
“No.”
It isn’t.
That’s the weird part.
“It’s fine,” I add.
“Okay.” She says it again, softer this time, “Wolfe.”
Something in me goes still.
Not calm.
Listening.
“We’re going to be fine,” she says. “My mother is going to love you, which will be its own special hell, and the town is going to lose its mind, and we’re going to carry crates and smile and answer invasive questions with the emotional range of two people who definitely make healthy choices.
This evening, we’ll be back on this road going the other way.
It’s a day. We’ll be fine if it’s just a day. ”
She means it to reassure me.
It doesn’t.
This might be the first day, but then there’s the next visit. The community dinner. The job interview. The practice. Maybe even the wedding where her ex gets married and half the town pretends not to watch her breathe.
Finally, the end of fall.
Then the part where the lie expires because Daisy goes back to Boston and I plan to move here next year. Assuming Winterberry decides I’m safe enough to teach teenagers how not to turn anger into a personality.
A qualification I am not sure I’ve earned, considering anger has paid rent in my body for years and refuses to leave a forwarding address.
We come around the last bend, and the vineyard opens below us.
Rows and rows of it sweep down the hill toward the water, green fading into gold, mist caught low between the vines.
The first sun touches the tops of the trees, turning the edges copper.
There are pumpkins stacked near the tasting room steps, not the grocery-store kind, but the pretty heirloom ones Daisy likes.
Pale orange, cream, sage green, a few with ridges deep enough to look dramatic on purpose.
Of course the pumpkins have better emotional range than I do.
Barrels of mums flank the gravel drive. A hand-painted sign near the entrance reads, HARVEST TASTINGS BEGIN AT NOON.
It looks like fall designed itself for people with disposable income and unresolved family issues.
A single light burns in the big house.
Which means someone in the Thorn house is already awake.
Beside me, Daisy exhales. She picks up the notebook she hasn’t opened and holds it tighter.
“Okay,” she says, to herself, to me, to whatever version of her used to belong here. “Here we go.”
Puck wakes the instant I cut the engine.
He sits bolt upright, lets out one joyful bark at the entire concept of the vineyard, then shoves his nose against the window like he has been waiting his whole life to arrive somewhere he has never been.
At least one of us is excited.
“For the record,” I say, before either of us opens a door, “this was a bad idea.”
“The worst,” Daisy agrees immediately.
“We should’ve stayed in Boston.”
“Absolutely.”
“Could’ve had coffee.”
“Could’ve had dignity.”
“Dignity was never on the schedule.”
“True. We left at four-thirty. Dignity was asleep.”
Neither of us moves.
Up at the house, the screen door opens.
Mrs. Thorn steps onto the porch in a barn coat and jeans, hair twisted into something neat enough to be intentional and fast enough to be work. She shades her eyes against the new sun, spots us, and lifts one hand.
“Joy, that’s my mother,” Daisy says.
“I figured.”
“Last chance to fake your own death.”
“I considered it on the highway.”
“And?”
“Somebody had to drive us here.”
“Thoughtful of you, Wolfe.”
Like a gentleman, I get out of the car and open the door for her.
Then for Puck.
That is where my gentleman streak ends.
Puck launches himself out of the back as soon as I open his door, nearly taking me with him. One hundred pounds of rescued optimism and breakfast-related delusion hits the gravel with purpose.
“Easy,” I mutter.
He ignores me and bounds toward the house, toward Mrs. Thorn, toward whatever smells like vineyards, baked goods, and immediate betrayal.
Daisy watches him go. “He’s going to love my mother.”
“He loves everyone with functioning hands.”
“She’ll think that’s a sign.”
“It’s a dog.”
“It’s Winterberry. Dogs are never just dogs. They’re omens with tails.”
Puck reaches Mrs. Thorn and sits directly in front of her like he has an appointment.
Mrs. Thorn bends to pet him.
Daisy groans.
“There it is,” she says. “He’s chosen a side.”
“He’s getting scratched behind the ears.”
“That’s how alliances begin.”
Mrs. Thorn looks from Puck to Daisy, then to me.
Her smile widens.
Not too much.
Just enough to tell me she has already assessed the dog, the car, the distance between me and her daughter, and probably whether I own a decent jacket.
I have faced playoff crowds with less evaluation.
Daisy straightens beside me and pastes on a smile so bright it should come with a warning label.
“Ready?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “But I have lip balm, a notebook, and generational anxiety. That’s basically a starter kit.”
Then she steps forward.
So I do too.