Chapter 20
Mo
“Peevie is fed!” Deli hopped on one foot just outside the back door, wrestling a wellie with one hand. In the other, she clutched a tall stem covered in what looked like maroon feathers. “Can you believe this?”
“Another one?” Mo asked. It was the third type of flower that had popped up in the garden that had previously been a graveyard since Deli’s arrival days before. “Is that Amaranthus?”
Deli raised an eyebrow and blew a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. “Impressive flower knowledge, Aunt Mo.”
“Comes with the job.” Mo gestured to the event coordinating documents she needed for the wedding she was working that weekend spread across the kitchen table.
“Amaranthus is good for good friends. It’s a silly, everlasting thing, you know?” Deli exhaled as she plopped onto the chair beside Mo. Somehow Beans was already purring in her lap. He materialized wherever Deli sat down so quickly Mo had begun to wonder if he’d learned to teleport.
“Huh, what about the others?” Mo gestured toward the garden.
“The new little purple ones I think are a type of primrose, and there are marigolds of some sort. They’re both . . .” Deli’s eyes went far away for a second—a habit Mo had clocked more than once. “They aren’t happy flowers. They say neglected merit, childhood, and pain. Grief.”
Everlasting friendship, silliness, neglect, childhood, and grief.
“Well, this little cottage has seen a lot of life.” Mo patted the table fondly. “Perhaps it wants to tell its story.”
The look on Deli’s face—so quick Mo almost missed it—broke Mo’s heart.
She watched as Deli whispered things to Beans. He stood on her lap as tall as his legs went to boop her head with a silly kitty grin. Mo noticed the round orange flower tucked into Deli’s pocket and was struck with inspiration.
“Wait, I have something I think you’d love, Deli.” Mo headed for her bookshelf and found the one she was searching for. Its binding had started to fray from time.
Deli brightened as she read the cover. “A Guide to Flowers and Language?”
“I picked it up at a flea market in Paris years and years ago. Never really looked through it. Maybe it was always meant for you.”
Deli flipped through the pages and stopped on an intricate drawing of a Scottish marigold. “Grief, despair, pain,” she muttered, nodding as her fingertip ran along the text. Then her eyebrows knit together and her hand stopped moving. “Huh.”
“Huh?” Mo asked.
“It says they also stand for grace, healing, and . . .” She hesitated.
“And?”
Deli tried valiantly, but Mo heard the sadness choking her up. “Constructive loss.”
“Constructive loss,” Mo echoed.
Sir Beans’s purr and the quiet crackle of a dying fire filled the space left by their silence.
Mo returned to her planning, committed to her decision to let Deli come out with her truth on her own, despite the agony it was causing the meddling auntie inside her.
In the week since Deli’s arrival, they’d caught up about some things—almost all of them pertaining to Mo’s life.
She’d learned there were many topics that she couldn’t ask about if she didn’t want Deli to shut down and withdraw, retreating to her bedroom and claiming jet lag.
Mo had a small list scribbled on a paper in her nightstand.
Don’t ask about: family, work, friends, love life.
She also had a list of safe topics.
Totally okay: religion, politics, and different combinations of carbs and cheese.
“Aunt Mo?”
At the sight of the tears building in Deli’s eyes, Mo had to mentally tackle the part of her that wanted to leap up and gather Deli into her arms. She tried to look unshaken as she set her pen down and pushed her glasses on top of her head. “What’s up, buddy?”
Deli’s voice was small as she began to cry. “Do you know that show The Highlander?”
Over the next three hours, Deli told Mo about the life she’d left.
She told her of Chloe (Mo was unimpressed), and of Trey (Mo was deeply unimpressed), and of the many years Deli had spent as his partner (though Deli didn’t describe it that way) before the night he’d kissed her.
Then she explained what had happened just a week before, on Valentine’s Day.
“You’d just emailed me. And that stupid show was on cuz my mom—never mind.
I just thought if I could kind of . . . I don’t know, go somewhere so far away Trey couldn’t show up when I don’t answer his calls, maybe he’d .
. .” Deli dropped her head into her hands.
Mo simply waited until her niece took a big breath.
“I’m just so tired, Aunt Mo. I need some space, so I can see it all from above.
Then I’ll figure out the things I missed, and I can fix it. ”
Mo wondered if Deli knew what she’d really come to Fearnhall for, or if Mo could help her find it.
“I see,” she said, passing Deli her third cup of tea and second packet of tissues. “And if Trey were to call, professing his love and asking for you to come home, would you?”
Deli picked at her nail polish. “Yes.”
Mo sat and blew out a long, slow breath.
It was a difficult thing, knowing how to share wisdom earned over time with someone too young to have learned it in a way that didn’t hurt.
She suspected sharing her perspective on Trey, Chloe, and the root of all of it—their family—would only send Deli running back to them faster and sooner.
There was a time in her life she would have done the same.
But that didn’t mean Mo couldn’t give time a helping hand.
There was magic waiting for McDonnell women who came back, and it had called Deli here, just like it had called Mo. There was joy to be found. There was freedom. She thought of Lachlan—another kid she’d loved so long and dearly wanted freedom for, too.
Thus far, Mo had kept the well-meaning residents of Fearnhall at bay, despite their loving and insistent attempts to swing by and meet Mo’s long-lost niece.
But now Mo was doing some plotting, and she’d need coconspirators.
She tapped her fingers against the table and quirked an eyebrow. “Do you know what we need?”
Deli sniffled. “What?”
Mo grinned, grabbed her phone, and held it to her ear as it rang.
Lachlan answered, accompanied by the familiar sound of lively conversation and clinking glass. “Alright, Mo?”
“Hey, come pick us up. Just give Douggie the keys. He’ll babysit.”
Lachlan made a groaning sound as she clicked end.
“Deli MacDonald, we need a night out. And I know the perfect place.”
She sent Deli to her room to do a quick change out of her muddy leggings and tearstained top while Mo listened for the sound of Lachlan’s tires outside over the “getting ready music” Deli played from her phone.
It took him much longer to walk to the cottage from his truck after he’d parked than it usually did.
He paused in the doorway, glancing through the living room like a vampire waiting on an invitation, until Beans made a play for the space between his boots.
“You’re letting Beans out and cold air in, Lachlan.”
He made a show of checking his watch. Beans yelled in the crook of his arm. “I need to get back, Mo. Can we hurry?”
“Should I put on makeup for wherever we’re going?” Deli shouted from the bathroom.
“No,” Lachlan said as Mo said, “Sure!”
He pressed his lips into a line and shifted from foot to foot until Beans sank a prison-break bite into his hand.
“Jesus!” Lachlan dropped the cat as he examined his unbroken skin. “Evil legume!”
Mo grinned. “Funny, he says the same thing about you.”
Deli emerged from her room in a fresh sweater and jeans, squeezing her arms into the same sad denim jacket she’d been hang drying in the humidity since the first day it got wet.
“Isn’t that still a bit damp?” Mo asked.
“Oh, it’s no big deal.” Deli’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s the only one I brought.”
“Lachlan.” Mo turned to him. “Can you grab the jacket from the closet behind you? The old leather one.”
He frowned. “The leather one?”
Mo answered him with a very rare glint. “Absolutely.”
“It’s fine, really!” Deli interjected, her eyes moving between them. “I don’t need it!”
“Lachlan,” Mo said flatly. “The jacket. Please.”
Lachlan pulled it from the closet it had hung in for many, many years.
Deli’s eyes narrowed as she snatched it from his hand. “Thanks.”
He grunted in response as Deli slipped into it like it was always meant to be hers. Mo wondered if, perhaps, it was.
Lachlan was glaring at her niece like she’d torn up his favorite baseball card. “Oi,” Mo called, snapping him out of it. “Is it happening?”
Lachlan sighed but nodded.
“Well then, what are we waiting for?” She jostled Deli toward the door. “We’ve got a show to catch!”