Chapter 45 Deli
Deli
Deli pulled her feet up onto an armchair and held her phone between her knees and her face to see whatever had come through as privately as possible.
She didn’t want Blair to loop her into wedding talk and pull her away.
She pushed down thoughts of Lachlan with the hope of Trey and unlocked her phone with her heart in her throat.
She needed to know that it mattered to her closest people—that it mattered she’d disappeared.
There were two texts and an email.
But nothing was from Chloe. It landed in her chest like a weight onto a padded floor—muted and heavy.
An unread text from Trey beckoned from her palm, but Deli hesitated.
She’d been gone nearly a month, and the gravity of it set in.
She couldn’t do this forever. Soon, Deli would have to go home, no matter what was or wasn’t waiting for her.
She closed the messaging app and opened her email instead, ducking under the guillotine feeling in her head.
There was a message from Rosemary McDonnell.
To: Delilah MacDonald
From: Rosemary McDonnell
Subject: You need to know . . .
Hello Delilah,
This is Grandma Rosemary. I understand you’ve gone to visit your aunt, Maureen.
Maureen abandoned the family many years ago after being misled by your grandfather to play into his last bitter attempt to hurt me. Instead of listening to reason when Callum washed his hands of Lorraine (your mother) and disinherited her in favor of Maureen, Maureen simply cut us out.
I confess, your departure worries me, darling girl.
I know you are a bright woman of your own mind, but so was Maureen, once.
That town . . . Fearnhall . . . No one knows better than I how beguiling it can be.
There was a time that I, too, was a young woman taken by its sea, its rain.
Its poetry. However, I beg of you to remember your life here.
You will wake someday to find the air is too damp, the food too bland, and the company too stuck in their ways.
Soon you will know Fearnhall is no place to call home. I only hope it will not be too late for the people and life you’ve left here to welcome you back.
Come home, darling. Though Maureen has caused great damage to this family, it has taken years off my life to have my child so far gone. I dare say there is a part of me who believes you might be, God forbid, following in her footsteps.
I could not survive it. Even now, I have a new knot in my chest and can scarcely catch my breath.
When will you be home? Please give me a date, and I will have my travel agent purchase you a ticket immediately.
Yours,
Rosemary McDonnell (Grandma)
Deli read the beginning of her grandmother’s email again, trying to understand the scant but illuminating details.
She’d never known the full story of her aunt’s departure.
She’d never heard about her mother being cut out of a will or about Aunt Mo being complicit.
Across the pub, Aunt Mo’s laugh rang out loud and clear as Graham wove a tale, and she wiped away tears of laughter.
Aunt Mo just made Deli feel like everything was easy.
Deli knew Lorraine and Rosemary were often complicated .
. . sometimes even cruel. Her grandmother, strict and exacting, like a surgeon with a scalpel excising the tumor of unruliness and excess before it could consume the little girls she loved.
Her mother, so hot and cold, creative and kind until some passing shadow, then a whip already on its way to you—searching for open skin to leave welted.
But they weren’t bad. They had their reasons and the benefit of motherhood’s eyes.
Deli couldn’t dismiss what they said about Aunt Mo without consideration—she had only known her for weeks, while they had known Aunt Mo her entire life.
But the person Deli had come to know was so at odds with who her grandmother and mother had painted in sketchy strokes over Deli’s life—especially a person who would do something so callous to her own sister.
She felt a pang of anger for her mother—the forsaken daughter of an absent man.
Deli breathed in slowly for ten seconds and out for ten seconds, then clicked on her texts. She debated between the two names with unread messages and felt a splotchy rash start up her neck. She clicked the text from Trey.
Deli . . . Things are so weird now. It’s like I don’t know what to do with myself.
Every morning I wake up and reach for my phone to text you.
It feels like you’re never coming home. I’m starting to think I need to figure out how to live my life without you.
Tell me we can fix it? I need you. Please.
Deli felt like she’d swallowed a rock and it was lodged in her throat. Her fingers shook as she started to type.
Yes, we can fix it. I’m so sor
Lachlan’s laugh washed over the pub and caught Deli’s attention like a small shell swept up in the water.
Hannah held up a compact mirror to show him his reflection with a rhinestone mustache glued to his face.
Douglas plucked them up as they fell one by one on the bar with Lachlan’s smile, and put them back in his “bling kit.”
Deli stopped typing. Her mind raced like she was leaping lily pads, but they collapsed before she could get anywhere.
Each time she thought she had a handle on how she felt, the concrete things turned to mist and left her staring at her hands.
She felt her breath rising in her chest, her pulse pounding in her neck—too aware of the wrong things going on inside her.
She began a new text message and typed Chloe’s name.
Hi Chlo. God, I miss you. Whatever I did, just let me fix it. I never want to hurt you. I will fix it, I promise.
Deli sent it and waited, staring at the screen, praying to see the dots that meant Chloe was responding. An entire song played from start to finish in The Wallflower. Nothing came.
Deli sucked in a breath like she’d broken some dark water’s surface.
She was drowning in all of the things she wanted to tell Chloe, all of the things she’d hoped to say and laughs they were supposed to share.
Before her mind could catch her heart, Deli opened social media and typed Chloe’s name, searching for clues about her best friend’s life.
And there she was, glowing against a sunset while a man held her from behind and kissed her neck. Again, dancing in a West Hollywood club with a group of girls Deli didn’t recognize, but who laughed and held Chloe’s hand under strobe lights.
Deli’s world had frozen while Chloe’s kept spinning.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears and willed herself to sense.
She knew the snippets on Chloe’s social media had always been curated to tell an only half-true story.
There were always messy moments the camera didn’t witness. Those were the ones Deli did.
She moved away from Chloe’s page, a little reassured. Deli would have chained herself to the lunch tree before it could be cut down, and Chloe would, too. It hadn’t been that long, really, in the context of their lifelong friendship. They still had time.
Just as Deli was about to exit the app, she was struck cold by Trey Evans’s eyes.
He stared at her from a photo, gaze intent and lips twitching the way they did when he shared a secret just with her—but it wasn’t Deli who whispered in his ear.
It was Scarlett. Her pillow lips brushed Trey’s skin like crimson velvet as the two of them sat in Deli’s favorite booth, in Deli’s favorite neighborhood bar.
The light in The Wallflower seemed to dim. Heat pricked her cheeks and neck like feathers poking through a down pillow. Deli’s eyes darted from left to right, focusing on nothing, trying to track the fragments of thought careening through her mind.
So dramatic, Delilah, she thought as she found the unopened text from her mother and clicked without hesitation. Cope.
Hi, honey. I’m so worried about you, and your father is a mess.
I know that things were hard for you back home, but we are here to help.
Grandma said she’d book you a ticket back same day if you wanted!
She’s started slowing down since you left .
. . just tired all the time. I know it would mean the world to her to see you .
. . even just hear from you. She has been devoted to you all your life. I am worried for her, too.
Deli tried to scroll for the rest of the message that wasn’t there.
Her grandmother’s email had been sent a few days before, and she hadn’t gotten a new one since.
She pictured Grandma Rosemary, bird-boned and blushed, turning gray under her immaculate makeup.
A sea breeze swirled around her through an open window, and under the salt and brine was the unmistakable scent of rosemary.
She recited the meaning in her head.
Constancy.
Remember me.
Death.
Deli typed furiously to Lorraine MacDonald.
Mom, is Grandma alright? What’s going on??
She sniffed the air again, but the smell of rosemary bushes had gone. She didn’t remember it growing anywhere near The Wallflower’s Crown. Her mother’s response buzzed her palm.
Hi! Where are you? How are you? Grandma is driving me crazy. Last week she had ‘rabies’ because of ‘that damn squirrel on her bird feeder.’ I asked if it bit her and she refused to elaborate. I’m missing my backup.
Speaking of . . . Are you coming home soon?
Grandma and I aren’t the only ones missing you.
I spoke to Chloe. We both agree you are just .
. . struggling to come to terms with some things.
Trey has been such a focus of yours for so long, we think you’ve lost sight of the truth. Maybe it’s time to let him go, honey.
And if not, we can help you. I’ll email you some of the healthy recipes I’ve been finding for you! There’s nothing broken we can’t fix. I know it’s hard to hear, but I only tell you because I love you, Deli. It’s for your own good.
Come home.
For her eleventh birthday party, Delilah asked if they could take some friends to the beach, and her mother had looked quite odd. Later, Delilah overheard her mom and Grandma Rosemary talking in her mom’s bathroom before they knew she was there.
“She’s wearing an extra large?” Grandma hissed.
“I’m doing everything I can!” Delilah’s mom whispered, but not kindly.
Delilah was so angry at herself for the way her eyes welled up and her cheeks got hot.
She wiped away the single bit of proof that she’d been eavesdropping as it slid down her cheek, as quiet as she could be until their voices were normal again.
Then she took a few deep breaths, smiled, and knocked. “Can I come in?”
Delilah hopped up on the countertop and watched, content as they frowned into the mirror and pinched the skin on their hips, tugged on the skin by their eyes.
She was one of them—the girls . . . even if she couldn’t look at her own reflection very long for some stupid reason.
Before they left, Delilah’s mom told her a beach birthday was not a good idea.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” her mother cooed. “It’s for your own good.”
That night Delilah pulled the covers over her head to try to block out the sound of her mom’s and dad’s too-loud voices.
In the morning before school, her dad came through the kitchen on his way out the door and said, “You better start thinking about who you want to invite to the beach, kid! It’s gonna be a good birthday!
” She stared at the low-carb English muffin half on her plate, slathered in some sort of butter substitute, until the sound of the garage door opening and closing had come and gone.
Her mom didn’t talk to her for the rest of the day.
The day she turned eleven, she wore her dad’s big Eagles T-shirt over her one-piece while she played in the waves.
Her mother loved Chloe’s triangle shaped bikini.
On the way home, noses burned and hair crunchy with sea salt, Chloe passed Delilah an earphone attached to her pink iPod mini and played “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera.
She’d even let Delilah listen to it twice in a row before she put on NSYNC.
Eighteen years later, Deli stared at her phone and realized she had been a fool.
She’d caused all of this pain to the people she loved, and for what?
Trey, hurting, begging her to come home—filling her place in their booth and his heart with someone who was there to love him.
Grandma Rosemary, waiting by a window—each sun setting sooner than the last.
Her mom, abandoned by those who had promised not to leave—searching for proof from anyone she could find that her daughter, Deli, would not be the third.
And Chloe, confessing to another that her best friend had been so busy carving “D + T” into the bark of a tree, she had turned Chloe invisible.
All this time, all Deli had wanted was for the people she’d chosen to choose her, to love her in the same ways. But she’d been so desperate, so needy, that she’d done something impulsive and selfish instead of being brave enough to just face the truth.
It didn’t matter how many miles she ran—they would never love enough. Because it would never be enough. Deli was a person who needed too much. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
It’s for your own good.
She clamped a hand over her mouth just in time to muffle the violent sob that broke loose from her throat. Tears—hot and fast—ran down her cheeks and the contours of her fingers. She was as lost as she’d been when she’d left. A month had already gone.
Far from home, Deli MacDonald hid in a lonely corner of the world and wept silently into her favorite Eagles T-shirt, worn tired and thin with time.
“Deli?”
A shiver ran through her at the sound of Lachlan’s voice, too soft and too close. She heard his clothing rustling and watched the light from her phone grow in his shadow, but she couldn’t look. She needed Lachlan to go away.
He repeated, “Deli?”
She flinched at his tenderness as he knelt beside her chair to bring his face level with hers. He waited. When Deli met his eyes, Lachlan Scott was again the man who searched her for the places that hurt.
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing. I’m just being stupid.” Shame stained her skin under the weight of his worry, his care. She would never forgive herself for ridiculing the pain of the wounded boy Lachlan had been forced to be. She looked away from him, her neck straining to escape. “Ignore me.”
Deli didn’t expect the gentle touch of his thumb against her jaw, catching a mutinous tear before it could fall. She didn’t expect how long he cradled her face in his hand, or the way she leaned her weight into him without thinking—like she’d done it a thousand times.
And Deli didn’t expect him to sound so helpless as he replied, quite simply, “I can’t.”