Chapter 83 Deli
Deli
Deli heard a soft meow from the corner of her room.
“Beans! What in the . . . ?”
She toed the suitcases until one nudged back, and she unzipped it. Beans leaped out and aborted his plan to stowaway with just hours until she was leaving for California.
“Chicken,” she said as she scratched his head. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face against her boot. “I’ll miss you, too.”
Knuckles tapped on her door.
“Hey,” Aunt Mo said. “You got a second?”
“Sure.”
“Great.” She threw a bright orange knit cap at Deli. “Don’t forget a towel!”
Deli followed the same path to the water she had the day she’d arrived.
She’d gone numb since everything happened.
When she’d walked away from Lachlan, every step was a stitch torn from the seam of her.
By the time she got to the front door, she’d let a final tormented cry slip through her grasp, and then she’d just . . . stopped.
One second she was being pulled under the dark water, and the next she no longer needed to breathe. She supposed it was what she’d always done.
As Deli and Grandma Rosemary had talked on the cliffside, she’d been numb. Her grandma asked if she loved Trey anymore. If she loved Lachlan. If she felt at home in Fearnhall or if she felt like she belonged back with them. All the words strung together without purpose.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter, darling? Please. Don’t come home for me, Delilah,” her grandma said. “You still have time.”
Of course she was going home.
She’d ruined everything she had in California, but she couldn’t stay in Scotland. She’d come on a selfish whim, and the best people in the world welcomed her into their home. And what had she done?
Ruined a wedding.
Broken a good man’s heart.
Brought the cancer back into Aunt Mo’s life.
She’d let everyone down, but of course she was going home. Her family needed her.
She would miss Aunt Mo so terribly—it was a punishment fitting of the crime. Come screw up her life, never see her again. That sounded fair.
Deli didn’t realize she’d waded into the sea until she was waist deep. She hadn’t felt the cold. As she got all the way to her aunt, she still didn’t.
“Look at you! No fuss at all this time! Have you been swimming without me?” Aunt Mo’s smile barely faltered in the face of Deli’s detachment. She twirled in a circle, kicking underwater with her arms spread wide and face turned to the sky. “I will miss this place.”
Deli’s heart lurched in warning. “What do you mean, Aunt Mo?”
“Though I’m looking forward to some warm sand to nap on.”
Deli couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her teeth started to chatter. “You . . . you can’t leave?”
“Why not?”
Aunt Mo’s tone was light and airy, like it was joy holding her up, not physics.
“You have Beans! And Mrs. Peevis! And the cottage! Your event calendar is booked for the summer. And who’s going to take care of—”
The name wouldn’t abandon her mouth.
“—Lachlan?” Aunt Mo asked.
“You don’t have to go. I’ll call you when things with Grandma get . . . When you need to come. I’ll take care of it, Aunt Mo.”
“It’s not your job, Deli.”
“But I can do it! And they need me. My mom needs me.”
“Do they?”
If Deli had taken a second to think about how her choices would have impacted others before she had run away like a child, she might have seen it coming—the ending where their family’s baggage burst from the grave and clutched Aunt Mo by the ankle. The ending where Deli dragged her down.
Stupid, reckless girl.
“I’m so, so sorry, Aunt Mo. I should have left you alone.”
Deli’s aunt studied her face, and Deli turned away.
“Deli,” Aunt Mo said, “look at me.”
The numbness was coming back as the cold retreated. Deli turned to face the woman she’d let down, ready to stomach the truth. The water lapped against the rocks, and a gull overhead cried out, and Aunt Mo’s eyes were nearly the same color as the navy-gray ocean.
“Even if you’d brought an invading army, a plague, and a pack of homophobic dance moms to my door, I would have taken them all for the chance to have you back in my life, Deli.
“The thing is, I didn’t leave well. You didn’t bring my sister and mother with you. They were always there. It’s well past time for me to clean up my mess, and I owe you the apology, not the other way around. I’m so sorry for that.”
Aunt Mo wiped a tear from Deli’s cheek she hadn’t known was there.
“But this is your home, Aunt Mo. You belong here.”
“It’s your home, too.”
Deli started to protest, but her aunt stopped her.
“As for the rest? I was hoping you’d take care of the cottage. And of course Peevie, and Beans, if you’ll have him. You’re perfectly capable of stepping in for any and all events—it would bring me so much joy to call it a family business.
“Everyone here loves you, Delilah. They really, truly love you. You have a family right here if you want it. And Lachlan?”
Aunt Mo tipped Deli’s chin up so they were square on, face to face.
“I’ve lived long enough to know that you two won’t find anything better. Understand?”
The tears were coming softly. They tugged on Deli’s composure. She nodded.
“And hear me now, Delilah MacDonald, because the next part is the hard part. Your mother loves you. She loves you. But she cannot change. Some people think love is something you earn. My mother never understood how to choose differently, and neither does yours—”
Deli caught her breath as Aunt Mo’s words moved into the same room in her heart where Grandma Rosemary’s cliffside plea had been locked away.
“—but we do. I can’t tell you what to do, Deli, but you will always have a home with me, no matter where or when. You do have love here. Someone who wants to care for you. I know it’s not the same, but different is a choice.”
Deli’s heart was pounding. It was all too much. She pressed her hands to her temples. “It hurts.”
Aunt Mo pulled Deli’s hands into her own while they bobbed in a rising tide, lifted by the pull of the moon over a world that kept turning.
“Any love lost is a love that needs grieving. But Delilah? Some love comes easy. Letting someone love you, even when you haven’t earned it, doesn’t make you a bad person. Okay?”
Deli cried. “Okay.”
“And as for me belonging here? I get to decide where I belong. And so do you. Got it?”
Deli watched a cloud drift across the iron sky over an endless sea. “Got it.”
They swam back to shore with only hours left.
Deli didn’t know what to believe.