Chapter 15 Daisy
DAISY
Nearly ten weeks after I left Adam, the woman on the phone sounds tired, not unkind, just worn down in the way people get when they've delivered bad news so many times it stops feeling like news at all.
"I'm showing the notification was sent to—" She pauses, and I hear keys clicking. "An address in Millbrook. Is that still current?"
"No." My voice comes out flat. "I moved six years ago. I updated my address three times. I have confirmation emails."
"Ma'am, I understand this is frustrating—"
"He showed up at my workplace several weeks ago." I'm pacing the length of my tiny apartment, Chaucer watching me from his spot on the radiator like I've lost my mind. "With flowers. No one told me he was getting out. No one told me anything."
More clicking. A long exhale that crackles through the speaker. "It looks like the early release was granted twelve weeks ago for good behavior. The notification should have reached you within seventy-two hours of his release date, but I'm seeing it was returned as undeliverable."
Twelve weeks. He's been out for twelve weeks, and the date I had been relying on was still years away.
Even knowing he is out, hearing the confirmation leaves me cold.
Nell and I have been calling the victim's advocate office since the roses showed up, that was nearly three months ago now, and every time we got voicemail, or a promise to look into it, or nothing at all.
We haven't waited for that office to protect us.
Nell saved the first flowers and the camera footage from his visit.
I reported both, gave his photograph to the staff, and stopped closing alone.
The local advocate helped with an emergency application; today I'm still chasing the release records she needs to support it.
Each step has left us waiting for another person to return a call.
"So what happens now?" I ask. "He knows where I work. He knows I'm here. What are my actual options?"
She walks me through them in that same exhausted voice: she can send the release records to the advocate handling my reports and application, and I should keep documenting every contact.
It all sounds reasonable until you remember I'm in a different state now, and the original order expired two years ago, and the system that was supposed to notify me couldn't manage to find a working address despite three separate updates and two phone calls.
"Would you like me to transfer you to someone who can help you finish the paperwork for a new order?"
I think about it. I think about weeks of forms and waiting and maybe, if I'm lucky, getting a piece of paper that says he has to stay away from me. A piece of paper he'd ignore anyway, because he ignored the last one, because men like Cole don't care about paper.
"Yes," I say finally, because what else am I supposed to do? "Transfer me."
Twenty minutes later, I've given a statement and my new address and my work address and a list of details I have already given them, and I'm standing in my kitchen with the application reference written on the back of my hand in smeared ink, and I don't feel any safer than I did before I called. Chaucer meows at me.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I know."
I need to move. I need to do something with my hands or I'm going to crawl out of my skin. Nell's already gone home for the night, she has to get the kids from her mother's, so the store is dark and quiet, and normally I'd find that comforting. Tonight it just feels like too much silence.
I grab the stack of returns that need to be checked in and head downstairs, flipping lights on as I go.
The basement stairs creak under my feet.
The old radiator clanks somewhere in the walls.
Everything is normal, everything is fine, and my hands won't stop shaking.
I'm so focused on not dropping the books that I almost walk directly into a broad chest carrying a stack of damaged hardcovers.
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
Adam catches the book I've knocked loose before it hits the floor. He's in jeans and a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up, and there's sawdust in his hair, and he looks so completely out of place in this basement that my brain short-circuits.
"Fixing bookshelves," he says. "Again. Nell said the one in the back corner was wobbling. She also asked me to stay until you finished, if that was all right with you."
"It's nine o'clock at night."
"I have insomnia." He sets his stack down on the nearest flat surface. "And your best friend texts like a drill sergeant. She said if I was going to be awake anyway, I might as well be useful."
She did ask me. I said yes to someone being downstairs while I called, then forgot who she had found. Fear has narrowed the whole evening to a voice on the phone.
I want to be angry. I want to tell him to get out, to stop showing up, to stop finding ways to insert himself into every corner of my life.
But I just got off the phone with a woman who told me the system designed to protect me failed, and Cole has been free for twelve weeks, and I'm so tired of being scared all the time.
"Come upstairs," I say.
His eyebrows go up. "What?"
"Not like that." I grab his sleeve and tug. "We're going to have a conversation. A real one. With terms."
I sit him down at one of the reading tables, the one closest to the register where the light is best, and I find a pen and flip over one of the leftover book club flyers from last week. The back is blank except for a coffee ring in the corner.
"What are you doing?" Adam asks.
"Writing your terms." I don't look up. "You want a chance? Fine. Here's what that looks like."
I write in my neatest handwriting, which isn't very neat, but it's legible:
1. You don't come to me. I come to you, if I decide to.
2. You don't buy me things. No gifts, no grand gestures, no throwing money at problems.
3. You stay off my social media. No comments, no messages to my followers, no showing up in my mentions.
4. The divorce stays filed. I'm not withdrawing the paperwork.
5. If you choose the company over anything we agree to, once, you're done. No second chances. No forwarding address.
I slide the paper across the table. "Read it out loud."
"Daisy—"
"Out loud."
He picks up the flyer. His jaw works for a moment, that muscle ticking the way it does when he's swallowing something he wants to say, and then he reads. Every word. Slowly, carefully, like he's taking a vow in front of witnesses.
"Number one. I don't come to you. You come to me, if you decide to." His eyes flick up to mine. "Number two. I don't buy you things. No gifts, no grand gestures, no throwing money at problems."
"Keep going."
"Number three. I stay off your social media. No comments, no messages to your followers, no showing up in your mentions." His voice is steady, but I can see his hand tightening on the edge of the paper. "Number four. The divorce stays filed. You're not withdrawing the paperwork."
"And?"
"Number five." He swallows. "If I choose the company over anything we agree to (once) I'm done. No second chances. No forwarding address."
"Sign it."
He doesn't hesitate. He takes the pen from my hand, our fingers brushing for just a second, and he signs his name at the bottom in that sharp, angular handwriting I remember from birthday cards and post-it notes left on the bathroom mirror.
Adam Smith.
He slides the paper back to me. "Can I take you to dinner?"
"No."
"Okay." He doesn't argue. Doesn't push. Just nods, once, and folds his hands on the table like he's waiting for further instructions.
And that's when my phone starts buzzing.
The first text is from my cousin in Ohio, the one I haven't spoken to in three years: OMG is this you???
The second is from a college roommate: DAISY. EXPLAIN.
The third is from someone whose number I don't even recognize: Saw the news! So happy for you both!
"What the hell," I mutter, and then I open Instagram and my stomach drops.
Nell posted a photo from book club last week. Just a candid shot, the group gathered around the reading corner with their books, everyone laughing at something Ruth said. She posts pictures like that all the time. It's good for business, makes the store feel welcoming and alive.
This time, Adam's shoulder is beside mine at the edge of the frame. Nobody needs to identify him. They did that weeks ago. What they've decided now is that standing beside him means I've taken him back.
The caption Nell wrote was innocent: Another great Thursday at The Margin! This month's pick: enemies-to-lovers with a side of emotional devastation.
The comments are not innocent.
Wait, are they back together?
Look how close they are now
she finally forgave him
so much for the divorce
I knew it I KNEW IT he's trying to win her back
this is the most romantic thing I've ever seen in my life
Someone has already screenshot the image and posted it to Twitter with the caption: BOOK-CLUB REUNION: BILLIONAIRE COUPLE CALLS OFF DIVORCE
It has forty thousand retweets.
"Daisy." Adam's voice is careful. "What's wrong?"
I turn my phone around and show him the screen. Watch his face go pale.
"Shit," he breathes.
"It's everywhere." My voice sounds far away, like it's coming from somewhere outside my body.
"Everyone is sending it to me. People I haven't talked to in years.
People I've never met. They're all—" I scroll through my DMs, a cascade of messages from strangers with profile pictures of flowers and books and cats.
"They're telling me to forgive you. They're telling me I'm being too harsh.
They're telling me this is goals and I should be grateful that my husband loves me this much. "
My inbox has twelve hundred unread messages. Twelve hundred strangers who think they know anything about my marriage, about the years I spent waiting for him to come home, about the way he looked through me like I was furniture.
"I didn't mean for this to happen." Adam's phone is ringing on the table, buzzing insistently, and he picks it up and turns it face-down without looking at the screen. "I swear to you, I never—"
"Kendra's page," I say flatly. "Have you seen Kendra's page?"
He hasn't. I show him that too: a photo of his empty chair at book club, caption dripping with sweetness.
He's been so nice to all of us. Such a gentleman.
Some people don't know how lucky they are.
And underneath, thousands of new followers, all of them spillover from this latest wave of attention, all of them leaving comments about how beautiful she is and how ungrateful I must be.
"I'm sorry." He takes his phone and sets it on Nell's empty chair, like putting distance between himself and the device will fix anything. "I never meant for this to happen. I just wanted to—" He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry."
I stare at the screen until the numbers blur. Forty-two thousand retweets now. Forty-three.
I don't know what to do or what to think. I don't know how to be a person when the whole world is watching and none of them understand anything.
"You need to leave," I say.
"Daisy—"
"Please." The word comes out cracked. "I can't do this with you right now. I can't. I need to work. I need to not think. And I can't do that with you sitting there looking at me like that."
He stands up slowly. Doesn't argue. Doesn't push. Just nods, once, and says, "I'll go. But the terms stand. I signed them. I meant it."
"I know you meant it." My voice is hollow. "That doesn't fix anything."
He's almost at the door when he turns back. "The reading, at book club. If you want me to stay away—"
"I don't know what I want." I'm already turning toward the stockroom, toward the mindless comfort of inventory and price stickers and tasks I can actually complete. "I'll let you know."
The door chimes as he leaves.
I shelve books until midnight, until my arms ache and my eyes burn, and then I go upstairs and lie in bed and stare at the ceiling while my phone keeps buzzing on the nightstand.
Forty-seven thousand retweets by morning.