Chapter 18 Daisy #2
My throat tightens. "For years."
"For years."
The anger arrives like weather, sudden and justified. "Every time I smiled at your board members and pretended we were happy, I remembered why I had agreed to it. You had his safety in your hands when you asked me to marry you. Do you understand what that cost?"
"I'm starting to."
"No." I flatten my palm on the table. "You don't get to start. I lived it."
He nods. Doesn't argue.
"What did you actually do? Recently. With Dad."
"Gave him the full investigation report. Corrected the company record officially. Apologized directly. Reimbursed his legal costs, no conditions attached." He pauses. "His own lawyer is handling it. Whatever else he wants, that's his decision to make."
"You didn't ask me first."
"The apology was his to hear. But I should have told you what I was doing, and let you choose whether to be there."
That lands somewhere complicated. I press my thumbnail into the table edge.
"Using your desperation was wrong," he says. "Even before I knew the records were falsified. Even if your father had been guilty. The way I did it was wrong."
I don't thank him. I don't tell him this changes anything. Maureen's shoes squeak across the floor somewhere behind me.
"Okay," I say. Just that.
He thinks we are done with the hard part. I can see it in the slight release of his shoulders.
"The ER text," I say.
Adam goes still.
"The week before I left. I fainted after your dinner with Klaus. Iron deficiency, exhaustion, three hours alone in the emergency room." I keep my voice flat. "You never mentioned it."
"I had my phone silenced for a call with Singapore.
I sent that message about working late without opening our conversation.
I read what you had actually sent after midnight.
You were already home." He speaks slowly, like each word costs something.
"I assumed you were asleep. I told myself I would ask in the morning. "
"But you didn't."
"I avoided it. Asking meant facing how alone I had left you, and I chose not to face it."
"I shouldn't have had to call. You should have checked your phone. You should have asked whether I was all right when you got home."
"Yes."
The anger from before hasn't left. It just has company now, something heavier.
"If something is urgent," I say, "I'll call twice. You answer or you have a backup who can actually reach you. A real person, with a name."
"Grayson, if you're comfortable with him. I'll ask him first and give you his number. But my phone stays reachable. He isn't an excuse for me to disappear."
"But that's emergency protocol." I lean forward. "I shouldn't need a code to matter. Care is also checking in. Asking about my day. Noticing when I have eaten."
He doesn't have an answer ready, and I don't give him one. I let him sit in the space where the answer should be.
Maureen's shoes squeak closer. I don't look up.
Maureen arrives with his dinosaur nuggets and my grilled cheese. The nuggets are shaped like a T-Rex, a triceratops, and something that might be a stegosaurus. Adam examines them with complete seriousness.
"I'm going to start with the triceratops," he announces. "It seems polite."
The interruption gives us a little room to breathe. Nothing is settled, but we keep talking.
"So tell me something real," Adam says, dragging a fry through ketchup. "Something I should have asked years ago."
"Like what?"
"Like your mom." He says it carefully, like he's handling something fragile. "You’ve told me a little about her. I’d like to know more about who she was."
I set down my sandwich. "You want to know about my mom?"
"I want to know about everything that made you who you are." He shrugs, almost shy. "She seems like a good place to start."
"She was a librarian," I say. "Well, retired librarian. But she never really stopped. Our house was basically a fire hazard. Stacks of paperbacks everywhere: on the stairs, in the bathroom, next to the stove."
"Organized chaos?"
"No, just chaos. She had a system she swore made sense, but I never cracked it." I smile at the memory. "She'd read everything. Romance, mystery, literary fiction, trashy beach reads. She said snobbery was the enemy of joy."
Adam grins. "I like her already."
"You would have." The words come out softer than I intended. "She would have given you such a hard time, though. She had this thing about men who wore suits. Said they were either hiding something or compensating for something."
"Both, probably, in my case."
"Definitely both." I steal one of his fries.
"She used to mark her favorite passages with this blue pen.
Not highlighting, actual notes in the margins.
Questions, arguments, little exclamation points when she loved something.
I still have some of her paperbacks. They're basically annotated editions of her brain. "
"That's where you get it from."
"Get what?"
"The way you engage with things. Books, ideas, people." He leans back. "You don't just consume stuff. You argue with it. You have opinions."
I blink at him. "Was that a compliment?"
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late. I'm insufferable now." I take a sip of my coffee, buying time. "She died when I was twenty-four. It was fast, which everyone said was a mercy, but it didn't feel like a mercy. It felt like a robbery."
Adam's quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry."
"Everyone's sorry. That's the thing about grief: everyone's sorry, but no one knows what to do with it.
" I trace a pattern in the condensation on my glass.
"Including me. I was a disaster for about a year.
Couldn't write, couldn't work, couldn't get out of bed some days.
Dad was grieving too. We loved each other, but neither of us knew how to talk about the empty places in the house. "
"What helped?"
I look up at him. "You actually want to know?"
"I actually want to know."
"Writing." I say it simply, because it's true.
"That's how the blog started. I was reading one of her old paperbacks (she had all these romance novels from the eighties with the ridiculous covers, you know the ones) and I just started writing about it.
About her. About how reading this book she'd loved felt like having a conversation with her. "
"That's beautiful."
"It was ugly, actually. Raw and messy and way too personal.
I almost didn't post it." I shrug. "But I did.
And people responded. Other people who'd lost someone, who were trying to figure out how to carry grief and still have a life.
That's when I realized: this thing I was doing, it wasn't just for me. "
Adam watches me, jaw tight. "I read those first posts. I should have asked what it took for you to write them."
"You never asked."
It lands harder than I meant it to, and I see him flinch. But I'm not trying to wound him. It's just the truth.
"I know," he says. "That's on me."
"You can ask now. I’m not exactly an open book."
"More like an annotated paperback," he says, and when I laugh, his face relaxes. "With blue pen notes I couldn't figure out how to read."
"God, that's cheesy."
"I'm trying here, Daisy."
"I know you are." I reach across the table and steal another fry, just to do something with my hands. "She would have liked this place, actually. She loved diners. Said they were the most democratic restaurants: everybody's equal when you're eating pancakes at two in the morning."
"Is that why you agreed to come?"
"I agreed because I wanted a date where we could actually talk. The cheap chicken nuggets help." I grin at him. "The Annie Memorial Diner Philosophy is just a bonus."
He laughs, really laughs, and it knots up my chest.
"Tell me more about her," he says. "What else?"
"She was funny. Like, actually funny, not just pleasant. Dry sense of humor. She used to say that anyone who told you they didn't have time to read was really telling you they didn't have time to think."
"Harsh."
"She contained multitudes." I lean forward. "She also cried at dog food commercials and couldn't parallel park to save her life. She was a whole person, you know? Not just the good stuff."
"That's how it should be remembered," Adam says quietly. "The whole person."
"Yeah." I swallow past the tightness in my throat. "It took me a while to figure that out. At first I just wanted to remember her as perfect, Saint Annie of the Paperbacks. But that's not honoring someone. That's erasing them."
"Is that why you write about her? On the blog?"
"Sometimes. When it feels right." I meet his eyes. "She never got to meet you. She died before I walked into your conference room. I used to think about what she'd say about you, about us. Whether she'd approve."
"What did you decide?"
"I think she'd have had questions." I smile, but it's crooked. "Probably the same ones I should have asked and didn't. She was good at that, asking the uncomfortable thing. I inherited her book obsession but not her directness."
"You seem pretty direct to me."
"I hide behind humor. It's different." I push my hair back. "But I'm working on it. Being actually honest instead of just funny about being evasive."
Adam reaches across the table, hesitates, then gently covers my hand with his. I don't pull away.
"Thank you for telling me about her," he says. "I wish I could have met her."
"Me too." I turn my hand over, let my fingers curl loosely around his. "She'd have asked you what your intentions were on the first date. Very Victorian about that stuff."
"My intentions were probably suspect."
"Your intentions were definitely suspect. You were wearing a suit."
He grins. "Fair point."
For a moment we just sit there, hands linked across the formica table.
"How's Chaucer treating you?" I ask, mostly to breathe.
"He hates me." Adam sounds genuinely mournful. "I've tried everything. Treats, catnip, that expensive tuna from the deli—"
"Chaucer doesn't forgive easily." I point my fork at him. "He held a grudge against the mailman for three years."
"What did the mailman do?"