Chapter 10
Fletcher
Margaux had crossed the line.
I apologized to August for the sick game that Margaux had purposefully made us play. I wanted to stay next to August and make sure she was okay, but she asked me to go after Margaux, so I did.
Margaux was at the railing, her back to me, her shoulders slumped. The ocean was loud tonight. Dark and loud and going in every direction at once.
“Margaux,” I said.
She turned around.
She was crying, but not the soft kind. Her eyes were red and her jaw was set and the tears on her face looked more like anger than sadness. Like she had been waiting out here for me to come through that door so she could aim everything she had at the first available target.
“I’m sorry if you feel like an outsider here, but—” I started.
“You stood up for her.” Her voice came out tight. “Again. You always stand up for her. Do you know how many times this week you have stood up for her and not once, not once, have you stood up for me?”
“Margaux—”
“What does she have?” She stepped closer. “What does that girl have that I cannot give you? Tell me. Because I have been sitting in that room watching you look at her all week and I want you to explain it to me.”
“You said something cruel about her mother.”
“She plays the victim and you all fall for it. Every single time. The sob stories, the foster care, the van, the flower shop. You all look at her like she’s someone special and nobody looks at me like that. Nobody in that house has looked at me like that once.”
“Because you haven’t given anyone a reason to.”
She made a sound that wasn’t a word.
“The only one sobbing here,” I said, “is you. Sobbing and getting jealous of someone who has done nothing to you.”
“Jealous.” She said the word like it tasted bad. “You think I’m jealous of her? Of a girl who sells flowers out of a van? Fletcher, I have everything. I have—”
“Then act like it.”
She went very still.
Her eyes moved over my face. She was reading something there. I didn’t know what she was finding but I could see the moment she found it.
“Are you in love with her?”
I looked at the railing.
“Fletcher.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. Because whatever I said in the next ten seconds would go somewhere I couldn’t take it back from, and I needed to be careful, and I was so tired of being careful about everything all the time.
“Oh my god.” Her voice had dropped. “Oh my god, you are. You are in love with her.”
“Margaux—”
“She has no idea who she’s dealing with.” The crying had stopped. Just like that, the tears were gone and something else had taken their place. Something colder and more focused. “Fletcher, I love you. I really do. And I am not going to stand here and watch some flower girl—”
“Stop.”
“I know people,” she said. “I know people who handle permit renewals in Millhaven. It would not be difficult. It would actually be very easy. And I will make it happen. I will make sure that van of hers never works another market in that town again.”
I looked at her.
She meant it. That was the thing about Margaux — she was not someone who made threats to hear herself talk.
She was someone who made threats and then made phone calls.
She had her father’s connections and her father’s way of using them, which was quietly, completely, and without leaving fingerprints.
I thought about August’s spreadsheet. The color-coded columns. Her dreams.
I thought about the Millhaven Farmer’s Market on a Saturday morning and August standing in front of her flowers in that yellow top and the way she’d looked the first time I’d shown up with a bad excuse and she’d smiled like she wasn’t going to let herself smile and smiled anyway.
Margaux was watching me. She was a very smart woman. She could read a room and she could read a face and right now she was reading mine. I had maybe three seconds before she read something I couldn’t afford for her to read.
I made the calculation.
The cold, fast kind. The kind I was good at. The kind that had a cost I would add up later, alone, on a dark road going nowhere.
I looked at Margaux and I kept my voice flat.
“She sells flowers, Margaux. She is not a threat to you. She’s a nobody. Just let her live her life.”
Margaux looked at me for a long moment.
The cold thing in her eyes softened slightly. Not because she believed me. Because she had decided to let herself believe me, which was different, and which was the only thing that mattered right now.
“You mean that,” she said.
“Yes.”
She dropped her shoulders and leaned against the railing. She looked out into the ocean.
I had just said, out loud, that August was a nobody.
I had chosen the words because they were the ones most likely to work and they had worked. Margaux was standing here looking at the ocean instead of picking up her phone and calling her father’s people in Millhaven.
It had worked.
***