Lilian Darcy - The One Who Changed Everything

He didn’t go inside.

He couldn’t. Not yet.

He needed some space. They’d decided not to say anything to anyone else until tomorrow. “Daisy only arrived six hours ago,” Lee had said. “I don’t want to hit everyone with this news until she’s settled in a little.”

“It’s not about Daisy, is it?” he’d answered, and the words had felt like a lie in his mouth.

Was it about Daisy?

Hell, he definitely wasn’t going inside right now, because Daisy would probably be there.

He sat on the porch steps instead, hunching over to rest his elbows on his spread knees and brooding in the dark. A slew of different emotions roiled inside him, as choppy and confusing as the waves on the lake when the weather was changing.

This whole thing felt like a change in the weather, a change in the season. That unsettling feeling at the end of summer when the leaves rattled down from the trees in a sudden wind, and the temperature dropped forty degrees in an hour, only to come back up into the seventies again the next day.

He didn’t run his life on these kinds of emotions. He didn’t blow hot and cold. There’d been no place for that kind of thing after the lymphoma had finally claimed his dad eight years ago, when Tucker was just sixteen. No place, and even less motivation.

He’d had to grow up fast, with no time to waste. He’d had to put his family first. He’d needed two part-time jobs to help his mom with money. He’d been the one to sit up with her late at night while they talked about how to keep Mattie in school and whether Carla was old enough for a serious boyfriend. He knew the value of caution, and of thinking things through. He knew the honor in it, even more.

“It’s meaningless, isn’t it?” he asked the universe, on a mutter. This sense of changed destiny, of an unlooked-for miracle, it was just nonsense.

What am I asking for? A damn sign, or something?

He heard footsteps behind him.

It was her, Daisy, and his crazy heart told him that this was the sign he’d been asking for.

He turned around too eagerly, already half on his feet on the lowest porch step.

And of course it wasn’t her.

It wasn’t even Lee. It was Mary Jane.

“Oh.” The energy slumped out of him. The slump was so obvious that Mary Jane couldn’t miss it.

“Everything okay?” she asked with a lightness he didn’t buy for a moment. She knew something was wrong. Maybe she’d seen Lee disappear upstairs and close the door of her room. There was no light coming from Lee’s window, he saw. She was in there in the dark. Daisy’s room was next to hers, and from there the light shone brightly, spilling down onto the porch roof.

“Everything’s fine,” he growled, almost too low for Mary Jane to hear. She said nothing, and he let her silence prod him into saying more, still on a reluctant mutter. “Lee and I have been talking. We’ve worked it out. It’s okay.”

“Good.” It was firm, almost aggressive. She hesitated for a moment, as if she might have said something more, then turned to head back inside. She’d been waiting all evening for Alex to call, and Tucker guessed that he still hadn’t. He would be full of apologies when he finally did, and would probably bring her flowers the next time he saw her, but Tucker still wasn’t impressed by his ex-future-sister-in-law’s boyfriend.

“Mary Jane, is that you down there?” Daisy’s voice came from her window.

She lifted the sliding screen and stuck her head out, her hair haloed by the lamp on the desk nearby. Tucker took the last step down off the porch, looked up at her and felt like Romeo to her Juliet.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks, if you can believe that nonsense!

“Oh, Tucker, sorry,” she sang out breezily. “I thought it was Mary Jane.”

It was. Dragging his gaze from the upper window, he found that Mary Jane had heard her sister’s voice and had stopped on the porch. She was looking at him as if she’d read the whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing in his body language, clearer than Shakespeare’s words.

“She’s here,” he told Daisy, his voice catching roughly in his throat.

“Or if you don’t mind, Tucker, I left my hairbrush in her car. Could you grab it for me and toss it up? Is it locked, Mary Jane?” she called a little louder.

Mary Jane cleared her throat, and called back, “No, it’s open. I can get it for you.”

“But I bet Tucker can throw better than you.”

“I could bring it up to you, Daisy,” Mary Jane said tetchily, starting across the porch and down the steps. “Nobody has to throw it!”

“I got it,” Tucker said quickly. The car was parked only yards away. He found the hairbrush on the front dash and held it up for Daisy to see. “You really want me to...?”

“Sure, why not.” She reached out for it. He threw it neatly, and she caught it even more neatly, laughing.

He thought he would remember that moment for the rest of his life.

Present Day

And he did, damn it, he still remembered it.

Abandoning the crooked paving stones, he went out the side entrance to his car, parked in its designated space at the front of the private parking lot, while Daisy began to browse the display areas. He could see her as he sat in the vehicle waiting for the engine to warm, in her bright blue biker-style jacket and black pants. She walked slowly, pausing every time something caught her attention.

She stepped back to appreciate the effect of the morning sun on the splashing water of a fountain, stepped forward again to run her hand across a piece of blue-gray slate. She picked up a glazed black pot planted with miniature bamboo and set it on the slate as if testing the blend of colors, and then she put it carefully back exactly where she’d found it.

This was what had drawn him so strongly ten years ago—the intensity of her response to beauty, the creative energy that ran through her, the bright light she seemed to give off, when the darkness of his father’s illness and its aftermath had still been hanging over him.

The car engine was warm. He had no reason to still be sitting here. He had to take himself off before she noticed...except that her browsing made her oblivious, the way she’d been oblivious that very first day.

The one thing he could be proud of, possibly. He’d kept his cataclysmic thunderclap of feeling to himself.

Lee hadn’t guessed. Marshall and Denise had had no idea. They’d gotten it all wrong. Marshall had accosted him in the privacy of the resort office after all the phone calls had been made—canceling the reception, the photographer, the flowers, the guests.

“I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”

“Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.

“You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”

It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.