Susan Wiggs - Marrying Daisy Bellamy

Pushing aside the frustration, she refocused on the bridal photo and quickly posted it on Wendela’s company blog, titling the entry, “Andrea and Brian sneak peek.” Sitting back and gazing at the shot, Daisy indulged in a private cry. She didn’t want people to know the sight of happy couples made her cry. She didn’t want anyone to see her need, her desire, her knife-sharp longing. Alone in the small hours of the night, she cried. And then she shut down her computer.

By then it was one o’clock in the morning, and she needed to get to bed. As she went around turning off the lights, she noticed a few envelopes on the floor below the mail slot of the front door. She bent down and went through the small stack. Fliers and junk mail. Solicitations, notices about neighborhood meetings. Coupons she would never use. And … a cream-colored envelope, addressed in a very familiar hand.

Her heart skipped a beat. She ripped open the thick envelope.

You are hereby invited to the commissioning of Julian Maurice Gastineaux as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force ROTC, Detachment 520 at Cornell University on Saturday 14, May at 1300 hrs in the Statler Auditorium.

On the back, scrawled in that same familiar bold script, was the message, “Hope you’ll come. Really need to talk to you. J.” So much for sleep.

It was nuts, realizing a simple name on a piece of paper could send her spiraling through a past filled with what-ifs and paths not taken. Because Julian Gastineaux, soon to be Second Lieutenant Julian Gastineaux, was her own personal path not taken.

Camp Kioga, Ulster County, New York Five years earlier

The summer before her senior year of high school, the last thing Daisy wanted to do was stay in a musty lakeside cabin with her dad and little brother. She had to, though. They were making her do it.

Although neither of her parents said much to her and Max, their family was in the process of breaking up. Her mom and dad couldn’t keep up the pretense of being a happy couple, even though they’d been trying for years. Her dad’s solution was to retreat from their Upper East Side home to the Bellamy family compound—historic Camp Kioga on Willow Lake—and act like everything was dandy.

Well, nothing was dandy and Daisy was determined to prove it. She’d packed her bag with a summer’s worth of hair products, an iPod, an SLR camera and a goodly supply of pot and cigarettes.

Though determined to ignore the mesmerizing beauty of the lakeside camp, she felt herself being unsettled by the deep isolation, the pervasive quiet, the haunting views.

The last thing she was expecting, out here in the middle of nowhere, was to meet someone. Turned out a boy her age had also been sentenced to summer camp, though for entirely different reasons.

When he first walked into the main pavilion at the dinner hour, she felt a funny kind of heat swirl through her and thought maybe the summer was not going to be so boring after all.

He looked like every dangerous thing grown-ups warned her about. He had a tall, lean, powerful body and a way of carrying himself that exuded confidence, maybe even arrogance. He was of mixed race, with tattoos marking his café au lait skin, pierced ears and long dreadlocks.

He sauntered over to the buffet table where she was standing, as if drawn to the invisible heat coursing through her.

“Just so you know,” said the tall kid, “this is the last place I wanted to spend the summer.”

“Just so you know,” Daisy said, making herself sound as cool as he did, “it wasn’t my choice, either. What’re you doing here, anyway?”

“It was either this—working on this dump with my brother, Connor—or a stint in juvey,” he said easily.

Juvey. He tossed off the word, clearly assuming she was familiar with the concept. She wasn’t, though. Juvenile detention was something that happened to kids from the ghetto or barrio.

“You’re Connor’s brother?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t look like brothers.” Connor was all clean-cut and WASPy, a lumberjack from the wilds of the North, while Julian looked dark … and dangerous, alternative’s alternative.

“Half brothers,” he said nonchalantly. “Different dads. Connor doesn’t want me here, but our mom made him look after me.”

Connor Davis was the contractor in charge of renovating Camp Kioga to get it ready for the fiftieth anniversary of Daisy’s grandparents. Everyone was supposed to be pitching in on the project, but she hadn’t expected to encounter someone like this. Even before learning his name, she sensed something fundamental about this boy. In the deepest, most mysterious way imaginable, he was destined to be important to her.

His name was Julian Gastineaux, and like her, he was between his junior and senior years of high school, but other than that, they had nothing in common. She was from New York City’s Upper East Side, the product of a privileged but unhappy family and a tony prep school. He was from a crappy area of Chino, California, downwind of the cattle lots.

Like moths around a candle flame, they danced around each other through dinner; later they were assigned cleanup duty. She didn’t raise her normal objection to the manual labor. An intimate camaraderie sprang up between them as they worked. She found herself fascinated by the ropy strength of his forearms and the sturdy breadth of his hands. As they were hanging up their dish towels, their shoulders brushed, and the brief encounter was electrifying in a way she’d never felt with a guy before. She’d known her share of guys, but this was different. She felt a weird kind of recognition that both confused and excited her.

“There’s a fire pit down by the lake,” she said, searching his strange, whiskey-colored eyes to see if he sensed anything, but she couldn’t tell. They were too new to one another. “Maybe we could go down there and have a fire.”

“Yeah, we could hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’”

“A couple of nights without TV or internet, and you’ll be begging for ‘Kumbaya’”

“Right.” His cocky smile quickly and easily gave way to sweetness. Daisy wondered if he realized that.

She found her dad as he was leaving the dining room. “Can we go make a fire on the beach?” Daisy asked.

“You and Julian?” His suspicious eyes flicked from her to the tall kid.

“Duh. Yeah, Dad. Me and Julian.” She tried to maintain her attitude. She didn’t want him to think she was actually starting to like it here, stuck in this rustic Catskills camp while all her friends were partying on the beaches of the Hamptons.

To her surprise, Julian spoke up: “I promise I’ll be on my best behavior, sir.”

It was gratifying to see her dad’s eyebrows lift in surprise. Hearing the word sir come from the mouth of the Dreadlocked One was clearly unexpected.

“He will,” Connor Davis said, joining them and passing a look to his brother. The stare he fixed on Julian showed exactly which brother was in charge.

“I guess it’s all right,” her dad said. He could probably tell Connor would kick Julian’s ass if the kid stepped out of line. “I might come out to check on you later.”

“Sure, Dad,” Daisy said, forcing brightness into her tone. “That’d be great.”

She and Julian were both pretty lame at making a fire, but she didn’t really care. They used a box of kitchen matches down to the final one before the pile of twigs finally caught. When the breeze wafted smoke right at her, she happily wedged herself snugly against Julian. He didn’t put the moves on her, but he didn’t move away, either. In fact, simply being near him felt amazing, not like making out with guys from school, under the bleachers at the athletic field, or at the Brownstones at Columbia, where she lied about her age in order to get into a college party.