by Vicki James
I felt like Mary Lennox on her discovery of The Secret Garden.
I wanted to roll in the grass, take pictures on my phone of the different shades of pinks, purples, reds, oranges, yellows, and blues. I wanted to shed the coat of adulthood and let childhood prickle my skin once more.
My face must have shown it, too because when I caught Danny’s eyes, they were tight, and his smile controlled, as though he was struggling to watch me.
“I think the willow is my favourite tree,” I confessed, almost romantically, seeking it out in the grounds, not too far away.
“Careful, Daisy. You’re starting to sound like you’re enjoying this.”
“I can admit that I’m finding it difficult to stay hard around the edges when I’m surrounded by so much nature and beauty.”
When I looked back at him, he was staring at me, his face sombre. “I know exactly how you feel.”
My cheeks blushed, and I couldn’t hide it. It was late in the afternoon now. The sun was beginning to die in the sky, and I was pretty sure that today had been the longest day of my life so far.
“As lovely as this is, why have you brought me here, Danny?” I asked, dropping my attention back down to him. “What’s this about? It’s going to get dark in an hour.”
“I know.” He smiled flatly. “So, let me show you what I brought you here to see. I have something I need to set straight.” Danny tilted his head in the direction he wanted to go before he spun around and began walking away.
I followed slowly, uncertainty tearing through my every vein as I hopped over small flowers I didn’t want to crush with my old Converse. Within a few seconds, Danny was wandering to the edges of some trees, and he glanced back to make sure I was where he wanted me to be. I didn’t realise I’d smiled at him until he smiled back in surprise, and I immediately cleared my throat and pushed that traitorous smile away. Old habits definitely died hard around him.
He guided me down a pebble pathway where the stones crunched beneath our feet, before we emerged into a clearing where the circular folly sat, tall and proud. I stepped forward, that awe of mine taking over everything and pushing me past Danny. I was aware of myself enough to know I probably looked like a child at Disneyland, unable to believe the magic before me, but that’s the thing about true magic. When it’s there, you can’t help but sparkle with it.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.
“Stunning,” he said with a sigh.
I spun around to see him studying me, and that blush rose again. He held the key to my weak heart, and it was dangerous to allow his words to ruin me again. Once all of this was over, Danny would be gone, and I couldn’t survive the sting of false hope a second time.
“Why am I here?” I asked again.
Danny walked towards me. His dark sunglasses hid any emotions he may have been feeling, but the tension in his jaw was obvious. Reaching up, he ran a single finger down my cheek until he trailed it down my neck like he already had my permission to roam wherever he wanted.
“I told you not to touch me ever again.”
“No, you said the next time I did, you’d break my fingers. You’re free to stop me any time you want, Zee.”
I sucked in a breath, unable to look away from him. We both knew I wasn’t about to break anything, not even the awkward silence that followed.
“What’s the worst thought you’ve had about me since I left?” he asked quietly.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do. It’s why I’m asking.”
I searched for eyes I couldn’t see before I set my truth free. “That everything I thought I knew about you had been a lie.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because you left. You left so easily, and you never looked back. Not even…”
“Not even?” he asked, taking a final step closer. “Say it, Daisy,” he whispered. “Finish that sentence. Let’s acknowledge that elephant in the room that you really hate me for. You don’t hate me because I left, do you? You hate me for the other stuff. The stuff you can’t believe I didn’t do.”
Tears filled my eyes again, but those tears weren’t for me. They were for Tim and Amie Silver.
“I thought everything about you had been a lie because you left… and because you never looked back. Not even for your own parents’ funeral.”
“And there it is,” he whispered softly, his shoulders sagging. Danny dropped his finger from my shoulder, and he pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans as two small tears ran down my cheeks. I waited for him to say something else, but instead, he walked around me and headed towards the folly, his pace slower than before.
“How could you do it?” I said, my voice too strained. “How could you stay away from the two people who needed you the most?”
“They didn’t need me anymore, Daisy, they were dead.”
My breath hitched in my throat, and I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Danny…”
He reached a dark, wooden bench that was propped up against the outer wall of the circular folly. He ran his hand over the arm of the bench, as though he was standing there petting a dog before he angled his head up to mine. “Only the living need the living, right? What did it matter to everyone else whether I showed my face or not?”
“You were their son.”
“Were? What? I’m not anymore because they’re not around to hold my hand and tell me when my decisions are right or wrong?”
“I don’t know this version of you.”
“Yes, you do. You know me better than anyone else alive.”
“No.” I shook my head. “The Danny I knew would have been back here to bury his parents. He wouldn’t stand in front of me, talking about them as though they were some puzzle he’d solved, got bored of, and done away with. The Danny I knew would have mourned with his friends and with his grandmother. He would have held the hands of those who were hurting. He would have been there for,”—me—“everyone, because that’s who the Danny I knew was. You didn’t even show up to say your goodbyes,” I pushed out, my voice breaking with emotion. “That’s when I realised everything I thought I knew about you was a lie, Danny. Right then, on that day, when I watched your parents being lowered into the ground and you weren’t there. You weren’t there!”
Danny dropped his chin to his chest and looked down at his feet.
“You were too busy off chasing some stupid dream that will never compare to the reality of your parents. You thought being a stupid rock star mattered more than respecting your mum and dad. You were too lost in your own self-importance to give a crap about the two people who had given up everything for you to go out there and—”
“You wore a blue dress!” he cried out, his head snapping up to mine abruptly.
I inhaled sharply, my eyes widening as I stepped back.
He turned to me fully, his hands back in his pockets again. “You wore a dark blue fucking dress, Daisy, and you had on these patent shoes with a high heel that made your calves pop like I’d never fucking seen them before. You wore a pin across your left breast. A gold one, and I recognised it as my Gran’s. The circle with the bird inside it. I smiled when I saw that, but then I saw that look on your face, too, and it damn near killed me. You’d lost weight, and the dress fabric hung a little loose around your stomach. You kept fidgeting with it the whole way through the service, as though the material itched your skin, or you were desperate to just shed the thing. I wanted to tell you to stop—just stop fussing and doubting yourself because even at a funeral, you looked sensational. I recognised that dress, too. It was the same one you wore to our leaver’s celebration when we were eighteen and fresh out of college. I said you looked pretty the first time you wore it, and you smiled like I’d just stolen your heart, and you were happy for me to take it. Your hair…” Danny raised a hand to his head, winding a finger around an invisible curl. “It was in my favourite style. When you kind of wear it half up and half down and let those loose waves fall across your face. Your lips
were the colour of pink roses, and your tears broke my fucking heart when I saw you cry them. Gina stayed by your side the entire time, propping you up when you kept glancing around and not finding me walking up to you to say I was back or that I was sorry or that any part of this fucking funeral was a good way to ease the pain that was tearing me up inside.”
My hand rose to my chest, clutching at my frail heart.
“You spoke at the ceremony because my grandma asked you to and, as always, you couldn’t say no, even though speaking killed you. Your voice sounded different, and I had to stand there in the shadows and watch you fall apart, knowing that I couldn’t put you back together again because I was beyond fucking broken, too. My parts couldn’t even be sold for scrap.”
“You… you were there…”
“You’re damn right I was there,” Danny said sharply, pulling the sunglasses from his eyes and tucking them into his waistband. Those pools of green were covered in unshed emotion, and I walked backwards until I stumbled, my ankle giving way before I righted myself and felt my back come up against the rough bark of a tree. “I was there. I saw everything. I heard every word. I saw everything on your face. The disappointment. The pain. The longing. The need for me to make you better. But I couldn’t make you better, Zee. I couldn’t.”
I stared up into his misty eyes, unable to believe what I was hearing.
He rubbed his lips together, and his nostrils flared. “For this is a journey we all must take, and each must go alone. It’s all part of the master plan, a step on the road to home,” he whispered. “When you are lonely and sick at heart, go to the friends we know. Laugh at all the things we used to do. Miss me… but let me go.”
“The poem I read.”
“I heard every word.”
“But… it doesn’t make sense. Why? Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you—?”
“Because I needed you to let me go, too.”
I searched his eyes, unable to deny the tugging at my heart as it tried to beat closer to his. “I did,” I lied.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “You did. But you turned me into a monster along the way to make it happen. I was okay with that. At least, I thought I was. But seeing you these last few days and seeing that look of hate in your eyes whenever I’m close by… it’s killed me a little bit, Daisy, and I need you to let go of that monster in your mind, too. I’m not him. I’m not that guy.”
“Then who the hell are you?”
Blowing out a breath, Danny raised his hand to rest on the trunk above my head, and he leaned in closer. “I’m still trying to figure that out for myself.”
Sixteen
We’d driven back to Hope Cove in silence, neither one of us having the energy for small talk, argument, or debate.
After sliding out from under his arm, I’d walked over to the bench he’d been caressing to see the gold plaque behind it, engraved in Tim and Amie’s honour. Amie’s full name had been Amber Silver, but after marrying Tim, people had called her Amie so she didn’t have a moniker filled solely with colours.
I never understood that. I saw nothing wrong with making a rainbow of yourself when your heart was so obviously bright.
Danny had apparently stayed at Atley House during that week of his parents’ burial, as well as spending time with Grandma Florence, which she’d never told me about at Danny’s request. The owners treasured the Silver family, honouring them with any request they placed in front of them because of the nature of their entwined histories.
I couldn’t shake the feeling of misplaced guilt from my shoulders now, and the weight of it was heavy. All those times people had grumbled and gossiped to me about Danny not returning for their funeral, and what a horrid boy that made him, and I’d never once defended him properly. I should have defended him. I’d known him better than to think he could skip such a thing, hadn’t I? So why had I been so quick to believe he was rotten to the core when the reality was that not many men had ever been moulded to be as good as Daniel Silver had?
Heartbreak made me do it. That was my excuse, although it was feeble.
It was dark when we pulled up outside my house, and I held onto the door handle too tightly, not knowing how to say goodbye… or if I even wanted to. In the end, I said nothing, and I pushed my way into the cool summer’s evening air, shutting the car door behind me without saying a word. My key was in the front door of my home when I heard him call out my name.
“Daisy?”
I spun to take him in one last time. His arm was resting on the open window ledge, his head leaning out as far as he could go. He looked effortlessly handsome, and the layers of the villain I’d covered his face with were drifting away with every passing minute.
“No more tears for me or my family, okay?”
My scowl was small but intense, and Danny smiled softly at me, making that scowl slip away before it really had any life to it.
“It’s okay to still hate me. Just hate me for the right reasons, and I can live with that.”
Without another word, Danny winked and drove off, leaving me to watch the back end of his white Scirocco disappearing down our windy, country roads until his lights went out of view.
“What if I don’t hate you at all?” I whispered to the ghost of him. “What do I do with myself then, Danny, huh?”
The next day, I woke to an early morning call from Gina who was, when you cut down to the truth of it, hunting for gossip. Some of the locals had seen me in the passenger seat, leaving Hope Cove with Danny, and word had spread quite quickly.
Didn’t it always?
After being backed into a corner, I gave her the bare bones of what had happened, leaving out Atley House or the tears that were shed by both of us.
“So, he was there, after all,” Gina said.
“He had to be. There were just some things he knew that Florence wouldn’t have been able to tell him—things he noticed.”
“Wow. How do you feel about it?”
“I’m happy he did the right thing, even if he could have done… more… I guess.” I winced at the accusation. As a young woman who still had both her parents, I had no right to play the moral police over someone who had lost theirs, and that had never been clearer than when looking up into Danny’s sad eyes the afternoon before. “Listen, I’ve got to go. It’s Monday, and it’s sunny. The shop will be rammed soon.”
“Don’t forget we have The Cove Festival on Sunday, too.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” I groaned.
The Cove Festival was the annual tribute to the pirates that used to pass through this little cove and use it as a smuggler’s bay. What had once been a scandal was now being celebrated, if only jovially. It was the only big event we threw around here, and even then, it was mainly full of locals and a few people who wandered down from Salcombe and Bantham by foot. Harbour beach would be filled with fancy-dressed pirates, and a small stage set up like an old ship that had been cut straight down the middle.
Danny used to love that event every year.
Now, it was just another day at work filled with tourists and trinkets, but it made Gina and me quite a lot of money, so who were we to complain?
After ending the call with Gina, and assuring her I had the shop under control, I went back into the stock room and tried to ignore the memories of Danny and I kissing on the floor in there. I was pulling out a basket filled with silver bracelets when the bell chimed above the door, and I pushed back through the seashell curtain.
I saw the little boy first, followed by his adoring mother who was wearing denim shorts and a black T-shirt that showed off her toned, tanned arms.
Jules and Corey.
Jules scooped the cute boy up in her arms, and he wrapped his legs around her waist and held up a small fluffy bunny he’d picked up from the first shelf in the shop. I watched the love between them pour free, and when Jules caught my eye, I smiled my welcome. She was beautiful. Her short, black hair was swept to one side, and she didn’t look like she was wearing
a dot of makeup on her fresh skin.
“Daisy, right?” she said with a smile, walking over to the counter I stood behind, clutching a basket under my arm.
“Right. Hi.” I squinted down at her, not wanting her to know I not only recognised her but that I remembered her name, too. “And you are?”
“Julia. But everyone calls me Jules.”
“That’s right. You were outside the Harbour & Hope the other day when…”
“… when Danny wasn’t enough of a gentleman to introduce us properly.” She laughed, hitching Corey up on her waist. “That’s right. I’m so sorry about that. I saw you, and I was caught a little off guard. We’ve heard a lot about you over the years.” My face fell, and Jules stepped closer. “All good, don’t worry. In fact, so good that I probably acted a little starstruck, which is weird for me considering my occupation and who my partner is.”
“Starstruck?” My brows pulled together, but only briefly as Corey looked my way and smiled a beaming smile I couldn’t resist.
“Like I said, we’ve heard a lot about you. When someone speaks about someone with such… reverence, you start to believe they can’t be real. You know what I mean?”
“I guess.”
Reverence.
The thought of Danny speaking about me at all while on the train to stardom was surprising enough, but to hear that the words he’d spoken were in reverence threw me off. How can you revere someone you walked away from so easily? How can you worship what you chose to leave?
Placing the basket on the counter, I tucked my long hair behind my ears and began to shuffle through the packets of delicate bracelets to unwrap them. It kept my eyes down and my hands busy.
“So, is there anything I can help you both with today? Other than the bunny?” I asked, my voice aiming for casual and coming off squeaky.
“Actually, I was wondering if you could help me with something that you don’t stock on your shelves.”
I glanced up at her. “Like what?”
“Like some pictures of Danny with his parents, and maybe his gran, too.”
