“I was hired with those funds,” she adds quietly. “And it’s—working at Beeslieve has been—it’s been everything I needed. It gave me a focus for my energy where I can see for myself, every day, that we’re doing good. That we’re improving the world. You know. In ways that sending a bunch of air conditioners to the North Pole wouldn’t have.”
My heart thumps erratically.
She has a life she needs to get back to. I can’t keep her on the road with me indefinitely.
I mean, Icould.
But I’d have to ask her to give up her job to come with me.
I’d have to be enough all by myself.
Daph would be happy seeing the world, but wehaven’tseen the results of our efforts the past few days.
We’ve dropped bucketloads of cash into random communities along the way, anonymously supporting fundraisers for playgrounds and kids’ sports teams and fire station upgrades and museum expansions and pet shelter support. We’ve left large tips at small family restaurants and dropped ridiculous amounts of change into charity donation jars at grocery stores and a few other ValuKarts.
And we’ve dashed off quickly everywhere before anyone could realize how much we’d donated or left behind.
I know she doesn’t need the credit, but I think she needs something more concrete than holding onto empty suitcases that used to be filled with money.
Her heart has always belonged to animals. To the environment and the world.
The donation we made at the only open pet shelter we’ve stopped at was the hardest.
I could tell she wanted to pet the dogs, but she faked an allergy attack as soon as we were in the door.
It’s the first time I’ve wondered how much she still hides of herself.
How much she’ll bend over backward to protect her own heart.
When I first heard she’d been disinherited, I didn’t think much of it. Couldn’t, really—not with the situation my father was in and the subsequent situation he’d thrust me into at M2G.
But now—now I think it was far more than a simple disinheritance.
Her parents abandoned her.
They left her to survive on her own without any resources because they never understood her.
Never understood what she loved and cared about.
How deeply she felt about her causes.
Something new flickers to life deep in my chest.
Anger.
Fury.
Rage.
Not at Daphne.
At her parents.
Somewhat at Margot too.
She stayed. She stayed at the family company. Stayed working for people who probably don’t care about her interests outside of work either. Unless it aligns with their own.
If my father hadn’t been sent to prison, if I hadn’t broken up with Margot because I couldn’t handle the obligations of maintaining a relationship on top of the expectations from Miles2Go, if I hadn’t learned so quickly that I wasn’t built for the life I’d been trained for, would I have been one more person carrying on like normal when my sister-in-law was abandoned?
