34
HOME ISN’T HOME WHEN I’M MISSING MY HEART
Daphne
“You should’ve gottenOliver out too,” I say to Margot while her private jet lifts off from a small airfield north of Denver.
It’s not the first time I’ve said it.
It likely won’t be the last.
But this time, instead of telling me that his own attorneys can handle things for him, that he’s in a lot more trouble because our father is refusing to drop the charges against him, or that it’s good for him after what he’s put his parents through, she squeezes her eyes shut, takes a notebook from the messenger bag beside her, and scribbles a note that she hands to me.
Would you please trust me?
I recline back into the plush seat and eyeball her.
She takes the note back and shreds it, tearing it into strips that she deposits into the water glass on the built-in console beside her.
“Thank you for getting here so fast,” I say meekly.
Her face softens, and she looks less like the angry CEO who marched me out of the county jail and more like the sister whocomes to visit me on the weekends. “Bea and I have been waiting for the call all week. I’ve had the plane on standby since Sunday.”
I sit straighter. “Oh, god, did she see the footage?”
“It’s highly unlikely that anyone you’ve ever known could’ve missed it.”
I cringe while the plane dips in a bit of turbulence. “Can I call her?”
“If you’d like.”
“I didn’t mean to get arrested. I mean, in the end, I did, but I didn’t think the road trip would end like…this.”
“If our father hadn’t hired a private detective to verify you two were on a road trip after his staff alerted him to the coverage last weekend, and then decided to do…what he did… you wouldn’t have gotten arrested either.”
“What the hell was wrong with him? I’m not a pawn in his corporate games. And Oliver—” I suck in a deep breath, then plunge ahead. “Oliver’s not going back to Miles2Go.”
Margot and I haven’t talked about the elephant in the plane.
Not the thing where Margot left Oliver in jail, but the thing where it’s obvious she knows how bad I have it for him, and we don’t have to speak in code about it and make me wonder if I’m understanding her correctly this time.
And honestly?
If sheismad about it…I think I’d pick Oliver.
Because he’s picking me.
And that thought has my nose burning and my eyes getting wet.
He says he’s picking me.
For the first time in my adult life, I don’t know what I’ll do if it turns out a man has lied to me.
Because for the first time in my entire life, I am honestly, truly, and completely in love.
It’s the scariest thing in the world to know what it feels like to be abandoned and still want someone to love you anyway.
To wonder if he’ll get mad that I left him in jail and decide after a few days away from me that I’m not worth it after all.
