“Stop talking.”
She doesn’t have to say a word for me to hear what she’s thinking.I can drive if you’d like to go farther down the road.
I pry one eyelid open and glance her way.
She holds up a misshapenthingin an unnatural orange. “Lava Cheese Puff?”
And my shoulders are at my ears again.
The interior of my car will be glowing orange from all of the fake cheese dust coming off her fingers, and I doubt anything that unnatural comes out of the cloth seats easily.
I squeeze my eyes shut and turn my face away from her, willing myself to imagine the sounds of a burbling creek or a thunderstorm in one of those apps that never worked well enough to help me fall asleep.
“That was a nice thing you did for that little girl,” Daphne says quietly.
“We’re not talking.”
“I helped my—someone with a carwash fundraiser a few years ago, and the town’s worst person ever came through and barely gave five dollars, and then this single mom came through and dropped in a hundred bucks, and every single teenager working that car wash that day remembered her until they left town. If they had part-time jobs at the diner, they gave her a discount. She’d get tickets to the high school plays dropped in her mailbox. One day, she found homemade cupcakes right after a rumor went around that she’d had a bad day.”
I suck in an uneven breath.
That.
That’s what I want.
A community where people help each other and remember each other and don’t care if you were born a billionaire or piss-poor. Where they remember each other and do nice things for each other because it’s what you should do, not what you do to look good.
Where you can belong.
I rub my chest where the longing for a place to belong is sucking the life out of me.
I never belonged in my parents’ world, and the only thing these past four years since my father was arrested have proven to me is that I never will.
CanI run a multi-billion-dollar corporation?
Apparently yes. Save it from the brink of ruination, even.
But I don’t want to. And honestly, it only worked because I listened to the people around me who seemed to have better ideas than the others.
Half of what I did wasn’t because I thought it was what needed to be done.
It was because my executive assistant is a genius who told me what to do, and I was smart enough to listen to her.
“That little girl will remember you for the rest of her life,” Daphne adds, even softer.
My eyes flare open, and I jerk my face toward her.
Dammmmmmit.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Daphne lifts a brow. “Kinda doubt she recognized you. Her mom either. If they did, they’ll remember you more for this than anything else.”
She flicks at my shirt with her orange-covered fingers.
I look down and spot the price tag hanging off the breast pocket. “Goddammit,” I mutter.
She grins and munches on another cheese puff.
