My future is the sunflower girl.
If she’ll have me.
42
EVE
Ispend my night nervously checking the time and pull myself off the couch an hour before I need to leave to put on clean clothes and bundle up.
And I ignore the uncomfortable gut feeling swarming around inside me that this is exactly how I become my mother. Forgiving a man repeatedly despite knowing who he is.
Because there’s another part of me that wonders if I’m perpetuating my own loneliness by insisting that forgiving someone who has done you wrong is always a bad idea.
When you’re a kid, you don’t see the nuance of the situation.
I saw my mother with a man who talked a big game. Who wore suits and drove fancy cars—which I realize, looking back, weren’t as fancy as he insisted—and promised my mother a life worth leaving her daughter for.
It became apparent over the years that those things weren’t true. That his carefully constructed facade was nothing but just that: a dupe, meant to draw in someonewho was unhappy with her life and would do anything to live a little better.
Even if that meant abandoning her daughter.
But that is not me.
I’m loyal to this place that raised me. To my grandmother, who still exists in the soil of this place, sprouting the most beautiful sunflowers on this side of the country. To my mother, who—as much as I don’t want to admit it—embodies the storms that blow through and challenge everything I thought I could do. To my grandfather, the tinkerer who took on a life so different from his own for love, who’s the stream that powers the water wheel I love so much.
And I’m starting to wonder if my fear of Ryder was really a fear of myself. My inability to stay focused on what’s important. To put the farm first and continue taking care of it with as much passion and effort as I have been since my grandmother passed.
As much as that nervous feeling churns around in my stomach, I know that Ryder’s not the object of my fear.
He’s just everything I ever wanted.
And I don’t trust myself to have himandcontinue pouring my heart and soul into this farm.
But isn’t that just what I’ve done over the past few months? With his help, no less?
I managed the farm as well as I ever have, if I can say so myself, and the second he started asking about an easement, I turned him down and stood my ground.
And he respected that.
Ithink.
Despite every neuron in my body shouting warning signs at me, I trek over to his property and start my hike through the trail Gus cleared for him so many weeks ago.And while the property is still a little difficult to traverse, it’s leagues better than it was before.
I use the flashlight on my phone to guide me, stepping carefully so I don’t roll an ankle on uneven ground or run headfirst into a low tree branch.
And I continue on past the cleared area into the dense woods that creep onto the property and mostly block the view of the cabins, aside from this time of year when the leaves start falling the little log houses peek through.
It’s a long walk made exponentially longer by my careful steps and the anxiety running through my veins that tells me to turn around and run.
But I don’t.
When I get to the clearing at the top of the hill where the first cabin sits, I wonder how exactly Ryder’s planning to convince me he’s not dicking me over. It’s almost pitch black out here, aside from the light from my cell phone, and I have trouble seeing the cabins looming in the distance, let alone any documents or blueprints he might have drawn up.
Andwhy the hellwould he make me trek all the way up here in the middle of the night? Talk about making a girl work for it.
The trail leads to the back of the first cabin, so I shuffle around to the front, my eyes peeled for Ryder, and keep a reasonable distance from the cabins themselves, because as much as I’m comforted when I get the occasional glance of them from the farm, there’s something about an abandoned cabin in the woods that screams horror movie.
And I’ve got enough drama going on in my life right now.
