She stayed until the evening, and when she finally walked back up to the apartment, there was a vase sitting outside the door with flowers in it. She paused and bent down, picking it up and looking at the card.
I’m sorry. Let’s have coffee sometime. Kristi.
She didn’t know if she was warmed by the gesture or not. It had taken that—it had taken a man being betrayed by David—for Kristi to see that he was not, in fact, a good man. It had taken video evidence. But it was better than nothing.
She heard the door across the hall open, and she turned. Declan was standing there, his dark hair slightly disheveled, looking no less gorgeous for it. The little leap in her chest from earlier was ... subdued. Today had been a lot, and hope was a strange beast at the moment. She was vindicated, but she had also been forced to look directly at the truth of all of this. She supposed that was the flip side of pure, unvarnished truth. There was an ugliness to it.
“I was going to ask you to dinner sometime,” he said.
Well. That successfully got a leap out of her beleaguered heart.
“Am I too late?”
She looked down at the card. And then back up at him. “No. You’re right on time.”
Chapter Twenty
Daisy
Mischief is best enjoyed in the company of friends.
—Rules for Witches
“What is the emergency coffee meeting for?” Nora asked as she and Daisy walked into Soraya’s apartment at far too early an hour.
“I have a date!” Soraya’s exclamation was halfway between a shriek of delight and a wail of despair, which, frankly, Daisy could understand.
Zach, and sex with Zach, was great and wonderful, but also the newness was weird, and in the midst of a whole bunch of other newness, it was a lot.
“With hot across-the-hall neighbor?” Nora was bright eyed and swept past them into the kitchen, where Daisy could hear her clattering around looking for a mug, then helping herself to coffee. She’d taken a seat at the small corner table by the time Daisy and Soraya joined her.
“Yes,” Soraya confirmed. “Declan.”
“Oooh.” Nora rubbed her hands together.
Daisy spotted a tarot deck at the center of Soraya’s table. “Getting more comfortable?”
Soraya huffed a laugh. “Comfortablemight be the wrong word? Desperate, maybe.”
Nora took hold of the deck and opened the box, shuffling the cards in her hand. “Here, I’ll do a pull for you.” She laid a card out on the table. The Tower, with fire coming out the windows and men falling down to earth. “The Tower means he likes you,” Nora said sagely before tucking the card back into the deck and stuffing the whole deck quickly back into the box like she was trying to hit erase on that draw.
Soraya was fussing with her coffee maker. Clearly, a tarot card didn’t have the power to make her more anxious than she already was.
“I don’t have anything to wear!” She whirled away from the coffee maker. “All I have are church-mom outfits.”
“Your outfits are pretty,” Daisy said.
Soraya took a breath. “They’re outfits I chose to fit in with a certain group and a certain image, and they don’t fit anymore. They fit physically, but ...”
“You want an outfit that doesn’t say ‘going to a potluck.’ You want one that says ‘would like to get railed.’” Nora’s words were succinct and undeniable.
Soraya’s cheeks went red. “Honestly? Yes.”
“Then we need to go shopping. We were going to hang out today, and now we have a mission!” Nora was triumphant.
They started with iced coffee—because the coffeepot split three ways in Soraya’s apartment wasn’t enough—and trooped up the sidewalk of Hemlock, the flowers in full bloom, the breeze fluttering through the trees, casting a golden-green glow everywhere around them.
This was the kind of tourist stuff that Daisy never did. She was too busy organizing the house, taking care of the kids, basically too busy living here to actually enjoy being here. It was surprising to her that there were shops up on this end of town that she hadn’t even known were there. A brand-new potted-plant store with immaculate vibes, and a shop that had locally made candles and handcrafted soaps.
