She’d been expecting a proposal.
That was the worst part.
Elena had taken her to Bistro du Midi, a fancy French place they’d only ever been to on birthdays or anniversaries, and the restaurant served the most decadent chocolate soufflé—it was so good, Daphne had dreams about it. So on a cool evening near the end of April, when Elena came home and took Daphne in her arms, kissing her passionately and whispering “Let me take you out” against her mouth, Daphne had felt a zing of anticipation.
She’d smiled, pulled back so she could look at her girlfriend, so beautiful and elegant with her long dark hair and pale skin, her nearly black eyes, and a beauty mark right above the left side of her top lip, like that supermodel from the nineties whose name Daphne could never remember.
Her future wife.
And she thought,Wow,I’m so lucky.
Twenty-nine days later, she was waking up with chiropractic problems and questionable hygiene, three hundred bucks and some change left in her checking account, and exactly one friend, whom she hadn’t spoken to in six months before she called Vivian begging for her couch.
She’d had nowhere else to go. Contacting her own family was out of the question, and Vivian was the only person she knew who wasn’t inside Elena’s art-world bubble—literally every one of Daphne’s “friends” from the last few years was Elena’s friends, and they’d clearly chosen her in the split.
And why shouldn’t they?
Daphne was twenty-five, unemployed, inexperienced, and was starting to suspect she’d been the equivalent of a trophy wife for the last three years.
She’d spent the first few years of college in a kind of bubble too. After high school, she’d left her small Tennessee town with a full scholarship for tuition, but that hadn’t covered room and board, textbooks, supplies, toothpaste, face cleanser, and new underwear when the pairs she’d had since she was sixteen grew too thin and worn to be considered practical, so she’d waited tables at a middling Boston restaurant at least twenty hours a week. When she wasn’t in class or serving medium-rare steaks, she focused on her art, trying to produce good work. Sometimes, she managed to hang out with Vivian’s friends, watching their community with wonder, trying to figure out what kind of queer she wanted to be. She’d known she was a lesbian from age nine, then spent the next nine years hiding it from her preacher father and rigid mother. Finally letting herself out was terrifying, and while she went on a few dates here and there in college, she always managed to get in her own way when it came to sex, or even making out.
And then she met Elena Watson, the curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, where Daphne had landed a coveted senior-year internship.
The rest, as they say, was very depressing history.
The only glimmer of light in all this gloom was her summer job. Vivian’s aunt Mia lived in a small town in New Hampshire, close to where Vivian had grown up, and she was opening a lake resort this summer.
Tomorrow, in fact.
By some miracle, Vivian had managed to convince her very generous aunt to hire Daphne to teach art classes. Daphne had no idea why Mia agreed. She hadn’t even talked to Daphne, really,but Daphne suspected it had something to do with Vivian’s desperation to get Daphne out of her hair, and the fact that there was another art instructor on staff as well, a local person Mia knew and trusted, and with whom Daphne would also share a cabin.
All of which was very, very fair.
On top of that, Mia had emailed Daphne a few days ago to see if it was okay to share her digital portfolio—which Miahadat least requested before hiring her—with a guest named Nicola Reece, who had asked about the art instructors’ work.
A curator at a museum in London, no less.
While this information had sparked a bit of interest in Daphne—curators had the power to make or break careers in the art world, after all—she was also quite tired of, well, curators and their power to make or break careers in the art world. Elena had made it very clear over the course of their doomed relationship that Daphne’s career would not be made.
Regardless, as Daphne stretched her arms into the air, she tried to drum up a little excitement for her summer ahead. She’d googled Cloverwild and it was beautiful, every photo featuring a sparkling sapphire lake and bright green trees, a veritable paradise. She could almost smell the fresh air already, and she knew she needed to get out of Boston. So while the job didn’t pay all that much, she at least had a roof over her head, and three whole months to figure out what to do with her sad, single, solitary life.
“You almost ready?” Vivian asked, coming out of her room with her dance bag slung over one shoulder. “If you want me to drop you at the train station, we need to leave now. I’ve got rehearsal in an hour.”
“What?” Daphne asked, then realized she’d been sitting on the couch staring out the window for the last twenty minutes, still in her sleeping tank and shorts, hair still a rat’s nest on top of her head. “Crap. Yeah. Ten minutes!”
She shot up—a move that made her dizzy—and ran for the bathroom for the fastest shower of her life, which with the time constraint now meant she would not be utilizing shampoo and conditioner.
“Ten minutes!” she yelled again.
And right before she closed the door, she heard Vivian sigh.
Daphne couldn’t getinto her cabin. The door unlocked just fine with her key card, but when she tried to push it open, she was met with resistance.
And this—this dark green wooden door that would only open a few inches while she stood on the log cabin’s porch between two red Adirondack chairs—was the final straw. After an hour-long ride in a train car that smelled like Doritos, all she wanted was to lie down and stare at the ceiling.
But no, she was well and truly doomed.
Never mind her useless college degree, lack of financial security or professional prospects—this recalcitrant door was the real proof that she couldn’t function as a human being. As she stood there, her flowing tears turning into audible sobs, she knew she was being ridiculous, but that was the thing about final straws: They rarely made any sense whatsoever.
