“Oh my God, what?” I stare at her waiting for her to say she’s making a really unfunny joke but her eyes fill with tears and she just nods her head. I finally pull my hands out of my pockets and grab hers with them. “Maggie, that’s insane. Just because you dated me?”
Dated. I used the past tense and we both catch it and our eyes meet.
She blinks and looks away. “Yes and because I also told them I wanted to merge the farms and create a partnership and that I told you about the container units.”
She takes a ragged breath and exhales in a gust that turns the air white. “I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to tell them anything. They never had to know about any of it, but I just… I am sick of the fighting and the lies and all of it. So I told them everything, and Clyde went off like nothing I have ever seen.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No, actually I think if he was it would have been less terrifying,” Maggie replies. “He hates your family on a level I have never experienced before.”
“What are you going to do now if he really sells the farm?”
“I don’t know what anyone in my family will do,” Maggie replies quietly. “Everyone is basically losing their shit, and I just ran back to my apartment and hid. Even Daisy disappeared today. She said she was going on a drive to clear her head and would be back by midnight.”
“I saw her this morning. She wanted to help with my meeting with the dean,” I say, my fingers still laced with hers. “Everyone in my family is being as irrational as Clyde.”
Maggie nods. She lifts her head again and speaks the words I don’t want to say. “I think we need to take a breather here.”
“I don’t want to, but I think you’re right,” I reply and every word, as it tumbles from my mouth feels like it’s taking a piece of my heart with it. “Just for now. Let everything settle down a little. I can concentrate on hockey.”
“I can get the winter marketing plan for the farm in order and concentrate on school,” Maggie replies. “Even if he is selling, it will take some time and I’ll be damned if I’m going to tank all my hard work with the farm in the meantime.”
We stare at each other. God, I can’t believe that there was a time when avoiding her was as easy and normal as breathing, and now the idea of going back to that makes me feel like I’m suffocating. She pulls her hands from mine. “I’m going to go.”
I just stand there like a chump and watch her start down the street. That lasts all of forty seconds before I break into a sprint and catch her, spinning her around and crushing my lips against hers. And she kisses me back…until she doesn’t. Pulling away and inhaling sharply.
“That won’t be the last time I kiss you, Maggie,” I find myself promising. “It’s just the last time for now.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tater Tot,” she says back and then keeps walking away. And this time, I let her.
21
Maggie
I’m sitting on the balcony, staring at the flowers Tate secretly planted. I’ve been coming out here a lot despite the cold weather at all hours of the day and night to stare at them and imagine him planting them. Reliving the feeling I felt when I saw them and realized what he had done for me. How he must have felt about me to do it. The first serious frost will happen any day now and they’ll wither and die, and that will be the last thing about us to be taken away against my will. I hear someone walk into my room and then Daisy whisper-yells my name. I don’t bother to get up. I left the door to the balcony open so it only takes her a second to find me.
“It’s freaking freezing out here, you lunatic,” Daisy chastises me and wraps her arms around herself. “Get inside!”
“I’m wrapped in three wool blankets and a quilt. I’m fine,” I say flatly. “What are you doing up and dressed at barely seven in the morning on a Sunday?”
“I’m fixing things,” Daisy says and walks over and yanks me out of my chair. She pulls me back into my room and closes the door behind us, leaning against it. “Shower. Get dressed. We’re going on a road trip.”
“I don’t want to go on a road trip,” I reply, and instead of following her orders I flop onto my bed.
“Magnolia,” she sighs. “I found our grandmother.”
The words seem to take a minute to float across the room and settle in my brain. As soon as they do I sit up, which is a little hard in my blanket cocoon. “What?”
Daisy pulls herself off the door and walks over to stand in front of me. “The genealogy site matched us. It happened the day after the whole Jumbotron nightmare so I didn’t tell you. You had so much going on and to be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was legit.”
“But you think it’s legit now?”
Daisy nods and uses both hands to tuck her hair behind her ears then laces her fingers behind her neck and stares at me with excited brown eyes. “I know it’s legit now because I met her.”
“Oh my God, what?”
This was not how I was expecting my Sunday to go. This will be the sixth day since Tate and I put things on indefinite hold. I was going to spend it like I’ve been spending all my days, zombie-walking through my daily chores and tasks: homework, farm work, attending class, blah, blah, blah—and then curling up in a mournful ball and thinking of nothing but him.
