“Excuse me for just a moment.”
I retreated to the back room.
The back room of Granger Hardware was not a glamorous space. Shelving units loaded with inventory lined the walls. A small desk was set to one side, and the ancient coffee maker predated my ownership of the store by at least fifteen years. The whole room smelled of cardboard and machine oil and the mustiness of a space that got used for storage more than anything else. I’d spent a significant portion of my life in this room. I’d done homework here as a child and cried here twice and had at least one conversation with Grandpa in here that I would carry for the rest of my life.
I stood in the middle of it now and pressed both hands on the desk as I fought to control my breath.
Gus had not been dying.
Gus had orchestrated the whole thing. The prognosis. The urgency. The dying wish delivered from a hospital bed, his words chosen with exquisite care, which I’d noted at the time and which now took on an entirely different meaning. He’d known exactly what he was doing. He’d recruited Ray, who had thirty-four years of medical credibility and a face you instinctively trusted. He’d sent his friend out to deliver a prognosis designed to make two people do something they’d been refusing to do on their own.
And it had worked.
We’d gotten married. We’d moved in together. We’d—the morning, the kitchen, the to be continued note sitting on the counter at home right now in Daniel’s handwriting?—
All of it because Gus had decided that twenty-three years of waiting for us to figure it out was long enough and had taken matters into his own hands.
I thought about Daniel at his kitchen table, talking through Alabama marriage law with the focus of a man who needed something to fix. I thought about the ring on my finger, and thevows I’d meant, and the joy on Grandpa’s face when Reverend Aldean pronounced us man and wife.
I thought about the fact that Daniel didn’t know any of this yet.
I pressed my lips together and inhaled through my nose and out through my mouth, which didn’t help. It never did. Then I straightened up, smoothed my shirt, and returned to the floor.
Ray still stood by the pumpkins with the medium-sized one under his arm, clearly waiting for sentencing.
When he saw my face, he said, “Obviously, it worked out. You and Daniel are—I mean, anyone can see that you’re?—”
“How much did it cost?”
He blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The pumpkin. How much?”
He looked down at the pumpkin. Then back at me. “Ellie?—”
“Six dollars,” I said. “For that size. Did you want anything else?”
He paid for the pumpkin. He tried twice more to say something. I smiled both times in a way that apparently communicated that the discussion was closed. He left with the pumpkin. I hoped he’d go home and think very hard about his choices. And possibly who his friends actually were.
Then I went back to work, because it was the last Saturday before Halloween, which meant customers. The pumpkins wouldn’t sell themselves. I was Gus Granger’s granddaughter, and I’d learned from the best how to hold something in until there was room to let it out.
I held it in until close. I counted the register and locked up before walking to my truck. I sat in the driver’s seat in the empty parking lot, staring at the windshield.
My grandfather had faked a deathbed.
He’d looked me in the eyes from a hospital bed and talked about leaving me alone and love not being somethingto be careless with, and he’d meant every word. Probably. The sentiment had been real, but the context had been manufactured. The dying wish of a man who wasn’t dying. The whole thing—the panic, the hospital, the wedding, the license, the night in the kitchen, Daniel at the table saying let me fix it—all of it set in motion by a seventy-three-year-old man with a fork and a decade of patience and absolutely no shame whatsoever.
I loved him.
I was furious at him.
I was furious at him in the helpless way you could only be furious at someone you loved completely, the way that had nowhere to go because underneath the fury was the undeniable fact that it had worked. I was sitting in this parking lot wearing Daniel Costello’s ring and thinking about a note on a kitchen counter and I was—I was happy. I had been happy all morning. Happy in a way I hadn’t been in longer than I wanted to admit, and that happiness had a direct line back to a hospital room and a dying wish that wasn’t actually a dying wish at all.
Which meant I owed everything I currently had to the scheming of an old man who’d looked at the two of us and decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who never doubted his own judgment, that we needed a push.
And then there was Daniel. Who didn’t know. Who’d gone into this thinking he was doing something for Gus and for me. Who’d sat at that kitchen table and assembled the plan with genuine love behind it. Who’d carried a ring in his pocket for four years without knowing why and put it on my finger in a hospital room and meant every word of his vows.
Daniel, who deserved to know that the emergency that started everything hadn’t been quite the emergency we’d thought. He’d said he didn’t regret any of it, but that was before. How would he feel now, knowing we’d been outright manipulated? That the whole deathbed scheme was a lie?
