‘Says the man who never bothers with a second date.’
‘Hey! I’m trying to be all understanding and shit.’
‘Sorry. That was a low blow.’
‘And I will have you know, my dating style works very well for me.’
‘I’m so happy for you,’ Elliot said dryly, watching the seagulls swoop over the water. It was nice to hassle his brother again. He’d missed it.
‘Anyway, I’m finishing this job at the end of the week,’ Caleb said, getting back to the task at hand. ‘I can be in Dream Harbor the week after.’
Elliot blew out a sigh of relief. ‘Thank you. I owe you.’
‘I’ll be sure to hold this over you forever,’ Caleb said with another chuckle.
‘I would expect nothing less.’
‘See you in a week.’
His brother would be here in a week to save his ass, something that just an hour ago would have made Elliot want to crawl into a hole, but now he felt nothing but relief.
ChapterTwenty-Six
It was well past midnight, and Daisy was still up.
The contents of the box her grandmother brought her were spilled out on her bed, like they had been most nights in the week since Beltane. She’d given up trying to be organized and had just been riffling through things, making piles based on her own chaotic categories. She’d found more pictures of Great-Aunt Daisy—Aunt D, as she’d started to think of her—some with the Elliot lookalike and some without. Thanks to the dates scrawled on the backs, Daisy narrowed down their relationship to a two-year period in the mid-twenties. She still didn’t know what happened between them, but her great-aunt just didn’t glow the same way in the later pictures as she did in the earlier ones. Something haunted lingered behind her eyes, even late into her life.
Daisy had not taken her grandmother’s advice about not getting lost in the past. She was all-in.
She probably should have listened. She probably should have put that old box aside and focused on her work. Sheshould have made beautiful things with her hands. She should have had coffee with her mom and visited Iris and held baby Owen. She should have lived her own life, but instead she’d spent an awful lot of time sorting through that cardboard box, falling deeper and deeper into the past. She couldn’t help herself. She needed toknowabout Aunt D, about why she felt so connected to her. The woman had taken up permanent residence inside Daisy’s head. She visited her in her dreams, always sad, always searching, driving Daisy to dig deeper, to look for more answers.
Her great-aunt needed her.
It didn’t matter that she was long dead.
Daisy needed to help her.
Her phone buzzed from somewhere under the piles of papers on her bed. She tossed a few photos aside until she found it.
A text from Elliot.
Oh, right, digging through this box had also given her something to obsess about other than her own life.
Are you still awake?
She couldn’t help but smile at his complete sentence with proper punctuation and everything. Elliot never sent a ‘u up’ text.
Yeah. Probably shouldn’t be. What are you doing up?
There was a three-part American Revolution doc on.
Nerd.
If loving history is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.
Daisy laughed out loud.
Are you still looking through that old box? That’s history, you know.
