Page 62 of Wild Sanctuary

15

DAISY

Felix is already talking as he pulls onto the track. He plucks my hat from my lap, and tosses it into the back seat, not missing a beat.

I know I shouldn’t look back. I do anyway.

The orchard is still lit, the string lights swaying in the apple trees, warm and gold against the dark. Wyatt is standing exactly where I left him. Hat low, hands in his pockets, not moving. Just standing there like a man who has nowhere he needs to be.

And then I see the blue dress.

Shelby. Moving toward him from the direction of the tent.

My chest goes numb as I face forward and inhale slowly through my nose.

Felix talks the entire drive. About the flight. About the rental car, which is an Audi, because of course it’s an Audi. About the traffic out of Bozeman, and the GPS losing signal on the county road, and how he almost hit a deer, which he describes with the exaggerated outrage of a man who has never encountered wildlife outside of a David Attenborough documentary.

I nod in the right places. Make the right sounds. My body is in the passenger seat of a rental car that smells like new leather and airport coffee, but the rest of me is still standing in an orchard with string lights in the branches and a man’s hand on my face and the whole world narrowed down to the sound of my name in his mouth.

I press my fingers to my cheek. The skin is cool now. His hand isn’t there anymore.

But I can still feel it.

“Babe?”

I blink. Felix’s glancing at me from the driver’s seat with that half-smile he does when he thinks I’m being spacey. “You okay? You’ve been quiet since we left.”

“Sorry. Long night.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone who didn’t just have her entire world rearranged by a whisper in the dark. “The fundraiser was a lot.”

“Yeah, I could tell. That whole tent thing looked pretty intense.” He reaches over and squeezes my knee. “Who was the cowboy?”

My stomach drops, and I turn toward the window before my face can give me away.

“What?”

“The guy. In the orchard. Tall, hat, looked like he’d been carved out of a mountain.” Felix shrugs one shoulder. “You two seemed pretty deep in conversation.”

He says it lightly. Of course he does. Because it hasn’t occurred to Felix that a man like Wyatt Hartley could be worth taking seriously.

“That’s Wyatt. He owns the ranch I’m writing about.” The words come out steady in the same careful, civil voice I’ve been using since the break-up. “He was just checking on me after the auction.”

“Nice of him.” Felix turns back to the road. Satisfied. Subject closed.

And there it is. The same patient dismissal he gave me over risotto three weeks ago, when I told him we were done and his response was to hold my hand as he reminded me that he still has power over me.

He only sees a woman he can still manage. He doesn’t see who I really am.

Not my work, not my ambition, not the things that are truly important to me. He sees the woman who showed up to his galas and laughed at his stories and fit neatly into the life he’d already planned. Everything else—everything that makes me me—he just waited for it to pass.

He’s still waiting.

At least the car’s nice. Very comfortable leather for an emotional crisis.

The attempt at humor falls flat. Even inside my own head, it falls flat.

* * *

The cabin is dark when we pull up. Felix kills the engine and the silence rushes in, sudden and enormous, filling the car like a flash flood.