Page 106 of Fake it ’Til Fall

Forrest: I’m gifted.

Daisy: Let’s not get ambitious.

Chapter Fourteen

Forrest

We leave Boston at four-thirty in the morning, which is not a time so much as a consequence.

It was Daisy’s idea, technically, though she framed it as mine the way she frames most things: by saying it out loud with enough confidence that reality got embarrassed and adjusted.

We’ll go up Saturday. First thing. Beat the traffic.

I agreed because beating traffic is reasonable, and because the alternative was driving up Friday night, which meant arriving in Winterberry after dark, with one of us in a guest room and the other in a question neither of us wanted to answer.

So.

Four-thirty.

The traffic we are beating doesn’t exist. There’s no one on the road but us, one trucker, and the darkness that makes a man too honest if he isn’t careful.

Daisy sits in the passenger seat with a travel mug she hasn’t touched and a notebook she hasn’t opened, both held in her lap like talismans. She’s wearing leggings, boots, an oversized sweater the color of burnt sugar, and a scarf looped around her neck like she’s trying to hide from the first real cold snap of October.

Puck is in the back, stretched across the whole bench, snoring with the abandon of an animal who has never worried about family gossip, career damage, or where he ranks in a woman’s fake relationship rollout.

Lucky bastard.

“You can sleep,” I tell her.

“I don’t sleep in cars.”

“Everyone sleeps in cars.”

“I have trust issues with momentum.” She turns the mug in her hands. “Also, if I close my eyes, I’ll start thinking, and if I start thinking, I’ll remember that we’re about to walk into my mother’s vineyard and pretend we’re romantically involved before seven in the morning. Then I’ll have to open the door and roll out of a moving vehicle, and you’ll have to explain that to Puck.”

“He’s asleep.”

“He’s sensitive when awake. It’s a whole thing.”

I keep my eyes on the road.

The headlights pull the highway out of the dark a piece at a time, and I think—not for the first time and not for the last—that this is the longest I’ve ever been alone with Daisy where neither of us has an easy exit.

At the café, she can go refill something.

At the counter, I can take Puck outside.

In a car, there’s nowhere to retreat unless someone wants to make local news.

“Why seven?” she asks suddenly.

“You said first thing.”

“I said first thing. You did math and landed on seven like a serial killer with a planner.”

“Seven means we can help your mother at the vineyard and have dinner at Mom’s.”

She goes quiet.