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“I dunno,” Carson considered. “I’m more of a Poppy kind of guy. She’s the goldilocks of the three—Jo’s the hellcat, Daisy’s the good girl, and Poppy’s a bit of both.”
“I wouldn’t mind the good girl,” Cade noted. “She’s the cutest anyway.”
Something in my chest stirred. Probably because I still had the vision of her as I’d just seen her, with a smile on rosy lips, her heart-shaped face lit up until Doug nearly got his mug beaten in. All three sisters had inky black hair and electric blue eyes, but I thought Daisy was the prettiest of the three. I felt a curious urge to dump Cade out of his chair for thinking so too.
My expression must have been damning because Cade’s smile widened. “Looks like Keaton agrees.”
I offered him a bored look and went back to the invoices I wasn’t actually looking at. “I have work to do, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Did she look cute today when you saw her?” Cade asked. “What’d she have on?”
“The hell does it matter what she was wearing?” I answered.
“Was her hair up or down?” he prodded.
“You should really get on whatever dating app people use these days,” I suggested.
“Look at him. His jaw’s locked shut,” Carson said with his dimple showing.
“Keaton has a crush,” Cole sang.
“Why, because I won’t tell you what she was wearing? You act like I pay attention to shit like that,” I said, and normally, I didn’t. But I knew exactly what Daisy had worn—a cornflower blue sundress the color of her eyes, her pale shoulders cutting through spills of raven hair. Anybody who’d seen a woman like that would have remembered every detail, assuming they weren’t blind.
“Ask her out,” Carson nagged.
“You ask her out.”
But his voice softened, losing the teasing edge. “It’s been near five years. Are you ever gonna date, or are you gonna marry work instead?”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“And you’ve decided that someone is you,” he said.
“Who else?”
“I don’t know if you’ve counted recently,” Carson started, “but there are four of us.”
“Y’all don’t want to do it, and I do. So how about you go find yourselves dates and get out of my ass?”
Cade jumped out of his seat and ran back into the entry. “Marry me, Millie. Make me the happiest man on earth.”
She squealed, flustered and swatting at him as he spun her chair around in circles, and my other brothers laughed too, filing out of my office.
But Carson paused with his hand on my doorknob, turning back to me with a heavy brow. “There’re more to life than this. We just want you to be happy, that’s all.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he shut the door before I could get more than his name out.
So I sighed, turning my attention to the invoices in earnest, telling myself my brothers were wrong.
There wasn’t more to life than this, not for me.
3
THE AUDACITY
DAISY
“I’m so mad, I could spit,” Poppy said, setting the empty basket on the kitchen island.
I closed the back door to the kitchen and sighed. It’d been a demoralizing afternoon, the vitriol from some of our townspeople undermining any joy received from helping people.
Poppy fumed on, blustering around the kitchen to make coffee. “I just don’t understand it. You know, somebody sees a skinny dog, half-starved and freezing to death, and they take it home, care for it, nurse it back to health. But not another human being? Makes me sick to my stomach.”
Jo let out a sigh of her own. “I mean, it’s not like this problem doesn’t exist outside Lindenbach.”
“Of course it does,” she said, throwing a cabinet door closed. “But here? Here, where our town used to be kind? When we used to be giving? I thought we were better than this.” Clack, clack, clack, she slammed three coffee cups on the counter and whirled around to fill up the pot at the sink. “These people aren’t in another town, they’re in our town, and we have a moral obligation to help.”
“Well,” I started, “we could make more sandwiches—”
“Not sandwiches, Daisy. I mean help them. Give them a hand up, not put something in theirs and say goodbye.”
“What do you think we should do then?” I asked gently. “We’ve hired more than we can even find work for.”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m mad.” She shoved the pot home and assembled the filter and grounds, slapping the on button before whirling around to lean against the counter.
Jo and I shared a look.
“Well,” I started, “let’s noodle on it. We’ll think of something doable. Won’t we?”
“Always do,” Jo noted.
“I’ve gotta get out to hive six to help Mama,” I said, hoping for a subject change. “Come meet us when you’ve had your coffee?”
“You’re not having any?” Poppy was nearly pouting, a common reaction to noodling. Until she had a plan, she’d be like this.
