She took my hand down from my forehead. “Could be, but even so, his behavior in response was poor. Take a few days and then talk to him?”
I nodded my agreement rather than speak.
“Is it okay if I tell him you need space, but you’ll call him in a few days?”
“Yeah, that’s okay. Thanks, Charity. I know we need to talk, but this headache is a bad one.”
She took my arm and led me back into my room, where it was dark and quiet. “Time for bed. I’ll lock the door behind me when I leave, and I’ll check on you again tomorrow. I want you to rest tonight. Hopefully, things won’t be quite as overwhelming in the morning.”
I climbed under the sheets and rested my head on the pillow. I was glad to be horizontal again to relieve the pounding in my head. “My existence is overwhelming, Charity. I haven’t been able to do anything right since the day I was born. Hell, if it weren’t for Mathias and his family, we wouldn’t even be talking. I understand that to the bottom of my soul, but I’m tired of the constant pain in my chest.”
She sat on the bed and rubbed circles on my back, telling me to rest and generally making me feel like someone in this world cared about me and my feelings. It was comforting, and I snuggled down into the pillow. Unfortunately, my broken heart still wished it were Mathias sitting next to me.
♥
I put my Nissan into park and turned off the ignition. The beautiful barn before me had been renovated years back and turned into the thriving restaurant and bar now known as the Apple Orchard. Indeed, behind the barn was a beautiful orchard that would soon be ripe with the juicy red fruit.
Laverne owns both the Apple Orchard and the only campground in Plentiful, Wisconsin. We’re a small town on the edge of Lake Superior, not too far from Bayfield, and you can see the Apostle Islands from our shores. We stay alive on tourism dollars, so while the clientele may change, the residents never do. If you’re from Plentiful, you never leave Plentiful. There are always a few transplants, people like Gulliver, Charity, Mathias, and myself, but we’re the rarity. No one willingly moves into a town this small unless they have a business to run. In our case, we do—or did, up until three days ago when I stopped going to work.
I had no idea why Mathias wanted to meet me here on a Thursday afternoon. The Apple Orchard wasn’t even open at this time of day. I sat in my car and stared out the windshield at the red barn. Maybe I should give him the car back. After all, he bought it for me so I’d be able to run around for work errands without borrowing his car. That changed Monday when I told him to get out of my life. This car was the property of Butterfly Junction, so I’d have to give it back. Truthfully, I didn’t care about the car. I hadn’t cared about anything over the last few days. I suppose some would call that depression, but I called it learning to live with my new normal.
After Charity left on Monday night, I slept hard and was thankful to wake up on Tuesday morning without my head pounding. I did nothing but putter around the apartment, watch old movies, eat takeout from the café, and pretend the world didn’t exist outside my apartment. I had a two-hour stare off with that little green book sitting on my desk but didn’t come to any great revelation about how to move on with my life.
The outside world did exist, though, and late Tuesday night, or maybe it was early Wednesday morning, I forced myself to read the text messages Mathias had sent. I couldn’t say they said much, other than with each text, you could sense his desperation with my lack of response. The first few were typical,I’m sorry, I was just kidding, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelingskinds of texts, but by the fortieth he was just desperately repeating my name over and over in full caps. The voice mails were much of the same. His first few messages were contrite but pissy. The next several were contrite but concerned, and the last sixty were him calling my name in a way that said maybe he did care about me just a little bit.
I had texted Mathias at three a.m. on Wednesday morning and apologized for worrying him. Not that I had any reason to apologize, but if nothing else, that part of the situation did make me feel bad. He answered me immediately, as though he had been holding the phone in his hand, waiting for my text. He assured me he understood, and after some idle and forced chitchat via text, he asked me to meet him here today at one p.m. So, here I was, but here he was not.
Knowing Mathias—and I know Mathias—he was caught up in a meeting and wasn’t coming at all. I slid my phone out of my purse and checked for messages or voice mails, but there weren’t any. I climbed out of the car and locked it, sliding my phone into my back pocket. Maybe he wasn’t coming, maybe he was, but I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him. I strolled around the side of the barn and into the apple orchard behind it.
The trees were filled with leaves and little buds that promised fruit when spring turned to summer. The beauty of the afternoon sun through the trees was breathtaking—even without the reddened fruit on the branches. I held my arms out wide, feeling the roughness of the bark on my skin and smiling at the bees buzzing from tree to tree. Not that long ago, we’d been battling bad guys to save those same pollinators.
Gulliver and Mathias spent countless hours on a pesticide that would protect the bees and butterflies while keeping pests away from farm crops. It hadn’t been easy, and as it turned out, it was downright perilous. The scar that ran up my right arm was proof enough of that. The pesticide Butterfly Junction was producing was so disruptive to the market that others saw the dollar signs and wanted it for their own. The blackmailers broke my arm and coerced me into working for them. They assured me they would be the ones to profit from it, or Mathias and I would be the ones to die.
I may have folded to their blackmail, but I never agreed to get them the actual formula. I stayed alive by giving the blackmailers fake formulas while Gulliver and Mathias completed theirs. Unfortunately for Charity, she got the brunt of the blackmailers’ anger. They ran her off the road, and she took a bullet in her ankle before she escaped on foot to this orchard. That was a time in my life I had to force from my mind daily. I prayed someday it wouldn’t be the first thing I thought of when I woke up and the last thing I thought about when I went to bed. I’d spent the previous year trying to make it up to all of them, but now my time at Butterfly Junction had to end. After meeting with Mathias today, I would get serious about finding a new job. What choice did I have now? Was it good to break away from Mathias and start my own life? Probably. Was it going to hurt like hell? Absolutely.
I lowered myself to a bench between two McIntosh trees and stared out over the orchard. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the beauty before me. I’d been too worried about staying alive. At the same time, I was so worried I was going to die that I’d wanted Mathias to know the truth if I didn’t make it. I wrote him a letter, and when Charity found it hidden inside my desk, she read it. Unfortunately, she also let Mathias read it. It never crossed my mind that he would see it while I was still alive. Everything I wrote was true, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t awkward now that he knew the truth.
I love Mathias.
I’ve loved him instantly and without question since I was eight years old and innocent about how painful the world of love was. The first day I met him in the park, I was so happy to be away from my parents’ mobile home at the edge of town. I was on the swings when I saw him the first time in the distance, and by the time he reached me, I was already drawn to him like a moth to a flame. He introduced himself to me and immediately took me home to his mother like a stray dog in need of love. From that day forward, we were tethered by a bond we could feel but couldn’t see.
Since that day twenty years ago, I’d loved him through every girlfriend he had and every breakup he went through. I loved him through the college party days and college graduation. I’d loved him through every false start and every business success. I’d done nothing but love him, and yet, in the end, he would always see me as the eight-year-old girl on the swings wearing her Strawberry Shortcake underwear, peanut butter matted in her curls, and the sickly-sweet odor of marijuana thick on her skin.
I stroked my curls with my fingers, a nervous habit I’d developed years ago. I didn’t know if I was making sure everything was neat or if I was looking for something to do with my trembling hands. Most likely the latter. I glanced down to see my fingers pointing to the sky again. The spasticity of those fingers was getting worse, but the insurance I could afford was limited in scope, so I just kept taking my medication and praying it got better instead of worse. Probably not the soundest medical plan ever designed, but I didn’t have a lot of options right now. Mathias wanted me to stop being stubborn and take the insurance plan through the business, but I refused. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get insurance again if something happened and I lost my job. Now I’m glad I didn’t fold to his demands. I’d be without a job and basic coverage. Once I found a new position somewhere, I would have to find a neurologist. I had neglected my health for too long to take care of Mathias. The headaches told me the piper had come for his pay.
“Honey? Are you out here? I saw your car!” Mathias called out.
Say something, Honey.
I couldn’t make my body do anything I told it to do, just like Monday at Butterfly Junction.What was going on?God, I hoped there wasn’t another headache coming on. I couldn’t deal with another one in this already horrible week.
In a heartbeat, he was standing in front of me, drawing a deep breath. He was all Scandinavian god today. He wore chinos, his signature sexy tee stretched across his muscular chest, and a white Apple watch that accentuated his thin wrist. His canvas shoes were white, and all I could think was that he’d regret walking in the orchard in them. That was a lie. All I could think about was his shirt. He buys them from offshore somewhere, and they’re the softest thing you’ve ever had against your skin. It’s what’s under the shirt that makes my heart skip beats, though. His hard chest, his strong arms, and the way he always looks so damn sexy wearing something as simple as a T-shirt was my undoing every time.
Why couldn’t I speak?
“Honey?” he asked, kneeling to make eye contact with me.
A gasp of air tore from my lips, and I inhaled the fresh afternoon sunshine. I cleared my throat before I spoke. “Hi,” I said, not making eye contact.
