Page 50 of What Love Can Do
“Who was that, Bee?” Old Man Phillips asked, his voice matching the one Quinn had heard in an unpleasant phone call just a few weeks ago.
Your grandson, Quinn thought, the words poised on his lips. Whether you like it or not.
But as Beatriz rolled up her window, her chastising look replaced with faux cheer, dismissing the whole encounter as perhaps a run-in with a lost driver just looking for directions, she replied, “Nobody,” and drove past Quinn into her driveway.
Twenty
Lilly hung up the phone and sighed.
Immediately after confronting her mother in the vineyards, she’d set out to find her replacement. After speaking with several bakers, she realized what a hard task it’d be to pick one. All of them sounded fantastic. All of them were more than qualified. She’d set up interviews for the rest of the week—that way, Mom, Mellie, and Cook could all try their goodies and decide for themselves who would be the best candidate to replace her.
The wave of relief that washed over her at that moment was freeing.
Everything would be taken care of.
The world would not fall apart without her there, as her mother had made it seem.
She was on her way. Time to move on.
If it hadn’t been for Quinn, however, things could have ended differently. Internship or not, she might have stayed in Green Valley. She might have decided that Mom needed her more than Life did and given her internship away to someone else. She liked to think that wouldn’t have happened, that she would have found the strength all on her own to face her mother, but the point was, she hadn’t needed to. With Quinn’s support, she’d done it, and even though he hadn’t been by her side physically when she had, he’d been with her in spirit.
He was an amazing man. She loved him. And she wasn’t going to let things end this way between them. She had to find him, and there were only so many places he could have gone to stay. Assuming he’d stayed in Forestville, of course.
But before she started driving to a bunch of hotels in search of Quinn, Lilly needed to take care of a couple of things first. While the thought of not seeing Quinn immediately, especially after what had happened earlier, twisted her stomach in knots, she was comforted by the knowledge that he wasn’t going anywhere. His brothers weren’t due to arrive for another few days. And she wouldn’t be leaving for Miami until three days after that.
She had time to make things right with Quinn, and to prove she’d stand by him.
No matter what.
An hour later, Lilly drove toward Langley Bridge. It was a gorgeous October afternoon, the kind that bathed every hilly contour in golden autumn light and made Lilly want to bake up a pumpkin spice storm. She should enjoy the surroundings while she could, since Miami in the Fall meant hurricane season more than it did maple leaf season.
Driving along wine country roads, it hit her all of a sudden how much she was going to miss her hometown a week from now. Maybe she’d return here after her internship after all. It would all depend on what happened between her and Quinn, of course. Maybe that was wishful thinking but…
She glanced at Maggie’s journal lying on the passenger seat. It contained the voice of a thousand regrets, and Lillian knew, even though life had gotten too busy for Quinn’s mother to write in the journal past her first baby’s birth, that Maggie had regretted not making her dreams come true.
“Even though we didn’t know each other,” she spoke aloud to no one, her voice filling the confines of the car, sounding alien to her, “I’m going to make my life count, Maggie. I’m going to do what I love and I’m going to fight for the man I love. Thanks for the inspiration.”
If she listened intently to the silence, she could almost hear Maggie speak back.
Arriving at the bridge, Lilly parked the car and got out. A gust of wind blew through the valley, chilling her to the bone, so she pulled her sweater closer to her. Below the bridge, the water in the creek bubbled and rushed over the stony riverbed.
She wanted to take pictures of it and the surrounding area. She had other pictures, of course, but none taken after she and Quinn had been here, or spent that special time in the wood shed.
The memory of it made her arms tingle and her legs weaken.
No man had ever made her feel that way. No man ever would.
Pulling out her phone, she opened up her camera app and began taking pictures of the bridge, the surrounding trees, then she walked all the way to the wood shed and took pics of that too.
Pausing to stare at the spot where she and Quinn had laid down and made love formed tears in her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. She refused to accept she’d never be with him again.
Finally, she returned to her car, bowed her head, and lost it. She cried not because she’d lost faith in making things work with Quinn but because she’d let him down in the first place. No matter how much she’d done to try and make him feel at home—from driving him and his brother to the Pacific, to taking him on a tour of her family’s vineyard, to bringing him straight to his family’s winery door, it hadn’t been enough. That moment of truth mattered to him, and she’d dropped the ball. If only she could rewind the clock.
She couldn’t. But she could spend the rest of her life making it up to him. Starting with creating a photo book documenting the town in which his mam grew up. She’d make several copies. One for Quinn and each of his brothers. And one for her.
Calmer and more resolved than ever, Lilly scrolled through the photos she’d taken. Then, pulling it toward her, she flipped through Maggie’s journal, scanning her words again. Using little scraps of a napkin in her car, she marked important moments—the first time she’d kissed Grant O’Neill, the time he’d bought her flowers, and the time they’d stopped at the corner store to buy picnic items, and it’d started to rain, so he pulled her under the eaves, and they’d kissed for almost a whole hour.
Lilly put the car in reverse a minute then drove back to the main highway, hell bent on making use of the sunlight before it faded completely. Five minutes later, she’d pulled into Forestville Town Park and gotten out, smiling at the sounds of children milking the daylight for all it was worth in the playground. Two little girls swung as high as they could possibly go on the swing set, reaching for the sky.