Page 61 of Hot Dad Summer

“Needing you and wanting you aren’t the same thing, Daisy. We know the difference. So do you.”

I couldn’t answer him. If I’d opened my mouth right then, everything would have come out of it and I was too emotionally wrecked already.

I ran up the stairs, locked myself in my bedroom, and slid under the blanket, wishing that Hank was with me.

47

***Daisy***

Iwoke up at 10:40 in the morning, which for a woman whose body had been getting up at 4:30 to proof dough since culinary school was less like sleeping in and more like coming out of anesthesia. I was still in yesterday’s clothes, my eyes felt like they’d been rolled in sanding sugar, and it took me a full minute of staring at the ceiling to understand that my body hadn’t slept late, it had shut down entirely and rebooted. My phone showed nothing from the men, who were respecting my boundary so completely that I loved them for it and resented them for it in the same breath, and one worried text from Kacey that I’d never answered. The house below me was silent in a way it hadn’t been all summer, the kids still at Cameron’s, and I missed their noise so much it told me something I wasn’t ready to look at yet.

So I did what any woman in emotional freefall does. I called my best friend. Kacey answered on the second ring with the bakery roaring behind her, and I heard a door thunk shut and the sound go muffled and cold. She’d taken me into the walk-in. Our confessional.

“Talk.”

I filled her in on everything. The kitchen, the ambush, all of it, every arrow they’d fired and where each one had landed. It took a while. When I finished there was a silence long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.

“Okay.” Kacey’s voice had gone very calm, which anyone who knew her understood was the most dangerous possible sign. “I have a piping bag, a rental car, and no fear of the law, Daisy. I will drive to Lake George in my robe and beat that ex-boyfriend of yours with a very stale baguette.”

“Kacey.”

“Day-old ciabatta. It’s basically a nightstick.”

“I’m not bailing you out of a Lake George jail.”

“Lily would bail me out. Lily supports violence against egotistical assholes with baked goods.” A shelf rattled, like she’d leaned against it. “Babe. I need you to hear me on one thing and then I’ll let you go back to your spiral. Tyler’s opinions are not evidence. That man once told you gluten intolerance was a personality disorder. He is not a reliable narrator of anything, least of all you. You want evidence? Look at what those three men have shown you all summer. From what you’ve told me they are falling head over heels and want to give you the world.”

I was crying again, except I was also laughing, which with Kacey was pretty much the standard combination. “Brooke said something about Flynn. That they had a thing, before. I’m sure it’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true. Brooke also said her lip filler was ‘natural fullness.’” Papers or boxes shifted. “But you’ve got that wobble in your voice, so go ask him. Not because you believe her. Because fuck her for trying to write your story for you. Right?”

“Right.”

“Say it like you own the best bakery east of the Mississippi.”

“Right.”

“There she is.” Someone banged on the walk-in door and Kacey yelled something threatening about croissants that I chose not to hear in detail. “I love you. Go get your answer. And if anyone needs a stale baguette beating, you know my rates.”

I hung up feeling steadier than I’d woken up, which was Kacey’s magic and always had been. The splinter was still in there, sitting right where Flynn’s silence had left it. But now I had a plan for it, and a plan has always been the difference between me and drowning.

I went downstairs for coffee and never made it to the pot. The door to Wes’s office was almost closed, and through the gap came a voice that turned my stomach before my brain even labeled it. Tyler. Inside, talking with Wes and Max.

The old Daisy would have announced herself immediately so nobody could think she was eavesdropping. The new Daisy stood in the hallway in yesterday’s clothes and listened on purpose.

“...because you guys encouraged Daisy to cut Brooke off, that’s why!” Tyler’s voice cracked somewhere in the middle of it. “She went through everything, Wes. Everything. You know what a suite in Santorini Greece costs in late June? I do. I know what it costs for eleven nights, because she said the light was better there for her content. Her content. It was supposed to pay for itself. The brands were supposed to come.”

“The brands.” Wes’s voice sounded annoyed.

“There was a photographer in Positano. A drone guy. You don’t want to know what a drone guy costs.” Something creaked, like Tyler had dropped into a chair. “And then Daisy shut her cards down out of nowhere Brooke used ALL of my money. My trust. What was left of it.”

“What was left of it,” Max repeated, “don’t you mean what was left of the money Wes gave you from his own trust?”

“It goes fast! Europe is expensive!” He paused, then said the closest thing to honesty I’d ever heard out of him. “It’s gone. All of it. And I’m done with her. I mean it this time. She’s a leech. She latched on and she drained me and she felt nothing while taking everything I have.”

I stood in the hallway with my hand over my mouth. My baby sister had gone through Tyler’s trust fund like a wood chipper, and he’d just described her, without one flicker of self-awareness, using the exact words I would’ve used to describe him. The irony was so thick I could have frosted a cake with it.

“You came here to tell us your girlfriend spent all of your money,” Wes said. “Or is there a number you’re working up to.”