was twenty-three, he was twenty-four. Not that young. We were all so incredibly happy when they got engaged. Do you honestly think that breaking it was her choice?”
“Lee is incredibly happy with her life now.”
“Now. Yes. But it took a while. It took a long while. Years.” Mary Jane said that last word as if she knew all about things taking years. Alex Stewart again.
“And you’re saying that’s all because of Tucker Reid?”
“He dumped her! They might have pretended that it was mutual, but it wasn’t. It was down to two things.” Mary Jane checked the first one off on her fingers. “Because of the accident, and because—” But even though the second finger came up, she stopped abruptly, closed her mouth, and the second reason didn’t get spoken.
Daisy’s attention had caught on the first reason, however. “The accident? Really? You think it was down to that? Because Lee had some scarring?”
“In large part, yes.” But she sounded hesitant and awkward.
“You think Tucker is as superficial as that?” Daisy was shocked about it, for some reason. Disappointed. It had never occurred to her to question the motives of Lee’s ex in such a way. She’d taken the whole canceled wedding at face value. They’d both had second thoughts. They’d sensibly called it off. It happened.
She’d been twenty-one years old at the time, and excitedly absorbed in her own life. She remembered giving her first impression of Tucker in a drawled aside to her mother. “Well, he certainly seems like the strong silent type...”
She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t been a statement of dislike, either. She’d shared the family’s happiness about the upcoming wedding and had thought of Tucker as someone who’d be great for Lee, but not for herself—definitely not her type.
“Do Mom and Dad think this, too?” she asked her sister.
“Mom and Dad think it even more,” Mary Jane retorted with spirit. “But that’s because they never saw—” She stopped suddenly, and her face was shuttered.
“No one has ever said this!”
“They’ve said so plenty to me. You haven’t been here. And when you are here, usually Lee is here, too, so we don’t talk about it.”
“Plus it was ten years ago,” Daisy reminded her.
“There’s that,” Mary Jane conceded. She’d calmed down a little. The angry pink in her cheeks began to fade. The violent eddies of emotion filling the room began to settle. Daisy wondered just how much Alex Stewart had to do with all this, how much Mary Jane was still regretting the fruitless years she’d spent waiting for him to get serious, make the full commitment, and then he never had.
After a moment she said, treading carefully, “Is there something else going on, Mary Jane? You seem—”
Wrong thing to say. “Oh, because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it? Or Tucker himself, for that matter. It has to be me.”
“Well, no, okay, but if there is something, if there’s ever anything, I want you to know that you can talk to me, that’s all.”
She reached out her hand and touched Mary Jane’s arm, and at least her sister didn’t throw her off. The atmosphere between them eased a little, once more. They were sisters, after all. There was a strong bond, even when they disagreed.
“Look, you’re going to Africa,” Daisy continued. “It’s going to be amazing.”
“Y-yes. Oh, it is!”
“I’m sure you still have a ton of stuff to do to get ready. I do understand what you’re saying. I’m...a little shocked, actually.”
“Shocked?”
“About Tucker.”
Mary Jane muttered something that was impossible to hear.
“You said there were two reasons...”
“Yeah, well, no, not really. No.”
“You said—”
“Look, that’s not important.” There was a stubborn set to Mary Jane’s mouth now that told Daisy she could spend all day trying to coax more out of her sister and still get next to nothing.
“Let me talk to Lee,” she offered, letting the was-there-or-was-there-not-a-second-reason thing go. “And I’ll talk to Tucker himself. If there really does seem to be a good reason not to go ahead, our meeting tomorrow is just the initial consult so that he can put together an estimate if we ask him to. We’re not committed yet. And if some of his personal choices and attitudes aren’t quite what they should be, does that matter? I mean, it’s...yeah, disappointing...”
Mary Jane huffed out an impatient breath as if she could have come up with a different word.
“But he’ll be doing our landscaping, and that’s all,” Daisy continued. “It’s a business arrangement. It’s not like he’ll be part of the family, the way we once wanted. It’s not as if we need to love everything about him.”
“Lee—”
“Lee is way stronger than you think. She’s—” A lot happier about being single than you are, sis.
Daisy managed not to say it out loud, while Mary Jane retorted, “Lee was way more upset than you think about the canceled wedding.”
“But since none of this actually involves Lee because she has a whole life that she loves, ski instructing and mountain guiding in Colorado, that she’s not planning to change anytime soon—”
“Oh, I give up,” Mary Jane muttered and stalked into the front office, closing the door very firmly behind her just in case Daisy was in any doubt that the conversation was over.
“You know what?” Daisy said out loud to the empty room. “I give up, too!”
* * *
That statement wasn’t quite true, however. She hadn’t given up at all. Why else would she have found herself forty minutes later, wearing a fresh outfit, climbing out of her car in the parking lot at the front of Reid Landscaping’s building? She’d tried to call Lee to talk about all this, but Lee’s phone was switched off, so she’d left a message.
She didn’t have an appointment with Tucker. That was tomorrow. But if there was any chance of hosing down Mary Jane’s overreaction before she flew off to Africa tomorrow, then why not go after it. You had to put the right energy into a problem if you wanted results. Daisy put energy into everything she did.
The headquarters of Reid Landscaping was an impressive advertisement for the company’s abilities. She hadn’t seen it before. Ten years earlier, the landscaping business had been only an ambitious plan simmering in Tucker’s head that he hadn’t spoken of very much, even to Lee. Since then, and having lived in California until so recently, Daisy had never happened down this quiet street on the edge of the woods during vacation visits home.
She’d never bumped into Tucker himself, either, and she knew nothing about his life now. He could be married with two or three children, or seriously attached. He could be divorced, for that matter, or wedded to his career, or maybe a player with no plans ever to settle down.
The building itself was a gorgeous, purpose-built structure in modern log cabin style, with richly varnished golden wood and huge double-glazed, south-facing windows that would catch the sun at all the right times. On the upper level, there seemed to be a private apartment with a balcony orientated to face summer sunsets. A round wooden table and two chairs invited the idea of cool drinks on warm, lazy evenings, while now, in fall, there were wooden tubs planted with chrysanthemums in gold and bronze and deep red.
But it was the exterior landscaping that really showed itself off. Even though the fall foliage had passed its peak of color, everything still looked beautiful. There were plantings