Under a Firefly Moon

by Donna Kauffman

  He’d been surprised at how comfortable it all had been, how seemingly natural. As if the three childhood friends often met up and relived old times. When nothing could have been further from the truth. Wyatt hadn’t spent much time in the States in the past decade-plus, only what he’d had to do early on so he could keep traveling on a work visa, before finally getting dual citizenship with Britain. Being stateside had never felt comfortable. Even with his father no longer a shadowy specter to be feared or loathed, it had still felt like . . . purgatory. A place that was between the two other planes of his existence, necessary but only as a holding spot until he could get on a flight to where he needed to be. It had certainly long since ceased feeling like home. If it ever had.

  So today had been revelation upon revelation. Time he’d most definitely think on, sort out, analyze too much, and ultimately find a place for. Somewhere. He just didn’t know what that place would be. At the moment, he couldn’t imagine thinking back on this evening, spent with these people, as anything less than a wonderful memory. A highlight, for so very many reasons.

  “No,” he replied to Vivi. “I can’t say I have. As wonderful as that sounds, though, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a rain check.” He pushed his chair back and picked up his plate and napkin.

  “You don’t have to clear,” Avery said, hopping up. “You’re company.”

  “KP duty is my middle name,” Wyatt said with a grin, standing anyway. “You went to all this trouble—let me earn my keep.”

  “Vivi, you are not going to let him—” Avery began, but Hannah cut her off.

  “Wyatt, have you made arrangements for tonight? We should have asked.”

  Wyatt glanced at Tory. “Tory said it was okay to bunk with her,” he said, then looked at Hannah. “If that’s okay with you.” Tory had offered him her couch—or Hannah’s couch, as it were—when they’d arrived. Over this delightful dinner he thought they’d gotten past Hannah’s initial reaction on first meeting him, so he was surprised by Hannah’s less than enthusiastic reaction to his request. He hurried to add, “I hadn’t planned on staying more than the night. I’ll find a place in town tomorrow.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Vivi said, stepping in. “I’m afraid between renovations and whatnot, we’re full up here—”

  “Vivi, he can use—” Avery started, but Vivi talked over her, her smile becoming brighter and more determined as she continued.

  “Chey, darling,” she said, as casually as you please, “you’ve got a fully furnished guest room. Surely you don’t mind—”

  “Vivi, he and Tory sound like they’ve worked this out—”

  “Oh, the loft really isn’t set up for guests,” Hannah explained, looking from Vivi to Wyatt, her smile now firmly back in place. “Chey’s place is much better.” She turned brightly to Tory, who had been seated to her right, with Wyatt on her left. “Speaking of which, why don’t we head out to the loft and go over everything since we didn’t have a chance earlier.” She looked at Avery. “Didn’t you say you wanted to show Vivi that new extraction process you came up with?” She smiled. “Chey, you can help with cleanup, right? Then get Wyatt settled?”

  Vivi patted Wyatt’s hand and took his plate and napkin from him before he could get a grasp on the rapidly developing situation. “Avery and I will do this. And we’ll talk business in the morning. I’ve already invited Addie Pearl for tea and lavender scones in the morning. Seth and Pippa will be joining us as well. He owns the winery up the hill here, and Pippa—well, I think she’s going to be the perfect addition to our little quest.” Her eyes twinkled. “She’s got quite the following, too.”

  Thirty seconds later, as if by magic, Wyatt and Chey found themselves alone on the enclosed veranda at the side of the farmhouse.

  Wyatt laughed. “I wonder if they’d consider being on my next production crew. That was about the most well-orchestrated teamwork I’ve ever seen.”

  “And so subtle, too,” Chey added wryly. “You know, you can bunk on Tory’s couch. Hannah was just being protective.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “By shoving me into your bed? Protective of whom?” He chuckled. “Because I don’t think anyone in there assumed that I was actually going to bunk in your guest room.”

  “I think Hannah was just making sure you didn’t end up bunking with Tory.” She made air quotes around the word “bunking.”

  Wyatt frowned. “Why?”

  “Apparently she thought you two were an item, and she was trying to protect me by not letting the two of you spend the night together.”

  “First, why would she think that? And secondly, protect you from what?”

  “Look, this is none of my business.” Chey sighed. “I don’t do gossip. And for what it’s worth, neither does Hannah. The only reason she told me was because she knows our backstory. She was the only one I told about you. And I only did that because she was getting involved with someone and about to make what looked to my experienced eyes like the biggest mistake of her life. She came to me for advice, and I told her about you, about how we parted ways. I wanted her to understand why I knew what regret felt like, that I was speaking from a place of knowledge.”

  “You all seem so close,” he said. “You never talked about us with the others?”

  “We are as close as family. We are family. Like sisters from different generations.” She looked out over the lavender fields for a moment, and he gave her the space and time to gather her thoughts, decide what to share. “We met at a grief counseling group a few years after Cody died. I worked a number of farms moving from the west to east, until I found a place on a farm in northern Virginia, just outside DC. I wasn’t handling my grief well. I knew that. I’d tried counseling but, frankly, it just pissed me off. Don’t tell me how to feel or what my grief is like.” She waved a hand, let it drop. “That was on me, not the counselors. They were trying to help me, but I honestly wasn’t receptive or trusting. I don’t even know what made me go to that group meeting that afternoon. Desperation, I guess. I thought maybe I’d do better in a crowd, where I could listen but not be expected to participate. I don’t know. A flyer at the post office was how I found out about it.”

  “Fate,” Wyatt said quietly. “Or a fluke. I’m a firm believer in both.” His smile was fleeting. “Even when it pisses me off.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted in a dry smile. She nodded. “I met Avery, Vivi, and Hannah there that day. We were complete strangers, but the thing we had in common was that we each instantly hated that group.” She let out a short laugh. “They were very much interested in holding hands and wallowing in their grief. Not finding a productive way to live with it. We all more or less snuck out at the same time. As we stood in front of the elevator Vivi was the one who made some comment that made us all laugh. Avery started in as we rode down together, and we laughed some more. I felt better in the five minutes it took us to get outside than I had in the past three years before. Vivi spontaneously suggested we grab coffee.”

  She shook her head, a brief grin crossing her face. “Five hours later, we knew we’d formed our own grief group. The fearsome foursome was born. We started meeting every few weeks, then every week. We began doing things other than sitting and talking about what brought us each to that point in our lives and sharing ideas on how we were coping, finding our new normal.” She lifted one hand and gestured to the fields beyond the French doors. “Six or so years later, we ended up here.” She glanced at him. “This time, fate got it right.”

  She walked to the row of French doors that lined the outer wall of the veranda. He could see that this was the tearoom part of the farm. The deep, covered porch was lined with round tables, set with soft pastel linens. The large paddles of the overhead fans moved lazily, suspended between the exposed ceiling beams. He imagined the doors had been put in so they could all be opened to create an indoor-outdoor setting, with the spectacular view as backdrop.

  “It’s not that I was ashamed or angry or . . . I do
n’t even know what, about our past,” Chey continued. “We have shared some of the hardest, if not the hardest parts of our lives with each other. I talked a lot about Cody, about our relationship, our life on the circuit, my aunt and uncle. I talked about Tory, our friendship.” She smiled briefly. “Our years taking turns beating the pants off each other in the ring. I don’t even know why I just sort of skirted your existence.” She let out a little self-directed snort. “Okay, so I know why. I didn’t want to relive all that. I was having a hard enough time dealing with losing Cody. My aunt and uncle were gone then, too, and, other than finding ways to cope with losing Cody . . . I was otherwise just done talking about loss. I wanted to talk about anything else. Honestly, after a while, I didn’t want to talk anymore at all.”

  He came to stand beside her, his gaze focused on the view just as hers was. “Understandable,” he said.

  “So, I listened, instead. When Vivi inherited this place and we started seriously planning to do something with the farm, it felt really good. To be forward looking. It was all we wanted, all we talked about. It was both healing and a welcome relief.” She looked at him. “I always liked hearing their stories. Vivi’s most of all. Still do. After a while, I could have talked about you, about us, but then I’d have had to explain why I never did before, and . . . I just didn’t. I should have honored our friendship better than that. Yours and mine. And mine with them, too, I suppose. I’m sorry.”

  “You have absolutely nothing to apologize for. I’ve made a lot of close friends on my journeys. I’m very close with my full-time crew, and keep in touch with as many of the part-timers who have come and gone as I can. In all that time, except to broadly say I grew up out west and raised bulls for the rodeo, I never shared my childhood. With any of them. None of it. Partly out of shame, because of Zachariah. And for pretty much the same reasons you held back, when it came to talking about us. Those memories were mine to hold close, mine to regret. Sharing them would have made our relationship feel . . . trivial, I guess. Like something that must not matter much, because it was so long ago. Only nothing was further from the truth. Maybe I should have, maybe it would have been better to normalize it, or at least confront it, deal with it. Healthier, probably.” Now he lifted a shoulder. “I just . . . didn’t. It didn’t feel right.”

  “I didn’t want it normalized, either. Even losing Cody felt like that. Like if I came to terms with it, then he’d be in the past, and I didn’t want that. Hannah has this amazing way of dealing with her grief. She showed me how to celebrate life by sharing it with Cody as I move forward, as if what I’m doing is with him. Not for him, but with him.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to explain, but it was what saved me. Only . . . I couldn’t do that with you. You were gone from my life, but not from this world. You were out there somewhere, living your life, moving on without me.” She ducked her chin. “I can’t explain it. I know that sounds crazy.”

  “No, it doesn’t. In fact, it might be the best explanation I’ve heard for how I’ve felt all these years.”

  “I didn’t talk about you with Tory, either. It was easier to just tuck you away, somewhere safe, but also somewhere I didn’t have to examine. It’s not that I never thought about you.” She turned her gaze to his. “I have. At certain times in my life more than others. No matter how much time has passed, something always comes up that reminds me of you. Or that I’d want to tell you about, joke with you about, because only you would get the same absurd things I did.”

  He nodded, smiling. “It’s funny—you’d think the far-flung places I’ve gone, where the day-to-day life could not be more different from anything I’d ever known growing up, would save me from thinking about you, remembering you. Because what on earth could I see, or hear, or eat, or . . . anything that would remind me of you?” He shrugged. “And yet it happened all the time. Used to drive me crazy.”

  “Used to?”

  He nodded. “Somewhere along the line, I stopped trying to make you go away. I tried to accept that I wouldn’t get to share these things with you, but that didn’t make it less amusing, to think about your reaction, or what you would have said. So, it was like I was sharing it anyway. Just completely inside my own head.” He laughed. “Now who sounds crazy?”

  She turned to him fully. “No, that’s how Hannah got me to see my life without Cody. She taught me how to take him with me exactly like that. To share what I was doing, seeing, feeling, with him.” She looked up at him. “It just didn’t work as a way to deal with losing you.”

  “You never lost me, Cheyenne.” He lifted a hand, brushed his fingertips across her cheek. “You couldn’t lose me if you tried.”

  “I know,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth. “Because I did try.” She ducked her chin then, slipping away from his touch and turning back to the doors and the view.

  They stood there in contemplative silence for a long moment; then, with a laconic drawl, he purposefully shifted the mood a little. “So . . . what was this gossip? Why did Hannah think I was with Tory?”

  He saw the corner of her mouth kick up. “So, I hear that Hannah caught you and Tory in a heated clinch out behind her truck.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “She might have drawn a few conclusions.”

  That took Wyatt aback for a moment and he let out a laugh as he tried to imagine the scene from Hannah’s perspective. “We weren’t in a clinch,” he said, shaking his head. “We were hugging, that much is true. And yes, we were having a bit of a private moment.”

  Chey’s eyebrows lifted slightly and she turned her head. There was humor in her tone, but the expression on her face was openly questioning. “Do go on.”

  His smile slid to a grin. “I don’t hug and tell,” he teased, “other than to say that I can see why Hannah might have misconstrued things.”

  “Oh, I think maybe you should go ahead and tell,” Chey said, one eyebrow arched, but a smile hinting at the corners of her mouth. “I’ll make apologies to Tory later if I have to.”

  Wyatt laughed outright at that. “It wasn’t that big a deal. We were talking about her bringing me here, about her separate friendships with each of us and how she’d kind of come to the end of her rope with that triangle of crazy. When Buttercup joined the scene, she decided she was done juggling. But that’s not to say she did any of this lightly. She felt awful, like she’d possibly ruined her chance here, and damaged her friendship with you and with me, no matter her good intentions. She was explaining to me why we are so important to her. I hated seeing her torture herself like that, because I know we both love her, for so many reasons. Always have. That hug was—”

  “You don’t have to explain, Wy,” Chey said. “Thank you for being there for her. I’ll make sure she knows that nothing has been ruined. I’m honestly glad she’s here.”

  “You sound surprised,” Wyatt said, a smile surfacing once again.

  Chey let out a short laugh. “I am, to be honest. I’m not a big people person.”

  He shot her a mock look of shock and took the nudge to the ribs in stride. “Says the woman who is running a farm with three other women.”

  “Point taken,” she allowed with a laugh. “That surprised me, too. Still does. But, you know, while our lives are far more deeply connected here than they ever were before, we also took great care to set this place up so we’d each have our own space and the ability to continue our other pursuits as well. Me with my horses, Hannah with her painting, Avery—though you haven’t seen it—with her lab setup. Vivi with her kitchen.” She lifted her hands and let them drop, her laughter wry. “Of course, we’re not here even a year or two and now Hannah is living with Will and his son, Jake. Avery spends most of her time out with Ben—who also happens to be my vet.” She shook her head. “It still all works, though. Maybe even better because we’re not under each other’s feet all the time. I don’t know. When you’re where you’re meant to be, life has a funny way of sorting itself out, I guess.”

  Wyatt nodded, but didn’t say any
thing. He wanted nothing more than for life to sort this out. He was starting to think maybe he didn’t know where the hell he was supposed to be. Because he’d been everywhere, but standing right there, next to Chey, not even caring about the view, or where it was they were standing, he felt . . . settled. Like after running for so long, he could finally stop, and exhale.

  “I’ll talk to Hannah,” Chey said. “So she doesn’t think you’re a two-timing snake destined to break my heart all over again,” she added dryly.

  “Thanks,” he said, chuckling. “I think.”

  She nudged him again, but gently this time. “I think she already knows,” Chey whispered. “Pretty sure they all do.”

  He glanced down at her. “You okay with that?”

  “That you’re not a two-timing snake?” She looked up at him and fluttered her lashes, which was so out-of-character it made him laugh.

  He grinned. “Well, that, yes.” He turned more fully toward her, took both of her hands in his, and let them dangle at their sides. “And the fact that I’m not means they also know I’m a one-woman kind of guy.” He looked down into her eyes. “And it’s not the woman bunking in Hannah’s loft.”

  “They do seem pretty okay with that, given they’ve all but invited you straight into my bed.” Her tone was teasing, but he saw the worry enter her eyes, the uncertainty, and it gave him more than a little twinge.

  “And the owner of that bed? What does she think?”

  “That I’m not ready to share it yet.” She searched his eyes. “Wyatt, I don’t mean that I don’t want—”

  “I wasn’t asking about tonight,” he said. “I’m not ready for that, either.”