Page 45 of The Devil In Denim
Maggie craned her neck, trying to spot her father. The greenhouse was, like the house, pretty big. Her father didn’t do anything by halves. He’d built the greenhouse for her mom after Maggie was born, replacing the original, much smaller one with this cathedral of glass. Not that she could see much glass now, apart from directly overhead. No, the place was full of greenery and foliage, the paths between the plants—some in pots on tables, some hanging from the ceiling, some hanging off trees located here for the express purpose of keeping orchids happy—narrow and winding.
“Dad!” Maggie called. “You in here?”
Silence. For just that fraction too long. Then Tom’s voice came from a distance. “I’m up back.”
Of course. Maggie pinned his voice as coming from the right and set off on the right-hand fork of the path. She moved carefully through the plants, wary of snagging one of the fragile blooms and breaking it. She didn’t particularly like orchids. Some of them were beautiful, but some were plain alien and ugly looking and one of the last memories she had of her mom was her carrying bags of potting mix out from the car toward the greenhouse. Away from Maggie.
As usual.
“Dad, you wanna send up a smoke signal or something?” she called again as she moved toward the rear of the greenhouse.
“I’m over near the Epidendrum calanthum,” he said.
“Let’s assume I don’t have the location of all your specimens memorized, okay?” Or the names for that matter. She knew a few of the orchids that had been her mom’s favorites but after a while all the Latin names blurred together.
“Back corner, near the last bridge.”
That much she understood. The greenhouse had a complicated watering system to maintain the humidity the orchids loved, and one of the conceits the greenhouse designer had worked into the system was a little landscaped stream that S-curved its way through the floor, necessitating a series of small wooden bridges to make hauling stuff across it easier. The stream itself was only a foot and a half wide in most places, easy enough to step across except when you were lugging forty-pound sacks of dirt or multiple pots of orchids or the odd tree.
Maggie rounded the next corner, and sure enough, there was Tom, sitting in a chair beneath the palm tree that stood sentry beside the bridge. He had a delicate pair of pruning shears in one hand, but he didn’t look like he’d actually been doing much, sitting half slumped, his eyes fixed on the tree’s upper branches.
As he heard her footsteps, he half turned, an odd expression on his face.
“There you are,” Maggie said.
“Maggie.” He pushed out of the chair, crossed to her, and bent to kiss her cheek. His unshaven jaw was scratchy … a novel sight. He only ever went without shaving when he was on vacation. Which was something that had happened about once in a blue moon when Maggie had been growing up.
“What brings you my way?” he said.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. “I left you messages.”
“I took Veronica away for a few days,” he said, ducking his head to snip at a stray fern frond. “She needed a break.”
“I needed you here.” Her voice cracked a little and she swallowed.
“No you didn’t.” He straightened but he didn’t look at her.
“Dad!” She caught his arm. “Yes. I did. What’s going on with you? You said we’d talk before the press conference and then you just bailed. Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?”
“I’d imagine that Alex has told you what was going on by now,” Tom replied. He patted her hand before disengaging her grip gently.
Maggie stepped back, throat stinging. “You mean the money? Yes. Yes, he has. But what I still don’t understand is why you didn’t tell me. Why you’ve been hiding it all this time? Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you paid for me to go to school for. To help you?”
“Darlin’, by the time you got to grad school, it was already going to hell. The Saints had a bunch of investments that went bad when the market tanked. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You thought it would be better to keep me in the dark until you told me that you’d sold the Saints?” Her voice squeaked upward again and she swallowed hard, trying to ease the tightness.
Tom sighed. “I kept hoping things would turn around. And then by the time I realized they wouldn’t, the only thing that might have helped would have been selling everything we owned to pour good money after bad and lose that too. It was too late. And then Alex came knocking.”
“And his offer was just too good to refuse?” She gripped one hand on the back of the chair, feeling wobbly.
“Yes,” Tom said bluntly. “It was.”
“So just like that, everything we ever talked about … it was just forgotten?”
“Maggie. I don’t want to talk about this. The deal’s done. Can’t you just move forward?”
“No. No, I can’t. All my life I wanted to work for the Saints. To work with you. To take over one day. You wanted that too. But when push came to shove you just forgot me.”
