No Forever Like Nantucket (A Sweet Island Inn Book 6)

by Grace Palmer

  “My son is only four, and I already feel disconnected.” Diana smiled and laughed, trying to join the conversation. Andre gave her only a quick flick of his attention before it was once again focused on Holly.

  “It’s nice to talk to another single parent,” Andre said, his full lips tipping up in a half-smile. “Especially one with a kid close to my kid’s age. Most of my friends are potty training their kids, and here I am trying to figure out how to handle Orah having a boyfriend.”

  Holly’s mouth opened and closed several times before she could find the words. She shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. No. No, I’m not a single parent. I’m married. To Pete. Goodwin. Pete Goodwin.”

  Andre blinked and then smiled easily. “You just said your kids were in Boston with their dad, so I thought—”

  “Oh, no,” Holly pressed a hand to her cheek. “I’m sorry. That was confusing. No, they are just away for the week at a family reunion. In Boston. I stayed here for this reunion. The Tale of Two Reunions.”

  She winced. What a terrible joke.

  Still, Andre laughed. “I misunderstood. But either way, it’s still nice to talk to another parent with a kid close to my age. If your son is as good-looking and friendly as you, I wish my daughter could meet him. Her boyfriend now may only be thirteen, but he’s a punk.”

  It was hard for Holly to sift through his words to sort out the compliment he’d paid her and find the content of what he’d said. It took her a ridiculously long amount of time to process and respond. By the time she did, her cheeks were warm and pink. “I think all thirteen-year-olds are punks. It’s in their nature.”

  “Yeah, but this kid is extra,” Andre said. “Believe me, I know punks. I was one.”

  Holly opened her mouth to respond, but Lindsay cut her off. “Oh, please. You were not a punk. Everyone loved you.”

  “A charming punk, then,” Andre amended. He turned back to Holly. “Though never charming enough to catch Miss Benson’s eye.”

  Now, Holly’s face was flaming. What in the world was happening? She couldn’t be certain if the conversation died around her or if the blood roaring in her ears was simply too loud for her to hear anything, but the next thing she knew, Andre was standing up and backing away from the table.

  “I’ll see you ladies tonight.” He tipped his head as though he had a top hat on. “Until then.”

  The moment he was back across the room and seated, Diana and Lindsay began to squeal.

  “Andre Wellington hit on you!” Diana said, slapping Holly’s arm.

  Holly pulled her hand back. “Ouch.”

  “He was so into you.” Lindsay shook her head. “Freaking lucky. I can’t believe it. I’m the one who is single. Hello!”

  “Single and swearing off men, remember?” Diana rolled her eyes and then reached across the table to drag Holly’s hand back within finger-crushing distance. “What did he mean by ‘never being able to catch your eye’? Did you two have a thing? Did he ask you out or something?”

  Holly yanked her hand back for the second time, took a long drink of her coffee, and planted her palms on the table. “No.”

  Her friends blinked at her for a few seconds before Lindsay finally asked, “To which part?”

  “To all of it,” Holly said. “We didn’t date, he never asked me out, and he wasn’t hitting on me. He was just being himself. You said yourself he was charming, Lindsay. That’s what charming guys do.”

  Lindsay bobbed her head to one side, looking less than convinced. “He was only charming to you. Diana and I might as well have not even been here.”

  Thankfully, Holly was spared further discussion by the arrival of their breakfast.

  “Finally,” Diana muttered as the waitress came over, carrying a large tray full of food. “So much for brunch. We’re just having a weirdly-timed lunch now.”

  “Sorry for the wait,” the waitress said, setting their plates in front of them with a skilled, graceful hand. Then she set the coffee pot and a pitcher of mimosas in the center of the table.

  “We didn’t order this,” Lindsay said, pointing to the pitcher.

  “Oh, right. Duh.” The waitress smiled and shook her head as though clearing her thoughts. “I was supposed to tell you. That is a gift from the gentleman over there.”

  She narrowed one eye and pointed across the restaurant in what Holly knew was the direction of Andre and Caleb’s table. Holly didn’t look, but Lindsay and Diana did. They both giggled like teenagers.

  “‘Charming’ is an understatement,” Lindsay said. “That man is dangerous.”

  “He said it was a thank you for the—and I’m quoting here—‘stimulating conversation,’” the waitress said, folding up her tray table and tucking it under her arm. “Can I do anything else for you?”

  “No, thank you,” Diana said, smiling at the waitress and then making aggressively suggestive eyes at Holly. “You’ve done more than enough.”

  “Yes, this has all been very enlightening,” Lindsay added, pursing her lips. After the waitress left, she leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “Seems we are in for an even more interesting evening than we bargained for. What say you, Holly?”

  Holly took a sip of her coffee, ignoring the pitcher of mimosas, which suddenly looked much more appetizing than they had a second earlier. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her friends laughed and snickered together, but Holly just focused on her omelette. When Andre and Caleb stood and walked across the dining room, stopping to say hi to another table before continuing towards the exit, Holly didn’t even notice.

  Why should she? What did the heartthrob of the class of 2006 have to do with her?

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  16

  Eliza

  Oliver & Eliza’s House

  The pounding in her head began before she even opened her eyes.

  Something was beating down the walls of Eliza’s head, trying to force her brain out through sheer force. She reached up to rub at her left eye, where most of the pressure seemed to be focused, and hit herself in the face with something hard.

  Her eyes blinked open, letting in scraps of daylight. It was like one of the first motion pictures, the image flickering and jumping across the screen, the story pieced together in the most rudimentary way.

  When her eyes first opened, Eliza could see she was outside. On her porch, specifically. She was sitting sideways on the porch swing. Her legs sprawled across the seat, white paint flecking away to reveal raw wood beneath, and her feet dangled off the other side.

  Birds chirped somewhere nearby, their songs discordant and shrill. She wanted to throw her hands over her ears, but her body felt strangely heavy.

  As she continued to blink, her pupils adjusting, she could see the bottle in her hands. It was a wine bottle. One Sara had given them when they’d moved in. It had been in the kitchen cupboard above the toaster for as long as they’d lived in the house. Eliza couldn’t understand why it was in her hand now. Or why she was on the porch.

  She sat up slowly, out of necessity. The world tilted and twisted, refusing to right itself. Eliza tried and failed to find the horizon, to anchor herself. So she closed her eyes again.

  The headache was starting to make more sense.

  This was a hangover. She knew that. She’d had a few of them recently. A bit of accidental over-indulging here or there. No big deal. Wine o’clock just running a little long.

  But why was she on the porch? That felt like a puzzle worth solving.

  Her dad had been an occasional sleepwalker. It was the reason their mom banned him from eating spicy foods before bed. “One pepper and the man starts rearranging the closet in the middle of the night,” her mom had complained, half-smiling the entire time. “It’s the oddest thing.”

  This was the oddest thing. They had a security system on the house. A self-monitored system with a keypad and a blaring alarm. Eliza had pestered Oliver until he’d installed it. The last
thing they needed was Winter crawling out of bed and walking out the front door in the middle of the night.

  Winter had never attempted it, but maybe Eliza had? Maybe, in her sleep-addled haze, she’d managed to correctly punch in her pin and make it to the front porch.

  Eliza moved to rub her eye again and nearly blinded herself with the bottle for the second time. With one eye squeezed shut, she peered down into it and then gave it a shake.

  Empty.

  Now the hangover made even more sense. A drunken haze, not a sleeping one.

  Suddenly, Eliza heard singing coming from the window to her right. Winter’s room. Oliver’s singing.

  It was a song from some musical Eliza hadn’t seen. He sang it every morning when he woke Winter up.

  If Oliver had noticed her missing from bed, he hadn’t been bothered. Probably because sleep had been elusive the last few months. Lots of late-night baking and watching knife demonstrations on the shopping channels. The not-sleeping worried Oliver enough.

  “You should call a neurologist,” he’d said one morning, pushing a cup of coffee across the table to her. “This isn’t healthy.”

  “I’m fine. Just stressed,” she’d said. “Things will get better soon.”

  Was falling asleep on the front porch better than not sleeping? Eliza doubted Oliver would see it that way. Especially if he saw the empty bottle in her hand.

  As quickly as she could without toppling over, Eliza struggled to her feet and hid the bottle behind the fake snake plant sitting on their front porch. Later, when Oliver wasn’t looking, she’d stash it in the bottom of the recycling bin. Just so he wouldn’t worry.

  Her head still pounded, somehow feeling both like a solid boulder between her ears and like half-set gelatin. She swiped her fingers under her eyes to take care of any smeared mascara, blinked a few times to clear the fuzz from her vision, and took a deep breath before forcing on a smile.

  The house devolved into chaos almost the instant Eliza walked through the front door. Winter was crying—screeching, really—because her favorite stuffed shark was nowhere to be found. She slept with it every night, but now it wasn’t in her bedroom.

  “Missing shark!” Oliver yelled as he jogged through the living room, head on a permanent swivel in search of the stuffed animal. Or maybe he wasn’t yelling, but his voice beat on Eliza’s eardrums like he was.

  “It’s not in her bed?” Eliza stood awkwardly in the entryway, trying not to take up any space. Trying to blend into the background.

  “I tore it apart.” Oliver opened and closed the drawers of the entertainment center. “It’s not there. He’s gone.”

  Winter wailed. “Gone?”

  Oliver smoothed back Winter’s bedhead, trying to comfort her. “We’ll find him.”

  Eliza waded into the pandemonium, strangely grateful for it. “Yeah, we’ll find him,” she echoed. “He’s here somewhere.”

  “I’ll check the kitchen,” Oliver said, spinning on his heel.

  “I’ll check our room.”

  Eliza slipped into their bedroom. She quickly scanned the room for any misplaced stuffed animals, but her main objective was to pull herself together. Quickly.

  A clean pair of jeans and a flowy top were a good start. Her makeup was less of a mess than she expected, just a slight smudging of mascara under her lower lids, but she still splashed water on her face to obscure the evidence. Then she pulled her greasy golden blonde hair back into a tight ponytail. For a woman who had spent the night outside, she looked pretty good.

  Once that was sorted, she joined the search for Sharky in earnest. As Winter’s howls continued to reach new heights of ear-splitting, Eliza searched her mind for any memory of the night before.

  Had she taken her daughter’s stuffed animal out of her room? No. Definitely not. That wouldn’t make sense.

  But how much sense did sleeping on the porch, in full view of the neighbors, make? Less. Way less.

  “No luck in the kitchen,” Oliver shouted.

  “Try the linen closet!” she yelled back.

  In the privacy of her own room, Eliza allowed herself to press her palms to her ears. She was the monkey sitting dumbly between crashing cymbals. It felt like the world was clobbering her repeatedly. She needed ibuprofen.

  On hands and knees, she crawled to her closet and dug around for her purse. As soon as her hand closed around a pill bottle, she yanked it out and began twisting at the childproof cap. Only when the lid was off did she realize the bottle in her head wasn’t the generic, extra-strength pain reliever she bought from the store.

  It was her prescription. Fluoxetine.

  The yellow and green pills were the colors of bile and toxic waste.

  Maybe she should take one.

  She’d chalked the pounding in her head up to a hangover, but what if it was the broken part of her brain making itself known? Dr. Silver had compared Eliza to a car with the check engine light on, chugging along, mile after mile. Maybe she was finally breaking down. Maybe she should just slip the pill between her lips and—

  “Found it!” Oliver and Winter both cheered from the other side of the house. “Sharky has returned!”

  Eliza looked up, expecting to see her husband standing in the doorway, looking down at her and her vibrantly colored pills.

  But the doorway was empty. Eliza was alone.

  She dropped the pills back into the bottle, closed the lid, and threw it into her purse.

  “Good,” she called, rising to her feet and padding out into the living room with her family. “Happy day!”

  Miraculously, Summer slept through Winter’s meltdown over Sharky. But when Eliza stubbed her toe on the bathroom door jam and cursed under her breath, Summer cried out.

  Oliver popped his head around the corner of the hallway. “Which do you want—Winter or Summer?”

  Most mothers didn’t have the kind of support Eliza did. Oliver’s job meant his evening and weekend schedule could be erratic, playing shows and dinner parties and wedding receptions, but he was always there in the mornings.

  He could make breakfast for Winter or change Summer’s diaper. While Eliza packed the bag for daycare, he could convince Winter the floor was lava and have her giggling uncontrollably as they put on her “protective gear,” which looked an awful lot like her light-up sneakers.

  She wasn’t alone. She had support. So what did she have to complain about?

  Porch sleeping and brutal hangover aside, Eliza wanted to shut herself in her bedroom and crawl back under the covers. Oliver was better at all of this, so he probably wouldn’t miss her, anyway. But that wasn’t fair to him. She needed to pull her weight.

  “I’ll take Summer,” she said.

  There would be less talking that way. Winter would have questions about where syrup came from and why she had to go to daycare—even though Eliza and Oliver both answered those questions and more each morning.

  Summer just needed a diaper change and a fresh outfit. No nonsensical interrogations.

  “Okay, great. Sounds good,” Oliver said, giving her a thumbs up. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Eliza backed into Summer’s room. “Of course.”

  Did he know? It seemed like maybe he knew something. Maybe he’d seen her passed out on the porch swing. Though, if he had, she’d hope he would have come out and woken her up. Out of pity if nothing else.

  Or maybe he knew about the pills.

  When Dr. Geiger first prescribed the antidepressants, Eliza never mentioned it to Oliver. There had been one close call when he’d answered her cell phone and heard an automated voice call from the Nantucket Pharmacy, informing Eliza she had a prescription ready to pick up. But Eliza told him it was a mistake.

  “The prescription is for the pain pills. The ones I took after the c-section,” she’d lied. “There’s something wrong with their system and they keep calling. I’ll take care of it.”

  She’d promptly blocked the pharmacy’s number.


  Summer was standing up in her crib, fingers gripping the railing, her little legs bouncing with excitement when she saw Eliza. Oh, to wake up with that kind of energy. Eliza couldn’t imagine.

  “Good morning.” Eliza didn’t sing it the way Oliver did. Didn’t make a show out of starting the day. That was probably why Winter preferred her father. Whenever Eliza sat down to play with her, she always asked where Daddy was. When Summer started talking, she’d probably do the same thing, too.

  Where’s the fun parent? they seemed to be asking. Eliza couldn’t blame them.

  Summer smiled and grabbed at Eliza’s hair as she changed her diaper and dropped it in the diaper pail. It had been full the day before, and Eliza had meant to empty it, but she’d forgotten. Oliver must’ve taken care of it. Probably while she’d been at her therapist appointment and the pharmacy. While she’d been spending five dollars they couldn’t spare on a prescription she didn’t want.

  They could have used that money on diapers. Each diaper cost thirty-one cents. Eliza had done the math. So five dollars was sixteen diapers. Almost two days’ worth that was now sitting in the bottom of her purse in the form of useless pills she didn’t need.

  “Ouch!”

  Summer pulled Eliza out of her thoughts with one particularly vicious tug on her ponytail. Eliza untangled her hair from around her daughter’s fingers and then hoisted her up onto her hip.

  “Come on. Let’s go get this day over with.”

  Eliza turned around, and Oliver was standing in the doorway. His hair was long over his ears, in need of a cut. And his brow was pinched together with worry.

  She froze in the middle of the room, surprised to find she had an audience. “You scared me.”

  “You don’t look scared.” Oliver tilted his head, studying her.

  She didn’t know why, but it reminded her of the way Dr. Silver had looked at her. Probing. Like she was a specimen under a microscope, the answers to the universe hidden away in her cells.