The Sea Glass Cottage

by RaeAnne Thayne

He smiled slightly and she ordered her stupid hormones not to react. “None of the human variety?”

  She thought she would by now. She’d been with Grant for four years, engaged for two, and they’d talked about possibly having one and adopting another child or maybe even siblings out of the foster system.

  That had been her one regret when she broke off the engagement.

  “No. And I understand you don’t, either. Mel likes to talk about you.”

  His sister was justifiably proud of Cooper, who had been a hero before he left town and who continued that pattern in the military, from what she heard.

  “How’s your mom doing? That was one hell of a nasty fall.”

  “You were there?” That didn’t really surprise her. Cape Sanctuary had a small paid staff of emergency medical technicians and EMT-paramedics. Most of the volunteer firefighters were also trained as EMTs, as her father had been.

  “I was on the ambulance that responded. It was scary for the first few minutes, until she regained consciousness.”

  “Unconscious! Nobody told me she was unconscious.”

  “She fell pretty hard. We were worried about a spinal injury, so it took us a while to stabilize her. Your mom was a trooper, though. Asking about the guys’ families and when Lindy Melendez was having her bridal shower.”

  “Yeah. That’s my mom.”

  Everyone loved Juliet Harper. If her mom ever decided to run for mayor of Cape Sanctuary, she would be a lock.

  “Well, thanks for helping her.”

  “It’s part of the job,” he answered with a smile that left her feeling dazed.

  She was sleep-deprived from driving all night, worried about her mother and stressed about leaving her doggy. That was the only reason for her ridiculous reaction. She certainly wasn’t still pining over her best friend’s older brother, no matter how gorgeous the adult version of Cooper Vance might be.

  “I guess I’ll see you around,” he said, with another of those lethal smiles.

  She nodded, which was all she could manage, climbed into her vehicle and drove away, vowing to do her very best to make sure she saw him first and prevented that from happening.

  4

  COOPER

  Olivia Harper.

  Cooper watched her drive away in a little silver SUV, feeling as if he were the one who had fallen off a ladder.

  How many years had it been since he had seen Olivia? He couldn’t remember. It even might have been before he left town for good. Melody had mentioned her a few times over the years. He remembered Melody telling him when Olivia graduated from college, when she got a job in tech somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, when she started her own social media company.

  She’d been engaged a few years ago, he remembered now. And then Melody had told him she’d broken off the engagement sometime later.

  Other than those few shout-outs from his sister, he hadn’t really dwelled on her much. If he did, he had thought of her as Little Livie, Natalie’s baby sister and his own sister’s best friend. In his mind, she still had pigtails and braces and walked around with a book in her hand most of the time.

  She wasn’t that girl anymore. The Olivia he just encountered was still small in stature but she wasn’t gawky and awkward anymore. His reaction to that one brief slash of smile still seemed to ricochet around his chest.

  She wasn’t for him, Cooper reminded himself. She was only here temporarily to visit her mother and she would be leaving soon to return to her life in Seattle.

  He, on the other hand, was here for good. His sister needed his help and he had vowed to her and to himself that he would do whatever necessary for Melody and her boys. They had to be his focus, not this instant, unexpected reaction to Olivia Harper.

  He pushed her out of his mind, grabbed his toolbox and headed up the steps to Melody’s house. One of them needed fixing, he noted. He would add that to his to-do list.

  Before he could knock on the door, his youngest nephew raced around the corner of the house, Melody’s big, goofy retriever right behind him. “Hi, Uncle Cooper! Did you bring your dog?”

  He always loved listening to Charlie, who had trouble with his R or L sounds, so called him Coopah and used words like bwing instead of bring.

  “No. Jock was sleeping when I left and I didn’t want to disturb him.”

  “That’s okay. Because guess what? We’re dogsitting!”

  “I heard that.” He studied the boy and the dog. “Weird. He looks just like Thor.”

  Charlie giggled. “This is Thor, silly. The dog we’re supposed to be dogsitting isn’t here yet.”

  “I think it is, since its owner just left.”

  “Oh! I want to go see!”

  Charlie raced up the steps to the porch of Melody’s small two-story house. “Mom! Hey, Mom! Where’s the dog? Is it here?”

  His sister came around the house holding a tiny trembling purse pooch cradled in her arm. “Hey. Keep it down. He’s nervous enough already.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Charlie spoke in what he probably thought in his five-year-old wisdom was a whisper but was loud enough to rattle the windows.

  “This is Otis. He’s not sure about us yet.”

  “He’s so cute! Hi, buddy. Don’t be afraid. We’re nice. Except for Will and he’s still at school.” He beamed at the dog, who answered by trembling a little more forcefully and hiding his face in Melody’s arm.

  Charlie’s smile turned into a frown. “What’s wrong with him? Is he cold? I can get a blanket.”

  “He’s just nervous. If we sit down together on the sofa, I bet he’ll settle down enough that you can make friends and then hold him in a few minutes, as long as you can be gentle.”

  “Okay. But I have to pee first. I was gonna do it outside but you got mad at me last time.”

  “Good call.” Cooper barely had time to say the words to Charlie before he raced down the hall toward the bathroom at a pace that clearly indicated an emergency was imminent.

  Man, he loved this kid. Charlie and his older brothers, Will and Ryan, were the most adorable boys. They were funny and sweet and openhearted. For the life of him, Cooper could not figure out what man in his right mind would walk away from the perfect family.

  “So. This must be Olivia’s dog.”

  Melody’s eyes widened in shock. “How could you possibly know that?”

  He had to smile. She had the same expression on her face that she used to get when he would pull a quarter out of her ear. For hours, he had practiced magic tricks he learned from a school library book, simply to earn that look of astonished glee from her.

  “Seriously. Did Charlie tell you that?”

  He shook his head, shifting his toolbox to the other hand. “She was leaving as I was pulling in and told me she was leaving her dog here. From there, I could put the pieces together on my own. I didn’t recognize her at first. It’s been years.”

  “Neither of you has managed to make it back to town nearly enough over the years.”

  Was coming back to Cape Sanctuary as difficult for Olivia as it was for him? They shared some of the same ghosts. Her sister. Her father. He had loved them, too.

  Guilt, his longtime companion, poked its ugly hand in the air for attention, but he had become an expert at ignoring it. For the most part, anyway.

  “She was always a good friend to you.”

  Melody’s features softened as she petted the trembling dog, who seemed to be settling down. “The best. I don’t know how many nights I spent at Sea Glass Cottage with her family when I was growing up. Maybe more than at our own place.”

  He didn’t blame her for that. The tiny two-bedroom on Harper Hill their mother had inherited from her grandmother when Cooper was ten had been cluttered, dilapidated, cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer. Melody had slept with their mother while he’d been in a tiny
room of his own until he ended up carving another space for himself out of the attic by putting up his own drywall and laying down a floor he created out of secondhand boards so that Melody could take his old room.

  At least it had been a roof over their head, which was more than they’d had at previous times in their childhood. The very best part about the house had been their neighbors, Steve and Juliet Harper and their daughters, similar in age to him and to Melody.

  Steve and Juliet quickly had sized up the situation in their home. He didn’t know how. Maybe they’d caught a glimpse of their garbage and had seen the outsize proportion of empty liquor bottles to food packaging. Or maybe they would have been just as kind anyway. Regardless, they had welcomed him and his sister into their home and into their lives.

  He had been ten in years and about thirty in experience by then, wary, mistrustful, difficult. Because they had moved so much, all his previous close friendships had been painfully short-lived and he hadn’t been looking for another, but for some bizarre reason he still didn’t understand, Natalie Harper had decided they should be best friends.

  Nat. His heart ached whenever he thought of her, yet one more woman in his life he couldn’t protect.

  “Is Olivia in town long?” he asked, hoping his voice sounded casual enough.

  “I suppose that depends on what happens with her mom’s surgery. I hope she can be here at least a few days so we have time to catch up.”

  “Her mom had a pretty bad fall. I don’t think her recovery is going to be quick.”

  “Oh, poor Juliet. I should try to get to the hospital tonight, after she’s out of surgery.”

  He loved that about his sister. Even after everything she had been through, after her world had basically imploded, she still was able to focus on others. She had always been that way. If they were down to their last can of tomato soup, she would find someone less fortunate to share it with them.

  “I’m sure she would appreciate it,” he said. “Now, which bathroom sink did you say was leaking?”

  “The boys’ bathroom upstairs. I wish you would let me call a plumber.”

  “You might still have to. I’m not an expert. But let me take a look at it first. I brought my tools and everything.” He lifted his box.

  “You’re the best brother a girl could ask for. I would hug you, if I didn’t think it would terrify poor Otis here,” Melody said with a smile that didn’t quite hide the shadows there.

  “Save your hugs until we see if I can actually fix it. You might need to give them to a real plumber.”

  “That wouldn’t exactly be a hardship, since my plumber is pretty cute.”

  “Send Charlie up when he gets out of the bathroom down here. I’ll give him a quick lesson in how to use a pipe wrench.”

  “I’m not sure I want that one knowing how to take the pipes apart in this house. That’s a skill that might come back to bite me.”

  He smiled. Charlie was a handful, which was one of the reasons he loved the kid. “Also, I’m here for at least a few hours. I can dogsit and kidsit for you, if you want to go to the store by yourself or even go sit by the beach with a book.”

  To his dismay, her eyes filled with tears and she hugged him. “You really are the best brother in the world. I have no idea what I would do without you. I would love to run to the garden center to pick up a few things for the yard without having to keep Charlie from jumping in all the decorative fountains.”

  “Have at it. Want me to take the dog?”

  “I’ll put him back into his crate for now. Liv said that’s his happy place.”

  “Got it. I’ll just carry the whole thing upstairs, where he can hang out with us. Send Charlie up before you leave.”

  As he headed up the stairs with his toolbox in one hand and the dog carrier in the other, he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Olivia and their intertwined lives.

  Her dad had been a mentor to him, one of those genuinely good guys driven to try making a difference in the world. He might have done amazing things, if he had lived past his forties instead of dying in a fire where he never should have been in the first place.

  His fault.

  Cooper set the toolbox down a bit more heavily than he should have, and Olivia’s little dog whimpered at the sudden noise.

  “Sorry, bud,” he said, setting the carrier down more gently.

  He still missed him. Olivia’s father had been one of the most decent men Cooper had ever known. The fact that he went into that building because of Cooper’s own stupidity still haunted him.

  Join the club, Steve, Cooper wanted to say. The ghosts of all the people he couldn’t save could probably fill the chapel of the local church.

  His mother.

  Natalie.

  None of his efforts had been quite enough.

  Yeah. All those ghosts were the reason he hadn’t come back to town as often as he might have over the years. Cape Sanctuary didn’t exactly live up to its name, in his case. For him, it was a place of sorrow and regret and inadequacy.

  “Hey, Uncle Coop. I’m here to help.”

  As his nephew climbed the stairs in his oversize cowboy boots, Cooper pushed away the memories.

  He couldn’t fix the past, but he was here now for his sister. Melody was the entire reason he had decided to apply for the fire chief job in Cape Sanctuary.

  She was stuck here alone with three boys, abandoned by her soon-to-be ex-husband. She tried to put on a good front, but he could see the baffled grief in her expression when she let down her guard.

  He wanted everything to be perfect for his sister. That had been his goal since the day she was born. The fact that her life had come to this, that her bastard husband had destroyed their marriage and her self-confidence without a backward look, made Cooper want to punch his fist through a wall.

  Okay, he would have preferred to punch his fist through Rich Baker’s face. He couldn’t do it, though. He didn’t want to end up in jail, like his and Mel’s father, who had spent most of their childhood as a guest of some correctional institution or other. Since he couldn’t beat the living daylights out of the man who had broken his sister’s heart, he would settle for stepping in and helping her out with the boys as much as he could.

  If that meant coming home to Cape Sanctuary and taking the tame and rather staid job of fire chief in a small California tourist town, it was a sacrifice he was more than willing to make.

  That was what he should focus on, Cooper told himself as he showed Charlie the water valve beneath the sink. These boys, his sister, his job. They were all that mattered. Not a certain lovely former neighbor or the shocking, unexpected awareness she sparked in him.

  5

  CAITLIN

  She hated this so much. On a scale of one to ten, sitting in Mimi’s hospital room and waiting for her to go into surgery ranked about a million times infinity.

  Caitlin sat in the ugly, uncomfortable chair in her grandmother’s room. Her head throbbed and her stomach felt a little sick, like that time she got food poisoning from eating bad potato salad at her friend Emma’s house.

  The hospital smelled. Mimi’s room wasn’t so bad. Her room smelled like all the flowers people had brought her, which Caitlin had arranged on a ledge beside the window, where her grandmother could see them.

  The rest of the place reeked, though, of disinfectant and pee and despair.

  Sitting here was so boring. She didn’t have the focus right now to read anything and she was all caught up on her YouTube subscriptions. Sure, she could always play one of the games on her phone to pass the time, but it was hard to concentrate to beat another stupid level when she was so worried.

  She looked over at her grandmother, whose eyes were closed. Every time she saw Mimi’s bruises, Caitlin felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  What would happen to her if Mimi died?

>   She pressed a hand to her stomach, to the nerves there.

  Mimi wasn’t dying. She was only asleep, like she’d been most of the morning since Jake’s dad dropped Caitlin off.

  The nurses assured Caitlin that there was nothing to worry about—it was only reaction from the pain medicine Mimi was on and the residual shock from her injuries, especially the concussion. Caitlin hated it anyway. She was not used to her grandmother being like this, dozing like some old lady during the day.

  Juliet wasn’t old. She was only in her fifties. Caitlin had done the math once and knew her grandma had her mom when she was only nineteen and hadn’t even been forty when Natalie had Caitlin when she was only eighteen.

  Mimi would be fifty-three in a few days and usually seemed a lot younger than that. She worked hard all day long at the garden center and then came home and took care of Sea Glass Cottage. She came to every one of Caitlin’s things, from soccer games to school plays to orchestra concerts.

  She wasn’t old. She was only injured.

  On the other hand, at least when she was sleeping, Mimi couldn’t nag at her to do her homework while she was sitting doing nothing or worry about the classes Caitlin had missed to be here.

  Caitlin thought about taking a selfie in the dull hospital room and posting it with the hashtag #myglamorouslife, but she hadn’t had time to do her makeup the way she liked it and didn’t like being here anyway, so why take a pic to remember it?

  “Cait?”

  “I’m here, Mimi. Do you need something?”

  “Water.”

  Caitlin rose from the chair, glad to give her muscles a break from it, and went to her grandmother’s bedside. Mimi wasn’t all the way awake. Her eyes were still mostly closed. They were swollen slightly, which the nurse had told Caitlin was from some of the medicine and also from her concussion.

  “The nurses said no, remember?” she said softly, taking Mimi’s outstretched hand in hers. “They don’t want you to have anything in your stomach before surgery.”

  Mimi sighed and closed her eyes again, still holding Caitlin’s hand. She stayed there for a long time, not wanting to move her fingers away and wake up her grandmother.