The Sea Glass Cottage

by RaeAnne Thayne

  What would she have done without her grandmother all these years? Caitlin didn’t even like thinking about it. Mimi had been more like her mother, really, since she was a baby. In fact, according to her grandmother, Caitlin had tried to call her Mama when she was first learning to talk because she spent so much time with Juliet. No matter how many times her grandmother tried to correct her, she still called her Mama. Somehow in those early years, that had morphed into Mimi. Apparently Grandma or Gamma or Gran had been too hard for her to manage when she was so little.

  Caitlin was the only one who called Juliet that, which she had always kind of liked.

  She knew that without her grandmother, she probably would have ended up in foster care. That might not have been so bad if somebody nice had adopted her, but she knew the odds of that weren’t great. Juliet was on the board of directors for Stella Davenport’s foster care organization and Caitlin knew the statistics. She knew a much higher percentage of girls in foster care ended up dropping out of high school, getting pregnant before age twenty and struggling with substance abuse issues.

  Not every grandmother could step in to rescue a grandchild. She understood that and was deeply grateful that Juliet had been willing to raise her when Natalie’s heroin addiction had landed her in and out of jail and then dead of an overdose a few days after she got out the last time.

  She felt the familiar pang she usually did when she thought about her mother. By now, she knew it was more habit than actual grief. She hardly remembered Natalie except through pictures and the stories Juliet would tell her and a few fleeting images in her head she wasn’t even sure were real or not.

  Her mother seemed like some kind of exotic creature who didn’t really exist, like something out of Harry Potter or Middle Earth.

  She knew her mom was dead. She’d always known it, but when she was little, she used to like to pretend her real mother was the fairy princess in some kind of story, captured by an evil witch and forced to stay shut up in a castle somewhere until Caitlin performed some act of courage and daring to rescue her, like finishing all her times table flash cards the fastest in class or winning a race in PE.

  Now that she was fifteen and almost an adult, she knew the truth was much less interesting and a whole hell of a lot more depressing. She knew Natalie had liked to party, that she had gotten pregnant with Caitlin when she was just a teenager. That she’d never told her family who the baby daddy was, which meant Caitlin had no idea, either.

  Juliet had told her that Natalie was creative and funny, with a tender heart. That she loved art and cooking and working at the greenhouse with Steve, the grandpa who had died before Caitlin was born.

  She’d come to know her mother much better since Christmas, after finding her diaries in the attic. She’d learned that Natalie had a sharp wit, was pretty observant and had terrible spelling. Mimi had told her Natalie had struggled in school. She wasn’t stupid; she just couldn’t seem to process math and science subjects well and she struggled to remember dates and names.

  Her poor grades had put her in remedial classes and that had led her to hanging around with some kids who didn’t always make good choices. Nat, in turn, had started making those bad choices along with her friends.

  Caitlin turned back to her notebook, studying the three names there, unearthed after months of research, poring over her mom’s journals and digging through any other information she could find.

  One of these names was her dad. She was certain of it.

  Jake thought she was wasting her time.

  “You’ve got a wonderful grandmother in Mimi. Why do you have to keep digging into history? You know what happens when you start turning over rocks. You end up finding grubs and spiders and all kinds of distasteful things.”

  That was likely true but she had to know.

  Anyway, she had a plan. A good one. Jake, who wanted to be a police detective when he grew up and was into all the true crime books and podcasts and YouTube videos, had given her the idea.

  “If they can catch serial killers by connecting them to people who have sent in their DNA to be tested, certainly we can search the DNA database to find somebody who might be related to you.”

  “My dad is not a serial killer!” She refused to believe that.

  “I never said he was,” Jake had protested. “I’m just saying that the process to find your dad’s identity would be the same. The DNA you inherit from both parents is called autosomal DNA. Once you take a DNA test at one of the genealogy websites, you can upload your genetic markers for free into several other sites. Then you sit back and wait to see if you come up with any close relationship matches.”

  Caitlin knew it was all a matter of luck that would depend on one of her relatives on her father’s side taking a DNA test and being traceable. The odds weren’t great but she had to try.

  She had sent the test in three weeks ago, after saving her allowance for a month. According to the website, it generally took four to six weeks to get results. Any day now, she might know the truth about her dad.

  She was looking at the list again, thinking about the sparse details she knew about the guys, when somebody knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” she called, assuming it was finally the anesthesiologist, coming to get Mimi to take her to surgery.

  Instead, her aunt Olivia walked in, at least an hour earlier than Caitlin had expected her.

  She must have broken some speed limits to get here so quickly.

  A weird mix of conflicting emotions churned in her chest at the sight of her aunt. She hadn’t seen her in person since she found Olivia’s journals shortly after finding her mom’s. She’d been dreading this moment, not sure what to say or how to act.

  She had always admired Olivia. Her aunt always seemed so cool, so put together, as if she had everything figured out. She worked for some big health business in Seattle and also ran a start-up of her own. She traveled to exciting places; she had a great apartment and super nice friends.

  All this time, she thought her aunt loved her. Olivia always sent fun gifts on birthdays and holidays, texted her funny memes she found, used to call her up sometimes, just because. Caitlin had even gone up to stay with her a few times and Olivia had taken her to cool restaurants and clothes stores that weren’t like anything they had here in Cape Sanctuary.

  She had loved her right back. In a way, they were more like sisters separated by about fourteen years, since Olivia’s actual mother was Caitlin’s mom, too, in every way that mattered.

  Then Caitlin had read her aunt’s diary and discovered everything was a lie. Her aunt didn’t love her. She despised her.

  Since then, Caitlin couldn’t shake a terrible sense of betrayal, as if a best friend had humiliated her, stabbed her in the back in front of the entire school.

  Olivia didn’t look sharp or put together now, she thought with a small-minded sense of satisfaction she was immediately ashamed of. Right now, her aunt’s eyes looked bloodshot and her hair was in a messy bun that looked more messy than bun. She wore yoga pants and an oversize sweater, and her face was pale and tired looking.

  Olivia’s eyes widened when she spotted her and Mimi inside the room. “Oh. You’re still here,” she whispered, with a careful look at the bed where Mimi was sleeping. “The nurse at information who gave me the room number thought Mom might be in surgery already. I’m glad I checked here first.”

  Hospital information ought to know where its patients were, Caitlin thought grumpily. She closed her notebook to hide the names there. Her quest to find her father was none of Olivia’s business.

  “We’re still here. The anesthesiologist is on his way. You didn’t have to come. I told you that on the phone. I can handle things.”

  She cringed inside as she heard her own tone. She sounded like a cranky three-year-old who insisted on crossing the street by herself, without holding a grown-up’s hand.
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  All of her interactions with Olivia were like this lately. She wanted to sound cool and polite and detached. Instead, she suspected she usually came across petulant and childish.

  The words she had read in her aunt’s journal seemed burned into her brain, flashing there like glaring neon signs.

  Whiny.

  Brat.

  Annoying.

  Needy.

  That had been hard enough. Who would possibly want to read that about themselves?

  Worse, though, had been discovering Olivia’s love-hate relationship with Natalie. Olivia’s own sister and Caitlin’s mother.

  Her resentment had come across loud and clear on the pages of that journal. She had written about Natalie throwing her life away by having Caitlin, about the terrible choices she was making, about how she could never stay out of trouble.

  Okay, Caitlin knew she should never have even looked at the pages of that diary. It had been a serious invasion of Olivia’s privacy. How would she feel if somebody read her teenage diary sometime in the future and judged her for the things she’d written?

  In her defense, Caitlin was on a quest to find her dad and had thought maybe her aunt’s diary from that time when Natalie had still been alive might provide valuable information that might help her.

  Instead, all she had discovered was exactly how much her aunt had resented her.

  As if Caitlin could help the situation. She’d only been a little kid. It wasn’t her fault her mom had been an addict who couldn’t take care of herself or a kid, that she had been in and out of jail and Mimi had to take care of Caitlin or else let her go into foster care.

  She wasn’t a brat and she wanted to toss those words at her aunt right now like an ax at one of those throwing clubs.

  Why did Olivia have to come back to Cape Sanctuary? They didn’t need her. Mimi wouldn’t want her here, either. Caitlin knew it.

  As if Mimi sensed Olivia’s presence, her eyes started to flutter open.

  Right now her grandmother looked older than her years. She wasn’t wearing makeup and the few wrinkles that fanned out from her eyes seemed more pronounced.

  “Oh. You’re here.”

  Mimi’s voice was filled with so much relief and gratitude, Caitlin tried not to feel invisible.

  “Hey, Mom.” Olivia went to Mimi’s bedside and stood kind of awkwardly, as if she wasn’t sure whether to hug her or not.

  While Caitlin and Olivia used to get along for the most part until she read that diary, she had always been aware that Olivia and Mimi’s relationship was a little funky, as if both of them had a hundred things they wanted to say to each other but could never find the words.

  Olivia was never mean to Juliet and vice versa, but they were always überpolite. Kind of like when Caitlin’s friends Allie and Emma got in a huge fight then made up and were way too nice to each other for weeks.

  Though she looked kind of out of it from the medication the nurse had given her, Juliet tried to sit up. “I told you not to come. Oh, honey. You must have driven all night.”

  “I’m glad I made it before they took you for surgery.”

  “I am, too. But you still didn’t need to come.”

  Much to Caitlin’s dismay, a tear leaked out of her grandmother’s blue eyes. Juliet reached a trembling hand out, and after an awkward kind of moment, Olivia reached for it and squeezed.

  “How are you feeling?”

  How did Olivia think she was feeling? Jeez. Juliet had a grand total of four broken bones, including her hip and her ribs.

  “I’ve been better,” Juliet said, forcing a smile. “How are you? How was the drive?”

  “Good. There’s not a lot of traffic on the interstate at 3:00 a.m.”

  Before Juliet could answer, the door opened again. This time it really was the anesthesiologist, Dr. Zane, a really nice middle-aged man who had come in earlier to introduce himself to Mimi and Caitlin. She still wasn’t sure if Zane was his first name or his last. Or maybe he was like Beyoncé or Drake and only needed one name.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked with a kindly smile.

  Mimi suddenly looked nervous. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not if you want to heal properly. I’m sorry.”

  With a sigh, her grandmother nodded. “I guess I’m ready.” She squeezed Olivia’s hand again then released it, and Olivia stepped away.

  “Bye, Mom. I...I love you.”

  Caitlin wanted to roll her eyes. It wasn’t really that hard to tell someone going into surgery that you love them, was it?

  “I love you, too, my dear.”

  “Everything will be fine,” Caitlin said briskly, stepping forward to give Mimi a genuine hug. “You’ll be back on your feet and getting things done at the garden center before you know it.”

  Her grandmother hugged her tightly. “You still should have been at school, but I’m glad you’re here, too,” she murmured.

  Dr. Zane spent a moment unhooking the bed from the wall, set a chart at the foot of the bed and started wheeling the whole thing out of the room.

  “You two can come as far as the door of the surgery unit, if you want,” Dr. Zane said cheerfully. “We have a waiting area for family members that’s closer. You’re welcome to wait there or you can come back here and wait in the room. Either way is fine. The surgeon will find you after she’s done and let you know how things went.”

  He pushed Mimi in her bed and they both followed after him like they were in one of those crazy New Orleans funeral processions she’d seen in a documentary once.

  After a series of hallways, they reached an area of the hospital with a big sign hanging from the ceiling that said Surgical Suite.

  “The waiting area is just through those doors,” Dr. Zane said, pointing. “This shouldn’t take long. Maybe two hours from start to finish. You’ve got plenty of time to go get something to eat, if you need to. We can page you overhead throughout the hospital if we need you.”

  They said their goodbyes to Mimi again and the look in her eyes made Caitlin’s stomach hurt all over again.

  Mimi looked scared. Really scared. And her grandmother never looked scared.

  What if something happened to her during the surgery? She had heard about those things. Yeah, complications were rare, but they did happen.

  Dr. Zane scanned his ID badge on a sensor on the wall and a door swung open.

  Once he’d pushed Mimi through and the doors swung shut again, Caitlin felt like she was going to throw up.

  “Don’t worry,” Olivia said gently. “Mom is tough. She’ll be okay.”

  Caitlin was suddenly furious, all the hurt and betrayal and fear tumbling together in her chest into one thick, nasty ball. “What the hell do you know? You’re never here. You don’t even know her. Don’t try to pretend you give a shit what happens to her.”

  She stalked off, needing desperately to be alone.

  6

  OLIVIA

  What had she said?

  Olivia stared after her niece as Caitlin stomped down the hall.

  The girl was a mystery to her lately. She had no idea what was going on behind those hazel eyes. She did know Caitlin seemed to hate her these days. She obviously couldn’t stand to be around Olivia.

  That shouldn’t surprise her. Caitlin’s mother hadn’t liked her much, either. After their father died, Natalie had largely ignored her. They had gone from being very close siblings to Natalie caring only about her friends, partying and the men in her life.

  Caitlin was following the pattern, either distant and cool or straight-up rude to Olivia.

  She didn’t think it was just adolescence. A few months ago, she had asked her mom about Caitlin’s attitude shift, trying to ascertain whether she was showing it to everyone or just to Olivia. Juliet seemed to think she was imagining things.

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bsp; She took a chair in a corner of the half-full waiting room. The moment she stopped moving, all the nervous energy pushing her onward all night as she drove seemed to trickle away. Suddenly, she was completely exhausted, more tired than she ever remembered feeling.

  She closed her eyes, thinking she would only rest them for a moment. The room was warm and soothing music played overhead.

  She ought to take the anesthesiologist’s advice and grab something to eat.

  It was her last thought for a while.

  She dreamed about the happy childhood family she remembered. Juliet, Natalie, Steve. They were having a picnic lunch on Driftwood Beach—Juliet’s best fried chicken and the delicious potato salad she made where she used fresh herbs. It was the Fourth of July. Olivia could tell by the little kids running past with flags and the distant sound of a band playing patriotic music.

  She was happy, her heart full as she savored this time with her family. Her dad, tall and handsome, pushed her and Nat on the swings, and they went higher and higher until her toes seemed to touch the clouds.

  Then suddenly it was dark and the fireworks were starting. Only they weren’t fireworks. Instead, with whistles and crashing booms, explosions started going off up and down the beach. Juliet screamed and grabbed Olivia, pushing her into the ocean, out of the way of the flames.

  Natalie didn’t want to go into the ocean. Her mom tried to call them both but Natalie wouldn’t leave the swings. She kept wanting to go higher and higher, until she and Steve both disappeared into the smoke and fire.

  Then, oddly, Olivia’s little dog was somehow there, running into the fire. She tried to go after Otis but she couldn’t move, trapped in the water. Finally, out of nowhere, Cooper Vance appeared. He gave her a long, disappointed look, then took off into the flames after Otis.

  Everything she loved. Gone, while she stood by, cowering in the water.

  “Wake up. She’s out of surgery.”

  Somehow the words pierced the tormented haze of sleep, yanking her out of that place of smoke and fear.