Robin looked at her mother then, having never heard her mother admit any faults before.
“I didn’t know what I was doing when you kids were teenagers,” she said, leaning forward to put her soda on the table in front of her. “And girls and boys are so different. By the time you reached that age, I figured I knew what I was doing, as Fisher had helped me cut my teeth. But nothing that worked with him worked with you.”
She shook her head, her sadness palpable. “I’m sorry, Robin. I tried the best way I knew how at the time.”
“I know you did, Mom.” Robin’s tears leaked down her face as she reached over and squeezed her mother’s hand.
“You have always been so strong,” her mom said. “So sure of yourself. You’ve always known what you wanted and haven’t been afraid to go out there and get it. You haven’t needed me the way I hoped you would, because you have Duke.” Her smile wobbled on her face, and while she had tears in her eyes, they didn’t spill down her face. “And Kristen, and all of your friends.”
Robin ducked her head, pure regret filling her. Not for how her relationship with her mother had gone over the years, but because she’d walked out on her friends.
Her friends had been there when no one else had been. Alice, especially, and Robin couldn’t just walk away from her.
“You need your friends,” her mom said. “You always have, and it took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t competing with them. Took me even longer to get to that point with Kristen Shields, but I did it.” She offered Robin another weak smile, and this time, Robin got up and hugged her mother.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. I don’t know what happened today, but if you can do anything to make it better, you should.”
“I’ll try,” Robin said. She’d yelled at Eloise, and she’d screamed and stomped out of the cottage. Embarrassment ran through her like a fast-moving stream, and she hated her passionate emotions in that moment.
“I’ll call you later, okay?” Robin headed for the front door. She had to find Alice and get on the same page with her. They needed Eloise to transfer the money to Garrett, and the only way they were going to achieve that was together.
Chapter Thirty
Kelli couldn’t go back to the beach house and face her husband and son. She left Kristen’s, but she didn’t go back down to the parking lot where she’d asked the RideShare driver to wait.
She couldn’t stop crying, and she couldn’t keep walking. She made it to the picnic table and sank onto the bench there. Overlooking the ocean, Kelli just told herself to breathe in and out. As long as she kept doing that, she could find a solution.
She’d sat at this table to shell peas with the Seafaring Girls. They’d done sand dollar crafts, and threaded seashells they’d collected, cleaned, and dried onto fishing line to make necklaces.
Kristen had stood near the head of the table and quizzed them on how to sail a catamaran, how to survive in the ocean for hours at a time, and how to administer CPR.
Right now, she felt like she needed someone to breathe for her. Press their palms over her heart in a steady rhythm to keep it beating.
Humiliation lived where her pulse should be, and she couldn’t swallow it away. She couldn’t cry it away. The agony simply went on and on, and Kelli kept looking out into the sky and over the water, waiting for the calm peacefulness from the blue sky and smudge of the water on the horizon to flow into her.
She hadn’t told her friends that she and Julian had gotten the largest loans they could. They knew they’d bought another company, but not that they were literally living hand-to-mouth, with the threat of complete ruin hanging only an inch above their heads.
She exhaled, her breath stuttering on the way out. Garrett Hall knew, and it felt like such a simple thing for him to flip a switch and ruin her life.
She heard Parker laughing, and she looked down toward the beach. Her son ran with a kite in his hand, trying to get the wind to pick it up. Jean stood down the beach a ways, her arms folded as she watched him. Gratitude filled Kelli, and just the simple act of watching her son and Jean reminded her that Kelli had never done anything or gone very far by herself.
She needed other people.
She’d needed Julian for many years—and she still did.
She’d needed her friends to help her in the past several months. She’d needed her mother to take Parker when she’d first moved back here. She’d needed Kristen as a teenager—and she still did now.
She couldn’t sit at this picnic table until time stopped, no matter how much she wanted to.
She had one place she escaped to when she felt like the world was about to end, and she pulled out her phone and called her husband.
“Hey,” he said, his voice happy, which was completely foreign to her in that moment. “Are you on your way back?”
“I’m wondering if I can send Parker on the ferry to you,” she said. “He’s old enough, and if you’ll meet him at the station, he’ll be fine.”
“Where are you going?” Julian asked, confusion in his tone.
“I have to go to Bell Island for a little bit,” she said. “See my mother. I might be there for a couple of hours, but I should be home later tonight. I’ll keep you updated.”
“I could meet you at your mother’s,” Julian said, and that alone testified about how much he wanted their marriage to work. He’d never cared about getting to know her mother before. In fact, he’d always preferred that Kelli go to visit her mom alone.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I need to go myself. Can I text you when I put Parker on the ferry? It’s only a nineteen minute ride; you wouldn’t need to leave the house until I text.”
“I can meet our son, Kelli,” he said. “I can leave right now.”
Kelli stood up, her decision made. “Thank you, Julian,” she said, and she hung up. On her way back to the parking lot, she texted Jean, and a few minutes later, she and Parker crested the path.
“Thank you,” Kelli called to her. “I’ll send you some money.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Jean called back, one hand on the doorknob. “I love seeing Parker.” She smiled and went inside the lighthouse, and Kelli received her son into her arms.
“Get in the car, baby,” she said. “I’m going to put you on the ferry, and your dad is going to meet you at the station on Sanctuary.”
“What?” Parker asked. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go see my mom,” she said.
“I want to go see Grandma,” Parker said, buckling his seatbelt.
“I have to go alone.” Kelli looked out the window, disliking the tiny fib she’d told her son and husband. She likely wouldn’t see her mother that day, but she did need to go to Bell Island—and the house on Seabreeze Shore.
An hour later, Kelli got out of another RideShare, thanked the driver, and faced the house where she’d grown up. The stained glass window smiled down on her, and Kelli couldn’t help smiling back.
She hadn’t been here since returning to the cove, but she’d come in June for half a day and made sure things were still clean. She’d restocked her bottled water in the fridge, along with a few snacks.
She didn’t want to find herself in another situation like the one she’d been in when she’d come for Joel’s funeral. This house needed to be her safe haven, and that required chocolate chip granola bars and microwave popcorn.
They’d never used the front door as kids, and Kelli didn’t head that way tonight either. She went to the garage and entered the code. She kept the key to the side entrance in a small, handwoven basket, and she pulled it from the shelf.
The basket was empty.
She pulled in a breath, her heartbeat suddenly fast and shallow, like a hummingbird’s.
“Looking for this?”
Kelli yelped and jumped away from the sound of a woman’s voice.
AJ stood at the top of the steps, holding the silver key pinched between
two fingers. Relief filled Kelli, but she still pressed her palm over her pulse. “AJ. You scared me.”
“I knew you’d come here.” She jumped down from the steps, which surprised Kelli. The woman was forty-five years old, and Kelli had started holding onto handrails a lot more recently. She didn’t want to fall and get hurt.
That had always been a big difference between her and AJ. Kelli didn’t like confrontation or hard conversations, and she was terrified of getting hurt—in any way possible, not just physically.
AJ had lived life on the edge, and in many ways still did.
AJ sighed as she sat on the steps, and as Kelli did too, she said, “I hoped you’d be here.”
“We must’ve been on consecutive ferries,” she said. “I’ve only been here twenty minutes.”
“I had to put Parker on one to Sanctuary,” Kelli said.
“What are we going to do?” AJ asked.
“I don’t know,” Kelli said. “Part of me wants Eloise to fight, because I am just so sick and tired of rolling over and letting people do whatever they want.” She sighed, thinking of the house she and Julian had just rented. They were still paying for their townhome in New Jersey too. Her husband was going to try to run his business from three hundred miles away, and guilt pulled through Kelli.
“But if she just gives him the money, this will all be over.”
“Yeah.” AJ fell silent for a few moments. “I just want it to be over.”
“Me too,” Kelli whispered.
“Do you think what she said is true?”
“Which part?” Eloise had said so much that Kelli was sure she’d already forgotten some of it.
“The part where she said the only way we’ll be safe is if we’re not associated with her.”
Kelli didn’t answer, because she didn’t want to believe that. She couldn’t imagine their group without Eloise, as she’d always been the quiet, steady one. The woman who knew what she wanted, and wasn’t afraid to go after it, even if it wasn’t proper or popular.
She was much quieter in the way she did things than say, Robin, but nonetheless, she’d shown Kelli how to be brave and how to be confident all the same.
“Even if she’s right,” Kelli said. “I don’t want to not be associated with her.” She stood up and extended her hand toward AJ. “Let’s go talk to her.”
AJ shook her head. “Let’s have microwave popcorn first. I noticed you have the key lime sea salt, and I need it to get my courage up.”
“Your courage?” Kelli couldn’t help smiling at her as she went up the three steps and into the house. “AJ, you’ve always had the most courage out of all of us.”
“Yeah, right.” AJ scoffed and let the door slam behind her. “I almost quit my job before I came here,” she said. “I don’t really care that I’m not on-air. I act like I care, because everyone expects me to care.”
Surprise darted through Kelli. “Really?” She set her purse down and picked up the bag of key lime sea salt popcorn AJ had already gotten out of the cupboard.
“Really,” AJ said. “I hate doing the research and all the interviews and having someone else deliver the story. So maybe I do want to be on-air again. Maybe I’d be happier.”
“Maybe,” Kelli said, sticking the bag into the microwave and pressing the popcorn button. She turned back to AJ and found her squinting at her. “What?”
“Do you need money, Kel?”
Her defenses flew into place, and Kelli’s first reaction was to say no, of course not. Instead, she gave herself a moment to think, and then she shrugged. “We get along, month by month.”
AJ nodded and said, “Okay.”
That was that, and Kelli loved AJ for not being Robin and pressing the issue. Their snack finished, and Kelli shook the bag to get the flavor on every piece. “Come on,” she said. “We can’t eat this if we’re not in the popcorn nook.”
AJ burst out laughing, and she followed Kelli upstairs to the tiny closet with a tall, skinny window that looked out over the wilderness preserve behind the house. Plenty of light shone through the glass, and Kelli sank onto the beanbag that had been there for years.
A sigh pulled through her body, but she opened the popcorn, took out a handful, and offered it to AJ.
They didn’t speak, and Kelli appreciated that. AJ had always respected Kelli’s need for peace and quiet when she came to the house on Seabreeze Shore. It seemed like AJ needed it too, and after they finished the bag of popcorn, AJ looked at Kelli.
“Should we go?”
“Yes,” Kelli said. “And we’ll take Eloise’s favorite treat from Bell.”
Their eyes met, and they said together, “Sour grapes,” before dissolving into laughter. They linked arms as they left the closet and then the house. AJ put the key back, and Kelli made sure the door was locked.
They shared a car to the old general store almost in the surf on the beach, and they got Eloise’s penny candy. If Kelli had to give up the people most important to her to save herself, she decided she couldn’t do it.
She would not give up Eloise so she didn’t have to admit her debt. Let Garrett Hall do what he wants, she thought as she and AJ boarded the ferry. Kelli was going to stick with her friends. After all, when the world came crashing down at Garrett’s hand, who would be there for her?
Alice, Eloise, Robin, and AJ, that was who.
Chapter Thirty-One
Eloise walked into the kitchen crying. She pulled the utility knife out of her pocket and sliced open one of the boxes that had been delivered to the inn that day. She pulled out a brand-new set of cookware and started putting it away.
She couldn’t sit still, but nothing she did took enough brain power to make her stop thinking about the situation she was in. She pictured Robin’s face, so full of fear and panic, and a fresh set of tears streamed down her face.
She wasn’t sure why she was being so stubborn about transferring the money from the accounts she knew about to the one Garrett had given her. Perhaps her brother had simply ignited her stubborn streak. True to his word, he had not contacted her again, and the whole world seemed to be holding its breath while it waited for Eloise to make a decision.
She’d seen the horror on Alice’s face. Heard the desperation in her voice. She’d witnessed Kelli’s tears, and she’d felt Kristen’s shock when Eloise had put down all the pictures and started naming the men who’d come to her father’s version of an “inn.”
Honestly, the whole thing felt tainted now. When the inn re-opened, would she have to deal with people who thought it was really something else? How did she make those explanations?
She shook her head and wiped her face, breaking down the box once all the pots and pans were put away. She opened another box and found clean, white kitchen towels inside. She’d been toying with the idea of monograming them, but everything felt ridiculous now. She didn’t need to spend the money to get the towels embroidered with some cute logo she hadn’t had designed yet.
She probably didn’t even need a logo.
Helplessness filled Eloise, but she kept working. Always one to keep busy, she opened, unpacked, put away, and broke down. When she ran out of boxes, she looked around at the empty spots where the new industrial kitchen appliances would go once they were delivered.
Eloise felt those holes and spaces way down deep inside her soul. They multiplied while she stood there, and she finally strode out of the kitchen and back into the sunshine behind the inn. It was starting to weaken as autumn continued its perpetual march toward Five Island Cove, and soon enough the leafed trees would turn gold and crimson, and she’d have to rake the lawn clean for the first time in years.
Oddly, she was looking forward to it. So many things about what she was doing here were odd, and she wasn’t sure why this building meant so much to her.
Then she’d remember how happy she was here, and the version of her father that she’d known here.
Her fingers fisted, and she wanted to shout her rage into the sky.
How dare Garrett come here and shatter her good memories?
She tipped her head back and bellowed into the atmosphere, and among all the stillness, her voice sounded so loud. Her throat stung, and she quieted. Her chest heaved as she breathed, and she forced herself to open her fingers.
Aaron had promised to meet her at the ferry station whenever she texted him, and he had tomorrow off. He’d asked her to go away for the weekend with him, and Eloise honestly hadn’t known what to say.
She hadn’t been able to be excited, and Garrett had stolen that from her.
“Don’t let him,” she said out loud to herself. “He can only do what you let him do.”
She felt foolish for thinking she could use her father’s dirty money to help her friends, but her mind had started to make those plans. To have all of that taken away in a single conversation felt utterly unfair to Eloise, and she hadn’t been able to let go of it yet.
She wanted to be excited when her boyfriend asked her to go away for the weekend, because maybe Aaron would propose. Maybe she’d come home with a diamond ring, and she could call her friends to come eat lunch with her so she could show them, tell them the whole story.
Eloise had lived for years telling herself she didn’t care that she didn’t have the same stories other women did. She’d been lying to herself, and she wanted to gather with Alice, Robin, Kelli, AJ, and Kristen and relate the most romantic way Aaron had asked her to be his wife.
“Go do it now,” she told herself, and Eloise crossed the patio to the door that led to her suite. She’d put the folder and paperwork in the built-in bookcase, and she got it down quickly.
She dialed the first bank, and said, “Yes, hello, this is Eloise Hall, and I need to make a wire transfer. Can I do that over the phone?”
Ten minutes later, that account was empty.
Twenty, and so was the second.
She finished with the third and final bank account, stuffed the paper with her brother’s handwriting on it inside the folder and took the whole thing outside. She’d hauled so much trash to the Dumpster, and this might have been the very first thing that was actual garbage.
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