by Maisey Yates
So maybe she needed to get a handle on her reactions. But, honestly, at this point in life she didn’t have a whole lot of perspective on what emotions were even supposed to be.
She bit back a scowl. And she stormed straight down to the Shoreman’s Cabin, with murder on her mind.
Anna’s car was there, so she knew her sister was around. She might be up at the Captain’s House, but Rachel would find her.
Luckily, Anna was home. She jerked open the door, looking comically like Emma in that moment. Sullen and defiant.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Did you tell my daughter to go ahead and take the job without talking to me?”
Anna lifted a shoulder. “She did talk to you. You freaked out.”
“Funny. She said the same thing.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Adam didn’t ask her. He asked me. If he’d come to her directly—”
“You would’ve handled it exactly the same. Because you didn’t want her to take the job. You want to have her close to you, and I understand that, Rachel, I do. But if you try to control her too much you’re either going to lose her now, or she’s going to have a complete freak-out in twenty years.”
“What makes you say that?”
Anna huffed and pressed her hand to her chest. “The voice of freak-out experience.”
Rachel stared down her sister, her heart thundering. She felt like she was standing in the doorway of a room she wasn’t ready to enter.
One that might challenge what she thought about Anna. About herself and her own feelings toward her sister, and she wasn’t ready.
She didn’t want to be challenged.
“I’m not ready to have this conversation,” Rachel said.
“I know you’re not. I figure that was why you hadn’t asked me about it. But we’re kind of in it, anyway.”
“Did you do it?” Rachel braced herself for whatever the answer might be.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know why you think you’re qualified to give my daughter advice.”
“Really? That’s all you can ask me?”
“My husband is dead!” she yelled. “He’s dead. I would give anything...”
What, to have him back?
No, she couldn’t have him back. That stopped her cold.
In the endless suffering that he’d been in, in his weakened state, where he was just so tired. Living life as a caretaker, and not as a lover. No, she didn’t want him back as he was. She wanted him whole. Because if he could have been healthy for their whole marriage... And Anna had that.
She’d had it. Easy. She had thrown it away, and for what?
“I would never have done that,” Rachel said. “You threw it all away for sex? I haven’t had sex in years, Anna, just so you know. And I would never... I would never.”
Anna’s face was drained of color, the dark circles under her eyes pronounced. “There’s a big difference between can’t have sex and won’t have sex, Rachel. A big difference. And how it makes you feel... It’s just different.”
Her sister was getting at something, at a deeper issue, and Rachel wasn’t dense enough to miss that. But she was angry enough to choose to. Because Anna had taken this moment, the hardest time in her life, and made it about her.
She’d advised her daughter to take a job somewhere else. She couldn’t have waited to end her marriage, even a few more months.
Her pain. Her own pain was so big she couldn’t see around it, and right now she didn’t want to. She’d taken care of other people all this time and worried about them, and right now, looking at her younger sister, she chose to just let all that poison flow right out of her.
“Our marriage vows were the same,” Rachel said. “The same as everyone’s. And it doesn’t matter if you have more sickness than health, it’s still the same promise. It doesn’t matter if things are hard, it’s still the same. That much I know.”
She turned and stormed away, the rage that was driving her now something she couldn’t control. She didn’t want to control it. She had been... She had been the best that she could be for everyone.
For years.
She hadn’t been able to fall apart when Jacob had died, because what was the point? There was too much to handle. She worked until she was exhausted. Fell into bed and slept dry-eyed and then woke up and did it again the next day. It would have hurt everyone if she lost it. Emma, her mother... What was the point of it all?
She felt close to falling apart now.
And maybe this was why she and Anna had struggled to find closeness as adults. They were united by a love of the Lighthouse Inn, their mother. Shared memories from their childhood. But Rachel had always taken care of Anna. Anna was five years younger and she’d helped with her sister from the beginning, been a proud big sister who’d adored her sister’s chubby cheeks and fuzzy red hair.
When she’d been a teenager she and her friends had stayed at her and Jacob’s house sometimes, to feel more independent, even though they were just on the other side of the wall from their mother.
And somewhere in there Anna had grown up. Separated herself. Found her own life. But Rachel had always been the caretaker. The one who’d watched over her. Anna had always been rowdy, wild and in need of caring for. Until she’d started dating Thomas, whom Rachel had imagined was the kind of steadying influence she’d needed.
But it hadn’t brought them closer together.
They were different. Too different to get along. Too different to deal with each other.
She was just so angry right now. It was better than being wounded.
Giving in to it, right in Anna’s face, had felt amazing in the moment. To unleash it all instead of shoving it down had been a high and she wanted to ride it as long as she could.
She stormed back to the Lightkeeper’s House and grabbed her car keys, then drove furiously toward town. When she pulled up to J’s, she took a deep breath before getting out of the car, and she asked herself if she was really going to do this.
If she was going to be that vision of angry Rachel that she’d had of herself about a half hour ago, storming in and causing her daughter a massive amount of embarrassment.
She wasn’t going to cause her daughter embarrassment. But she was going to talk to her.
She got out of the car and slammed the door shut, crossing the street. And then she stopped.
She could see Emma there through the window, talking to customers. Laughing. She had a pad in one hand, and she was writing down orders.
Her red hair was up, and she was wearing a gray T-shirt, white apron and a pair of jeans. She looked...impossibly like an adult. Like the college student she was soon going to be. And very much not like a little girl whose life Rachel could control.
It wasn’t even about control.
It was just about having to let go of way too many things and not wanting this to be another one of them.
She let her arms fall slack at her sides, and her purse dropped to the sidewalk.
She saw herself way too clearly just then. A ticking time bomb pretending she had it all together while yelling aimlessly at her sister, just looking for a target for the anger and pain that lived in her and finding her convenient.
She was pushing away her sister. She was smothering her daughter because she was terrified of what her life might look like if she had only herself to be responsible for.
She was ruining everything.
Not Anna. Not Emma.
And all that righteous rage drained away and left her feeling exactly as she was. Sad. Tired.
Alone.
The door to the diner opened, and Adam popped his head out. “Did you want to come in?”
“No,” she said, deep in the throes of thwarted anger. What a terrible feeling that was. Worse than being turned on with
no relief. Worse even than looking forward to leftovers all day and finding out someone else had eaten them first.
She closed her eyes and breathed in, then out.
“Maybe I’ll come out, then.” He slipped out the door and stood in front of her. It was weird to not have a counter between them. She wasn’t sure she’d realized how tall he was. She was usually sitting, and he was usually standing, and the counter space was between them.
He dwarfed her. She barely came up to the bottom of his chin. It was weird that it surprised her.
She’d talked to Adam multiple times a week for the past couple of years, but she didn’t know much about him.
He was the grandson of Jack, the original owner. But she didn’t know what had brought him to Sunset Bay. She didn’t know why he’d chosen to take over the diner. She hadn’t asked. Because he did her the great mercy of not asking her about her life, and on some level maybe she felt like not asking him about his made it all safe.
“Why did you hire my daughter without talking to me?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Was I supposed to talk to you?”
“You asked me if she was interested and I said no.”
“And then she came by this morning and told me that she was. You didn’t tell me not to hire her, Rachel. You told me that she wasn’t interested.”
“Did you think that might be the same thing?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. Because as far as I know you’re a pretty levelheaded woman.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I guess not.”
She made an exasperated sound. “I am her mother, and I just need to know what’s going on with her. And... I was counting on her to work at the bed-and-breakfast.”
“Were you?”
She took a breath and looked up and down the street. It was deserted, and it was dark, the streetlights casting an overly yellow glow onto the sidewalks. She hadn’t confided in her family. She hadn’t told them anything about what she was feeling because it didn’t feel fair to burden them. But Adam... She could tell Adam.
Things were always easier with him.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t. Not in a practical way. Just an emotional one. She’s going to college in the fall. And... I am not handling that well.”
“You’re doing okay,” he said.
“I’m here, ready to yell at you for committing the great evil of giving her a job.”
“You didn’t actually yell at me, though,” he pointed out. “And you didn’t storm inside and yell at her.”
“I wanted to.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “But you didn’t.”
“You’re a pain. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“More times than I can count.”
She cleared her throat and looked behind him, into the diner window again. At Emma. “Will you take really good care of her?”
“She’s waiting tables in Sunset Bay, not taking work as a human pincushion in Vegas.”
“Can I come visit?”
“I was under the impression that you would be spending as much time in my restaurant as you ever have.”
“Okay. She can work for you.”
“I didn’t ask for or need your permission.”
Rachel sputtered. “You... You did, though.”
“I mean, you wanted me to need it. She needed your permission, but I didn’t need your permission.”
“I’m pretty sure you did, to hire my minor child.”
“I don’t have a form for you to sign. This isn’t a field trip.”
“Didn’t you care about my feelings at all?”
“Of course,” he said. “But caring about them and thinking they’re reasonable are two different things. And I figure, even if you needed a minute to sort your feelings out, you weren’t going to keep her from working here, not in the end.”
“You’re enraging.”
“Do you want a cheeseburger?”
She sighed. “Yes, I want a cheeseburger.” She picked her purse up off the sidewalk and followed Adam back into the diner. Emma looked up from the table she was waiting on and froze. Rachel waved her fingers, a small white flag. She sat down at the counter. “Do you want it to go?” Adam asked, putting himself back behind the counter, and happily restoring the order of things.
“I might eat here,” she said.
“Only if you promise not to harass my waitstaff. Or ground them.”
“I promise,” she said.
A few minutes later he put the cheeseburger in front of her. The intense...normalcy of the moment felt wrong when she’d left things with Anna like she had.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked up and met his eyes. “I thought you had a policy against asking me that.”
“Did I...ever say that I had a policy about anything?”
“No. But you’ve never asked me that. And it’s the only thing most other people have asked me for about two years.”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “Sure. You also never stormed up to the front of my restaurant before, stood frozen outside like you’d been hit across the face with a marlin and then stared at my cheeseburger like it had stolen your best friend from you.” He winced. “That was a bad choice of words, and I’m sorry. It’s not my place to dig into what’s going on.”
“It’s not about him...” She said the words softly.
It was the first time either of them had ever come close to talking about her husband.
He nodded. “Okay, then.”
“I yelled at my sister earlier. Because she’s the one who told Emma to come get the job. And I said some things to her that I... That I shouldn’t have said.”
He considered that for a moment, and she could tell he wasn’t especially thrilled that he’d gotten himself into the position of being the advice giver. “We all say things we don’t mean when we’re angry.”
Rachel let that comment settle over her for a minute. “No, I meant them. I shouldn’t have said them. Not the way that I did. Because... I feel things. Some complicated things. But I’m also not interested in cutting her out of my life. So I guess I need to figure out a better way of dealing with my feelings.”
“Yeah, I think they call that life. The thing where you spend a lot of time working out better ways to handle your feelings.”
“Have you managed that yet?”
He nodded. “Yep. I do it pretty well. By not having feelings.”
He said it light and funny, but the words hit her in a way that made her feel unaccountably sad. Adam seemed easygoing, but when she really thought about it...
It didn’t make a whole lot of sense that he had moved here to run the diner. She imagined he made an all-right living with it, but it wouldn’t be anything extravagant. Not really anything worth uprooting a life over. She supposed that he could be married, though she never heard anyone say that he was, and he didn’t wear a ring. Even more possible, he had a girlfriend, because it wasn’t like they talked about those sorts of things.
But if he was what he appeared to be, he was single, alone. And he was...an attractive man. Probably forty, in excellent shape...
All those things didn’t add up. Not without something dark and hollow and sad behind them.
But she wouldn’t ask. They didn’t ask each other those kinds of questions.
“Okay, but what if I have feelings?”
“You’ll probably have to talk to her.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“It’s up to you. You could also just not worry about it right now. Maybe it’ll fix itself.”
“Nothing fixes itself,” Rachel said. “Though, in my experience, not a whole lot seems to get fixed with my effort, either.”
“I don’t know. I think you fixed this pretty well.”
They both looked back at Emma, who was happily seeing to the next table.
Happy.
She looked happy here. Less burdened and pale.
And she’d tried to keep her from this to make herself feel better.
She’d fought with Anna, who’d made life choices without her—her permission. Her guidance.
She wondered then if the thing that scared her most was what her life looked like when she wasn’t needed.
And she was afraid she was perilously close to finding out.
11
Today the chaplain came with a timely reminder: we are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY STAFF SERGEANT RICHARD JOHNSON, AUGUST 25, 1943
ANNA
Anna hadn’t spoken to Rachel in the two days since their fight. But she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to avoid her for much longer.
For one thing, they worked on the same property. For another, they were supposed to bake croissants from scratch for a large party that was coming up just for breakfast in the morning. And that meant not only would they be seeing each other, but they would also be interacting in that tiny kitchen. Trying to work together to make something happen.
It was too bad she was going to have to try to pretend her sister didn’t think the worst of her the entire time.
Rachel’s response hadn’t surprised her, even if it had hurt her. Emma’s reaction had been surprising, but welcome. Anna was afraid to have a conversation with her mother that went too deep, because she knew that in her mother’s eyes she was the worst kind of woman that could ever exist. While Rachel was currently exemplifying what it meant to be the best.
And Anna felt petty unto her soul to even think of it that way. It was like being trapped in the middle of a storm-tossed sea and worrying about your hair being wet. The waves might pull you under, but God forbid you be a little bit damp.
She wondered if Rachel would even show up and help her bake. She couldn’t actually imagine her sister backing out on an obligation, but in truth, baking wasn’t Rachel’s special skill and she wouldn’t be looking forward to seeing Anna any more than Anna would be looking forward to seeing her.