by Beck, Jamie
Logan watched Claire take Ryan’s hand as he helped her stand. She never once glanced over her shoulder at Logan, but she must’ve known he was waiting on the porch while watching them. Ryan loaded Claire’s bag into her back seat, then closed her door and waved her off.
She pulled from the curb and crept down the residential lane, where kids were building snowmen.
“What the hell, Logan?” Ryan scoffed as he retrieved the discarded salt bag.
“She ordered me to leave her alone.” His lungs now had frostbite from Claire’s chilly new attitude.
Ryan scooped some salt and tossed it across the walkway. “What did you say to upset her?”
“Nothing. I complimented her work. She threw the first barb, and the second. Even then, I tried to help her to her car, but she broke free.” He crossed his arms, newly affronted. “If anyone has the right to feel pissed off, it’s me.”
“Get your head out of your ass.” Ryan hoisted the bag onto his hip. “You know you’re the second-to-last person on the planet she wants to see. She didn’t expect to face you this morning. Give her a break. She and Steffi are under a lot of pressure now, and you’re a life-size reminder of something else that’s painful.”
Logan resented being persona non grata because of what his sister had done. “Well, she’d better get used to seeing Peyton and me around town. Despite what my sister did, she has as much claim on this town as anyone, maybe more.”
Their great-grandfather, William Herbert Prescott, or Duck as Logan had named him because of the way he’d often spoken to kids in a Donald Duck voice, practically founded the town. A Prescott had lived on Lilac Lane for ninety years. Logan should know. In less than two months, he’d be required to attend an annual fund-raiser to celebrate that fact and raise money for the local library’s literacy program.
Ryan narrowed his eyes. “Don’t pull the Prescott card, buddy. It doesn’t suit you.”
In some ways, it didn’t. He’d rather be admired for his own talent than the long shadow of his family name. While he’d had moderate success, he’d yet to produce a truly noteworthy project. This morning, however, Claire’s dismissal had thrown him out of sorts, although he couldn’t honestly say why it hurt him so much.
It wasn’t like he saw her often. She’d simply been part of his life here, like the rambling mansion his mother and father still called home, and Donna, the aging waitress at the diner who knew to bring him black coffee and coconut cream pie when he sat down, and the sense of peace he knew when kayaking on the Sound during the golden hours. “Sorry. Maybe I should go. Steffi’s likely to chew my head off, too.”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Shut up and get inside. Her bark is worse than her bite. Besides, she planned a whole lunch thing.”
“She cooked?” Steffi Lockwood was not someone anyone would deem domestic.
“Takeout.” Ryan smiled and raised his index finger to his lips, forcing a chuckle from Logan. “Lasagna from Lucia’s.”
“Thank God coming home can still yield a few good surprises.” Logan smiled and headed for the door, noticing for the second time its canary-yellow appeal. A nice contrast to the Wedgwood-blue clapboard trimmed in cloud white.
It’d been a long time since he’d spent more than a few hours in Sanctuary Sound. When his sister first announced her wish to come home for her double mastectomy after the final round of chemo, he’d been skeptical. Her relationship with their parents was only slightly better than his own, and Peyton had burned some serious bridges last year. The sleepy town also wouldn’t offer much entertainment.
But a growing part of him had looked forward to catching up with old friends. He’d assumed that list included Claire, but apparently his last name had cost him that privilege. That left him with two choices: pursue his original plan or let her go.
The past six months had been a grueling challenge with Peyton, so how hard could one more battle be?
Chapter Two
Claire frowned, muttering to herself throughout the drive to her mother’s house. She jabbed the seat-heater button, but the lukewarm cushion scarcely melted her frozen behind. The humiliation of landing on her butt in front of Logan had stung a whole lot less than the crestfallen look in his eyes when he’d said, “Pity to learn it was all an act.”
She hated disappointing anyone, including him. The fact that she’d done so with false bravado, well . . . karma had swooped right in to make her pay.
Dicey roads and slippery thoughts made the drive treacherous enough without the added distraction of her phone pinging text messages. Steffi? Logan? A potential client? She couldn’t check while steering, but each ding sparked along a new nerve ending until she shook with frustration.
As soon as she parked in her parents’ driveway, she scrolled through Steffi’s messages.
10:42 a.m.: Sorry! Logan showed up an hour early.
10:43 a.m.: Are you okay? Text me so I know you’re all right. I promise finding new work will be my number one priority this week.
10:46 a.m.: What happened outside with Logan? He’s kinda sullen, and you and I both know that rarely happens.
10:50 a.m.: Logan asked if he should call you to apologize. Since I know you don’t want to deal with him, I said I’d pass along the message and you’d call if you wanted to talk to him. Here’s his number, in case you don’t have it: 203-555-9753.
Claire’s derisive snicker echoed off the windows of her car. As if she didn’t know Logan’s number. She didn’t even need to check her contacts. She’d memorized those digits when he’d been showing her his first iPhone back in 2008.
Sighing, she typed back:
It’s fine. I’m at my mom’s. Tell Logan
She hesitated and then deleted those last two words. Tell him what? She had nothing more to say. As much as she wished things hadn’t ended on a horrid note, she couldn’t pretend that they could pick up as friends now. Not when he’d take Peyton’s side of everything.
She hit “Send” before hauling herself out of the car, which smelled like damp laundry that had been sitting in a warm dryer too long. She peeled the seat of her wet pants away from her bottom. Nice.
“Hello!” Claire called out as she entered her folks’ house. She leaned on Rosie while shucking out of her snow boots.
“Claire?” Her mom appeared from the vicinity of the kitchen, wearing a warm smile and a pink flannel robe. Saturdays at the McKenna home usually involved lazy mornings of crossword puzzles, breakfast strata, and gossip. “I didn’t know you were stopping by.”
Within three seconds, Claire found herself in the middle of her mom’s reassuring bear hug. Ruth McKenna was a champion hugger. When Claire was young, the overt affection had been a bit suffocating and uncool, especially in front of her friends. With time, she’d come to appreciate the comfort.
Her parents had suffered two miscarriages before they had Claire, and one after, which explained why they’d always treated her like she was made of spun glass. Things got worse after the shooting. Those surgeries. The recovery. Back then, Claire could hardly blink without her mom taking her temperature and calling the doctor. If her folks could’ve locked her in the house forever, they might have. She might’ve let them, too.
That was back in the days of frequent nightmares and panic attacks, when any unexpected sound or semblance of a crowd had made Claire nauseated, sweaty, and weak.
Bit by bit, she’d assimilated back into the familiar setting of her hometown, uninterested in venturing out into the nasty world where the news rarely made anyone smile. After all, life-changing danger had visited her just thirty miles up the highway. At least her previous years spent in tennis training and competition had given her a taste of big cities like Boston and the rural beauty of Vermont. Now, her simple, safe life seemed like the smartest choice, and not only because it helped keep the nightmares and panic attacks at bay.
“I just left Steffi’s house.” She yanked her scarf off and tossed it over the back of a wingback chair, then shrugged o
ut of her coat and threw it over the scarf. “Can I borrow some PJ bottoms and toss my pants in the dryer while I’m here?”
Her mother’s brows drew together in that familiar pattern of concern. She had one of those pretty heart-shaped faces. Short, curly auburn hair fringed her forehead, framing bright-blue eyes so disproportionately large she looked like a Bratz doll. “What happened to you?”
Claire placed both hands on Rosie’s ivory handle. “An unfortunate run-in with a gnarly patch of ice.”
Her mom clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Are you hurt? How’s your hip?”
“A snowdrift cushioned the fall. I’d be completely fine if it hadn’t happened in front of Logan.” She started toward the kitchen. “As you might guess, I need chocolate. And maybe some Cheetos.”
To date, her unfortunate stress-eating habit hadn’t been a problem because most days she remained fairly calm, and so far, her body still melted calories like butter in a frying pan. Peyton’s impending arrival, however, might take Claire from a size two to a four.
“Let me go find you some bottoms,” her mom said as she went toward the stairs.
Claire rounded the corner to the kitchen, intending to beeline for the junk-food drawer, and nearly smacked into her dad as he stirred sugar into what she presumed, at this hour, was his third cup of coffee.
“Claire Bear!” He kissed her cheek. “What a nice surprise. Are you having lunch with us?”
She opened the cabinet below the silverware drawer and rummaged around. Oreos, Twizzlers, kettle corn . . . aha! She grabbed two bright-orange bags and tossed them on the counter. “If Reese’s and Cheetos count as lunch, then sure.”
“Uh-oh.” He chortled, taking a seat at the table, where his glasses rested on the open newspaper alongside a pencil. He pushed his glasses back into place and smiled. He wasn’t a handsome man—sort of average looking, with thinning brown hair, smaller brown eyes, and a dimpled chin—but his face radiated the kind of sincerity that instantly put you at ease and made you spill all your secrets. “What happened today, sweetie?”
How lucky to have two parents who not only loved her to pieces but knew her so well. Some adult children might complain about the daily reporting and general nosiness, but Claire didn’t. Her parents’ involvement gave her the deep sense of belonging that kept her grounded. “Logan.”
“I thought you liked Logan?” He scratched his head.
“I did.” She really did, which was part of the problem. She unwrapped three mini Reese’s and popped them into her mouth in quick succession. Milk. She needed ice-cold milk. “But now he’s Peyton’s emissary.”
“Oh.” He nodded, frowning with a slight nod. “Well, he’s in a tough spot.”
“Really, Dad?” she asked, her mouth still pasty from the peanut butter. She poured herself a tumbler of milk and guzzled a bit before speaking. “My relationship with his sister is none of his business. He should just butt out.”
“Who should butt out of what?” her mom asked, dangling pink-and-gray polka-dot drawstring pajama pants in one hand while gesturing with the other. “Give me your wet pants.”
“Logan,” Claire muttered, popping another Reese’s. “And my relationship with Peyton.”
“Oooh.” Her mom grimaced in agreement.
Her dad covered his eyes while Claire wiggled out of her damp corduroys. Her fingers brushed the scars from the bullet wound and her surgeries, which were partly visible despite her undies.
The shot from the high-velocity rifle had punctured the front of her left hip and blown out the back, shattering her acetabulum, the fragments of which caused additional trauma requiring multiple surgeries, leaving her with lifelong damage and sciatic nerve pain. Few people had ever seen the scars, though. She’d had little dating experience prior to Todd—a side effect of having lived at home with her parents for too long. She’d rushed headfirst into that relationship, although it had taken her a while to let him see her naked. The first and only man she’d trusted enough. What a waste . . . and a lesson.
She handed her pants to her mom and slipped on the pj’s. “You can look now, Dad.”
“Pass me some of those.” He gestured to the Reese’s with one hand.
Claire took her milk and the bag of candy to the kitchen table and sat down.
Her mom returned from the laundry room within a minute. She must’ve decided that anything would be a better topic of conversation than Logan, as she suggested, “If you’re not too busy today, we should get a manicure. That always makes me feel better.”
Her mom wasn’t wrong, and a manicure sounded like a little bit of heaven. A bit Claire couldn’t afford at the moment. “Thanks, but I need to conserve every penny so we can afford decent retail space.”
“Why pay rent when you can work from your home office?” Her mom poured herself another small cup of coffee.
“Right now we’re only reaching customers by word of mouth and our website. If I had a storefront, people would drop in, and I could sell services. It’d give us more legitimacy, I think. If I could find something supercheap, I might even dip into my rainy-day fund to make it happen.”
“That’s not wise, honey.” Her dad scratched his chin.
“Tom, why can’t we give the girls a little business loan?” Her mom rubbed his shoulders and kissed the balding spot on his head. Claire had watched her mom maneuver him with this soft touch a thousand times.
“I wasn’t a fan of her going into business with a friend because of the risks. Now you want us to get involved, too?” He patted his wife’s hand before looking at Claire. “But if you get into a real bind, come talk to me, and we’ll see how we can help.”
“Thanks, Dad, but I’ll solve my own problems.” She hated that the first thing most people thought of when they saw her and Rosie coming was how to make things easier for her. “Needy” and “incapable” weren’t words she associated with herself.
She’d been a fierce competitor before the accident. Disciplined. Strong. Ambitious. Those traits didn’t disappear just because she’d healed funny, post-traumatic arthritis sliced through her hip like a hot knife, and nerve damage sent a jolt of lightning through her back and leg every now and then.
She’d survived the bullet, blood loss, and surgeries. She’d learned to walk again, graduated high school on schedule despite missing many classes during rehab, and gone on to have a satisfying career. The only battles she’d lost were some mental ones—missing what had been, and fearing what else could happen. But she’d hidden those blues from most everyone, so why did people still treat her as less than?
Her dad smiled. “Just because you can take care of yourself doesn’t mean you can’t lean on others sometimes, too.”
“True. And on that note, Mom, have you spoken with Mrs. Brewster lately?”
“No, honey. Why?” Her mom slid onto an empty chair and sipped from her coffee cup.
“Rumor has it that she might be looking to remodel her master bathroom. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks, so I wondered if you’d heard anything.”
Her mom shook her head. “Sorry.”
“No worries.” Claire’s book group—an odd assortment of local women spanning a few decades—met in a week. They might know something. “She still works at Earth Garden, doesn’t she?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe it’s time to spruce up my porch with a new plant.” Claire downed her sixth Reese’s with a long swallow of milk before rising and setting the glass in the dishwasher. She always felt better after chocolate, and now she had a goal. Goals were good. Goals kept her moving forward so her mind didn’t dwell on things that couldn’t be changed. “See you later!”
“Um, honey,” her dad said. “You might want to change your pants first.”
Oh yeah.
“I’ll go dress in the laundry room.” Claire meandered around the bend to the back hall. Few things felt better than sliding into a pair of warm pants. It would’ve been pure bliss if not for the unpleasant memor
ies of why they’d gotten wet in the first place.
Hopefully she wouldn’t run into Logan—or Peyton—anytime soon.
Gravel ground beneath the tires of Logan’s Wrangler as he drove along the winding driveway that led to Arcadia House, Duck’s rambling summer retreat. Originally occupying a fifty-acre pie-shaped lot along Connecticut’s shoreline, it’d been that man’s place of peace, where he’d continued writing best sellers after the success of his most famous work, A Shadow on Sand. Sixteen million copies later, that book’s royalties still helped pad the Prescott coffers, despite Logan’s grandfather’s profligate lifestyle nearly stripping them bare at one point. Logan’s dad had saved the estate in the midnineties by subdividing forty-five acres for a residential development.
That deal had resulted in the dedication of Lilac Lane as a public road, which, along with the creation of a few other streets, turned the former estate into a neighborhood.
Logan didn’t mind the new neighbors. In fact, thanks to his father’s transaction, families like the Lockwoods and McKennas had given Peyton and him nearby friends. Yet a part of Logan mourned for the earliest days of his childhood, when the entire acreage—wooded areas, grassy fields, and one thousand feet of private beach—had led to hours of discovery. He’d caught turtles and snails, climbed trees for hours, and made art from broken shells and sand and the occasional piece of trash that would wash ashore.
Duck had always told Logan that creativity came alive when the body and soul were at peace. He’d never been much interested in the fame or money that his work derived, except for how they enabled him to keep doing what he loved. Logan’s dad, on the other hand, cared very much for the wealth and societal position, and very little for creativity. Thus, the bastardized version of the onetime refuge of a great writer.
Now Logan parked beneath a gleaming white portico at the far right side of the antique-gray shingle-style home. From there, he could see down the sloped lawn to the remaining four-hundred-foot-wide private shoreline on Long Island Sound. His father’s carbon-gray GranTurismo was parked in front of the newly constructed detached four-car garage.