by Mia March
Kat would never forget what she’d screamed at her mother the day Lolly had told her that her father was gone. “He should have let me come with him, like I wanted to! Then I could be in heaven with him!” Over the years, as Kat thought about that, it shamed her to the point that she’d have to throw up. What a thing to say. To her mother. To someone who’d lost her husband, her sister, her brother-in-law. When Kat had been thirteen, she’d been consumed by it, what she’d said, and Oliver had told her to just go talk to her mother about it, say she didn’t mean it, and Kat had worked up the courage, but her mother had shot her down, as always.
“Kat, we don’t need to think about that.” And then Lolly had gone back to her ledgers, leaving Kat alone with the shame, with the weight of something she couldn’t dislodge from inside her chest.
But now, images of Lolly Weller’s kind moments came over Kat. The way her mother had held her for hours that first night without her father as Kat sobbed and screamed. That she’d taken over Kat’s father’s nightly job of reading Kat her bedtime story, even when she was clearly so tired from running the inn, from taking on her grieving nieces, that she looked as if she might fall asleep herself. How she’d once driven sixty miles to a local bird healer when Kat had found an injured robin in the backyard. How she’d been there, all these years, steady, sturdy, going over figures in her ledger, taking care of guests, making the egg breakfasts.
How she seemed to be trying to do something now by bringing her nieces back to the inn. And by fighting the cancer. Kat wouldn’t have been surprised if Lolly had said, “I’m not going to bother with that awful chemo and radiation. My time is coming and I’m going.” That was more her mother. That she was fighting was both unusual and not; that was how complicated Kat’s mother was. But no matter what, Lolly was her anchor. Even if they weren’t close the way some mothers and daughters were, shopping together or sharing secrets while they peeled carrots, they were business partners, in a way. They shared the inn. And now…
Oliver sat up and pulled her to him and held her. He didn’t say that everything would be all right. He didn’t tell her to stop crying. He didn’t say anything. Kat clung to him, gripping his T-shirt. When the tears finally stopped and she could breathe again, she looked out at the wildflowers, at the old bench right in the middle of the meadow.
“Some romantic must have put that here, just to sit and be among all this raw beauty,” she said, gesturing at the bench. She took a deep breath and got up and put out her hand. Oliver took it and she led him over to sit.
Oliver nodded. “Yeah, me.”
She glanced down and there it was, among the many scratched-in initials and names, OT carved into the second slat and KW in the third. Not in a heart of course, but marked. It had been their bench out by Frog Marsh, where they’d sit and talk away from their houses, watching the frogs and toads leap from lily pads. “What? How did you get this here?”
“I won the bid to design the new park. And they wanted this ‘old thing’ out, so I asked if I could have it, sentimental value and all. I passed this place a few weeks ago, and after I heard about your mom, I thought this would be a good place for you to come and think, come and breathe, to get away but feel rooted, you know?”
Yes, she knew. She knew exactly. She loved how sentimental he was. That a landscape architect who designed and built residential and commercial gardens and yards and walkways appreciated a meadow of wildflowers.
“Oh, Oliver.” She reached for him. “You’re beyond wonderful.”
“Does that mean you’ll marry me?” he asked, pulling a small box from his pocket.
That funny feeling started in her toes but didn’t work its way up as it usually did. This was Oliver standing among the wildflowers and their saved bench in this field of possibilities and asking her to marry him. She wanted the world to feel right again, safe again. He held open the box and took out the antique gold ring with the glittering round diamond. He slipped it on her finger.
“I love you more than anything. And I know how scared you are right now, how worried you are about your mom. I want to be your family, Katherine Weller.”
Damn him for saying exactly the right thing. In exactly the right place.
She hesitated, but only for a second. “Yes.”
Then, shielded by old oaks and evergreens, Kat let Oliver lay her down on the wildflowers, lift up her sundress, and make love to her for the first time.
She didn’t feel any different. After all these years, all these years of fantasizing about having sex with Oliver Tate, imagining it, but being so… afraid of it, she and Oliver had finally made love, the sun on her face, the breeze in her hair, and Oliver’s eyes, full of love and tenderness and I’ve waited for this my whole life, intently focused on her.
But she didn’t feel different. Or differently. Why? She certainly hadn’t exploded into a million pieces the way she’d always thought she might.
She stood at the door to the inn and turned to wave at Oliver as he drove away, that funny feeling back in her toes. She knew she wouldn’t tell anyone her news that night, and so she slid the beautiful ring off her finger and looked at it, then put it in her pocket. She took out her phone and texted Oliver, Keep it to ourselves till the right time to tell Lolly, ok?
A moment later, he texted back, You got it.
She braced herself at the door, sure that her mother would know something was different the moment she saw her. She and Oliver had made love. She and Oliver were engaged. Once again, in the space of a moment, her life was completely different.
Her mother had cancer.
Kat was engaged to be married. Married.
She sucked in a breath and opened the door, the smell of popcorn in the air.
“Oh, good, you’re back,” Lolly said as Kat closed the door. “I know it’s not Friday, but since I’m starting chemo tomorrow and need something fun and light to take my mind off things, I declared it impromptu Movie Night. We’re watching The Devil Wears Prada. It’ll be us and your cousins, Pearl, and Tyler and Suzanne, our young guests.” Though her mother was looking right at her, her eyes didn’t light with You finally said yes—to everything with Oliver. I can see it all over your face. It had always surprised Kat as a child that people could have such big secrets inside them that didn’t show.
Anyway, Kat wasn’t in the mood for fun and light. Or a movie. She was nervous about the chemotherapy starting tomorrow. And she wanted to run up to the Alone Closet and take out the ring and stare at it. Had she said yes to Oliver’s marriage proposal? She had. Without hesitation. Because of the gesture? The bench? The wildflowers? The thoughtfulness? Had he gotten her in a weak moment when she’d been scared?
She was still scared.
But now she could add I told Oliver I’d marry him to the list.
“Are you feeling all right?” Kat asked, peering at her mother. She’d been asking this practically every half hour since her mother had shared the news. And every time she got the same answer.
“Just fine,” Lolly said, and Kat could tell her mother’s mind was on a million other things—the inn, getting things set up for Isabel, Movie Night. Chemotherapy. “Let’s not make it more of a thing than it already is, okay?”
Kat stared at her mother, but then felt her expression soften. This was her mother’s diagnosis. Her mother’s disease. And she had a right to handle it the way she wanted. “Okay,” Kat said, squeezing Lolly’s hands whether her mother liked it or not.
She told Lolly she’d be down in a minute, then ran upstairs and put the ring in the secret compartment under the bottom of her old jewelry box with its tiny ballerina dancing to “Moon River.” Her father had given it to her for her ninth birthday with her first piece of jewelry inside, a gold necklace with a heart pendant with K on it. She glanced at the beautiful ring one last time, then slid the little drawer closed.
Back downstairs in the parlor, Kat took her usual spot on the beanbag by the sofa, where her mother and Pearl sat. Isabel and June were on the love seat. In the two hard-backed chairs were Suzanne and Tyler, twentysomething guests. Since they’d arrived, they’d never stopped holding hands. At check-in yesterday, when Kat and Lolly had been going over procedures with Isabel, Suzanne mentioned that they were there to celebrate their one-month anniversary, and given the lack of rings and their ages, Kat assumed that meant a month of dating.
Kat hadn’t had a chance to bake cupcakes for the impromptu Movie Night, but there was popcorn aplenty and a big bowl of M&M’s. Kat grabbed a few, but found herself so struck by the opening of The Devil Wears Prada, of Anne Hathaway zigzagging her way through the busy, crowded streets of New York City, that the little candies slipped right out of her hand. She wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that, all that energy, all those lights, traffic, people. Boothbay Harbor got crowded in the summer, very crowded, and it was fun and exciting in a different way, but it was still a small town.
The hot actor from the TV show Entourage played Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend. Kat liked them together; they looked as if they belonged together—the same thing everyone said about her and Oliver. Kat admired Anne’s character, a recent college graduate who’d moved to New York with her ideals and dreams to become a hard-hitting journalist covering important issues. She had determination, but no job offers. So when the most powerful editor in fashion-magazine publishing, Meryl Streep’s character, Miranda Priestly, offers her the position of second assistant, Anne accepts, despite how wrong she is for the job.
Kat loved how wrong. With her long messy hair, lack of makeup, lack of style, Anne was completely out of place at a major fashion magazine. She didn’t care about fashion at all or how she looked, but she cared about the credentials the job would give her. In the end, stylish and unexpectedly indispensable to her dragon-lady boss, Anne is faced with choosing her values—or her job.
Kat imagined herself working in a tony cake shop or hotel or restaurant as pastry chef or pastry sous-chef, losing her hemp tank tops and clunky Merrell sandals and dressing in sleek black, her apartment on the twentysomething floor, with views of the Empire State Building, the river, and thousands and thousands of lights.
Something stirred inside her as she watched Anne Hathaway’s transformation from slouchy no-style to glamorous, confident, sleek. Maybe Kat needed a trip to New York, just to show her she could never live there, never breathe there. To put the fantasy out of her head.
Right. Suddenly you could imagine leaving Boothbay Harbor. Two hours after you get engaged to a man you’re not entirely sure you should have said yes to forever to. But as the credits rolled at the end, Kat wished there were part two of the movie, so she could keep watching Anne Hathaway in New York, find out if her dream job really was, after all, and if things did work out with her boyfriend. Kat believed they would.
“Meryl was almost unrecognizable,” Lolly said. “Isn’t it amazing how much she made you sympathize with dragon-lady boss?”
Kat took a sip of wine. “I love how much Meryl humanized Miranda Priestly. Even when she was at her most awful, her most condescending, you understood her. I loved that scene when she explains how Anne Hathaway’s choice of a simple blue sweater is based on what goes on inside the offices of the magazine.”
“I knew fashion was serious business,” Isabel said, “but, my God, that pressure, from all sides, just seemed so unbearable.”
There were nods all around.
“Speaking of pressure,” Suzanne, the young guest, said, “I sort of hated how Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend wouldn’t let her be this new person. Why don’t people let you change and grow?”
“I would never hold you back from anything, Suze,” her boyfriend, Tyler, said, his face in her hair.
“They get scared, I think,” Isabel said. “You’re out there doing your new thing, setting your world on fire, and they get left behind.” She glanced down at her feet, and Kat wondered if she was thinking about Edward.
June reached for a handful of popcorn. “With that kind of job, though, it seemed like you couldn’t have a personal life. It’s either the job or a life. She and the boyfriend were what? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? This is the time to figure that out. Not be stymied.”
“Still, she had to make choices,” Suzanne said. “Her boss or her boyfriend’s birthday party. She always chose the boss. I would never choose my job over Tyler.”
You’re probably not in a position to have to, though, Kat wanted to say. “You know what I think? I think she chose the boss, chose the job, because Meryl Streep’s character was letting her become someone new, someone she didn’t even know was inside her. An entire new facet of her came out at that job. The boyfriend didn’t care about that at all—and he didn’t like it. He liked her messy. Which is nice in itself. But not for Anne Hathaway’s character. The boyfriend was kind of whiny to me.”
“I didn’t think he was whiny at all,” Tyler said. “I think he was just keeping her in check, keeping her real, not letting her get away with treating him like shit.” He glanced around. “Sorry.”
Lolly stood up and began collecting plates and dishes, so they all got up too before Lolly could do too much. “Well, I do like that Anne Hathaway refused to let herself be compromised. She walked away from all that and went back to what she always wanted—to the person she wanted to be.”
“But she did love her job at Runway,” June said. “And she was good at it.”
“Good at being someone’s personal maid and conscience?” Suzanne asked. “That’s not a role to aspire to.”
“I’m not so sure going back to her boyfriend was so right either, though,” June said. “I’m glad she took the job she always wanted. I mean, I understand that she realized she had to sacrifice too much, including her ideals, for her job, but it seemed like she became a new person and grew past the boyfriend. Does that make sense?”
Yes, it does, Kat thought, the ring in her jewelry box flashing in her mind. But Oliver wasn’t some stick-in-the-mud, small-minded guy. If she wanted to travel, he’d probably be excited to plan a trip to Thailand or Austria or Spain. If she wanted to take a pie-baking class in the Deep South of the United States or a cannoli class in Rome, he’d encourage her. Well, to a point.
So why the cold feet, Kat? What was the problem? Was she so scared of Oliver, of losing the kind of love that came around once in a lifetime, that she kept herself at arm’s length? Or in her heart of hearts, did she not love him that way, after all?
How did a person not know how she felt? Her friend Lizzie insisted Kat read too many women’s magazines and let the mumbo jumbo sway her. She thought Kat should remember exactly how she’d felt the moment before that bottle spun to her when they were thirteen—secretly in love with Oliver, dreaming about kissing him, safe in the secret. Until the bottle opening did land on her. Exposure.
“I love that Anne Hathaway became her own person in the end,” Isabel said. “Not the person she needs to be to fit into Meryl Streep’s character’s world. She becomes a more mature version of who she wants to be. The hard-hitting journalist.”
June nodded. “You know what I was thinking of most while I was watching? That I love New York City, but I would not have lasted a minute at a place like that—Runway magazine. I wonder if all major magazines are run that way. Maybe I dodged a bullet, after all.”
Kat could picture herself in that sleek black outfit, dashing to hail a cab to her trendy bakery-café in SoHo, sipping a chocolate martini, leaving her Merrells and mud boots in Maine. A day ago, she wasn’t fantasizing about moving to New York and working in a posh bakery. But she wasn’t leaving Boothbay Harbor. Her mother needed her more than ever. And once she was married, well, this was where Oliver wanted to be, where he wanted to spend the rest of his life, raise the four kids he alw
ays talked about having. Oliver did not want to live in New York City. Or Rome. Or Paris.
He would encourage her to a point.
If she married him, she’d stay right here—forever.
CHAPTER 7
Isabel
He was in the backyard. The guest, the good-looking one who’d checked in last night, just before the movie started. Griffin Dean was his name. He’d arrived, somewhat harried and wanting to hurry through check-in, with a little girl, two or three years old, asleep in his arms, and a teenaged girl with earphones and a scowl. The teenager had been upset to discover she wasn’t getting her own room, but when Lolly explained about the alcove in the Osprey Room, how it was separated from the main part of the room by a wall that jutted out and had two twin beds and its own window, she’d calmed down with a “Fine.” On the way upstairs, Isabel had chattered nonstop, about breakfast being served from seven until eight thirty, that if they needed anything, anything at all, to just let her know, and that if he was interested, it was Movie Night at the inn and they would be watching The Devil Wears Prada. He’d looked confused, as if wondering why on earth she’d think he’d want to watch that, then said thank you and waited politely for her to turn and go before he closed the door.
Isabel glanced at her watch. It wasn’t yet six o’clock in the morning. Monday. She was up early for her first official day as proprietress of the inn. But still, a guest had beat her to it. She wondered if that was okay. Another question she’d have to ask Lolly. But she’d also been unable to sleep much last night. It wasn’t just her aunt’s first chemotherapy appointment that afternoon, which she and Kat were taking her to while June and Charlie manned the inn, that had kept Isabel awake. She’d had a dream about Edward, an odd dream of the two them lying in the backyard under the oaks, but as adults, and Edward telling her that it was a good thing they’d made their pact because she’d be a terrible mother. She’d woken up in a cold sweat, her heart aching, and she’d whispered, “June,” to see if her sister was awake, to talk, but June didn’t answer, and Kat had been so quiet the past couple of days that Isabel figured she wouldn’t be up for talking at 2:36 in the morning either.