An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach)

by Mariah Stewart

  It was all very harmless and gave Grace something to focus on other than the great love story that was playing out under her nose and the pain it caused her every single day.

  Next, she’d invited her followers to Saturday night at the movies. Every Monday, she’d suggest three movies to be voted on during the week, then on Friday, she’d announce the movie that had garnered the most votes. On Saturday night, they’d all watch the selected movie and share their thoughts on her blog. It was a way for them to cope, to get their feet back on the ground. Even Grace felt a lot better after a few months of getting TheLast2No up and running.

  It seemed harmless enough. Okay, so a few of her followers maybe got a little carried away now and then when describing what they’d like to do to their ex or to the woman who broke up their happy life, but of course no one would ever follow through. And Grace tried to defuse any violent sentiments as best she could, either by talking the person down, if possible, and if not, by blocking them from commenting. There had been a few who protested being blocked by rejoining under another name, and once or twice had threatened Grace personally, but she figured that came with the territory. Anytime you tried to shut down someone who wanted to have their say on a topic they felt particularly passionate about, there could be protests, emotions could run understandably high, but she never took them seriously and never felt she was in danger.

  The only thing she was afraid of was being found out.

  She’d have been hard pressed to admit it, but Grace actually enjoyed her Friday and Saturday nights with her virtual friends more than she enjoyed being with people face-to-face over the weekend. The followers of her blog deferred to her in ways no one in her real life ever did, and her blog gave her total control over that one small corner of her life. She wasn’t interested in meeting anyone, had no desire for romance—she thought of her heart as having shrunk to the size of a walnut—and the friends she’d had hadn’t proved themselves to be as understanding as she expected good friends to be.

  “Gracie, he doesn’t love you. You can’t spend your life pining for someone who doesn’t love you,” her supposed best friend Michelle had told her every time Grace had confided a possible new how-to-win-Zach-back scheme. “Why would you even want to be with someone who doesn’t want you?”

  After showing her childhood friend Rosemary the sexy card she’d bought for Zach’s birthday, she’d invited Grace to lunch, during which time she’d leaned across the table, taken Grace’s hand, and said, “Grace, you’re better than this.”

  Even her own sister had tried—in typical blunt Natalie fashion—to get Grace to give up her dream of getting Zach back. “Girl, you’re making a fool out of yourself. Let him go. You deserve so much more than a guy who would walk out on you two months after you buried your father.”

  “Oh, this from my sister whose baby daddy walked out on her the minute he found out she was pregnant?” Grace had snapped.

  Nat’s eyes had flashed with indignation, and she’d snapped back, “Oh, yes, I most certainly deserve more than a drug-addicted man who would make me choose between him and my child. I will never regret choosing Daisy. I was happy about the baby, so I expected Jonathan to be as well. But I’d never for a second even think about crawling back to him. He’s not worth it. Neither is Zach. Stop crawling.”

  Grace had walked out of Natalie’s apartment, and it had been weeks before she’d spoken to her again.

  She sighed. She knew her sister loved her, knew she meant well. Grace loved Natalie, too, and she adored her niece. She missed her friends, but she couldn’t be in their company. No one understood how she felt. She’d been in love with Zach since she’d walked into her first-year law school class and he’d turned and smiled at her. With her whole heart and soul she believed that he was her one true love, her meant-to-be, her happy-ever-after. Her parents had had that sort of love, so for Grace nothing else would be acceptable. And once you found that person, you were supposed to stay together, till death do you part. That was what soul mates did: they stayed together forever. That was what she’d expected from her marriage.

  What she hadn’t expected was that things between her and Zach would end the way they had. It was inconceivable that he’d go behind her back and have an affair right under her nose and show absolutely no remorse. She’d waited for him to come to his senses and come back home to the house they shared in Haverford, but with every passing week, it became more obvious that that was not going to happen.

  Grace hadn’t tossed in the towel until she realized he hadn’t cared who knew—and apparently everyone at Flynn Law had, except her. He hadn’t tried to hide his new relationship, hadn’t cared how humiliating it was for her. Grace had accepted the end of her marriage—the end of her happy-ever-after—with a sense of overwhelming sadness and bitter disappointment, because she had no choice. TheLast2No gave her a sense of control she had nowhere else in her life, and for now that was going to have to be enough.

  Chapter Five

  NATALIE

  Natalie thought of Friday nights as a portal that opened onto two days she could make into whatever she wanted. Tonight she’d shared dinner with Daisy at six thirty and by eight had smoothly nailed playtime, bath time, and bedtime—including the reading of one of their favorite books, On the Night You Were Born, which was so wonderful she silently thanked the author, Nancy Tillman, every time she read it. After closing the bedroom door on the sleeping three-year-old, Natalie poured herself a glass of wine and decided she’d like company. Specifically, she’d like the company of her sister. She picked up her phone and sent Grace a text.

  Wanna come over and hang out?

  Five minutes later, Grace replied, Sorry. Plans for tonight.

  Whatcha doing?

  Drinks with friends.

  Anyone I know?

  Nope.

  Dinner on Sunday at Mom’s?

  See you there.

  While Natalie would have enjoyed Grace’s company, she was happy to hear her sister was beginning to socialize again. While Grace appeared to have accepted the fact that Zach would not be coming back, she’d kept to herself so much that their mother confessed to Nat she’d discussed Grace’s situation with Isabelle Finley, a friend from college who was a psychologist. Isabelle had offered to refer Grace to a therapist who specialized in dealing with the aftermath of failed marriages, but Grace had declined. So Natalie was gratified to see her sister making new friends and getting out of the house she and Zach had shared (which both Maggie and Nat agreed Grace should sell and find a new place, one with no ties to the life she’d been forced to leave behind). The hope was that Grace soon would move on and make a new life for herself.

  Natalie turned on the TV as she scrolled through her emails and half watched the last half hour of a crime show. She responded to emails from several students. As a teacher of freshman English at a community college, she tried to be accessible. Having gone through those in a timely manner, she exited her email and opened the genealogy website where, several months ago, she’d submitted her saliva for a DNA test. She hadn’t had high expectations from the results, though she did discover several second cousins she hadn’t known about, one who lived near State College, a Nittany Lion like Natalie, whose enrollment at Penn State had overlapped Nat’s for two years. They’d spoken on the phone several times and were making plans to get together sometime later in the fall at a Penn State football game. Nat’s main genealogical goal was to find her father’s maternal great-grandparents, whose names and places of birth had somehow been lost over the years.

  Her bare feet crossed at the ankles and rested on the edge of the coffee table, she scanned the DNA matches, searching for names that might have been added since her last visit to her page, but there was nothing new. She opened the family tree she’d started for Daisy, thinking the day might come when she might want to know about both sides of her family. Jonathan had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with their daughter, which was fine with Natalie. The last yea
r they’d been together he’d grown increasingly distant. Nothing had changed in their lives that she could see, though in retrospect she’d realized there’d been much he’d taken pains to hide from her. She’d discovered he’d been using and selling drugs the day she found out she was pregnant, and she had delivered her ultimatum: stop using, stop selling if he wanted to stay with her. But as soon as he’d heard the word baby, he was packing. After he left, she had no regrets. From that moment on, she’d known she’d be raising her baby alone. It had never occurred to her to beg Jon to be part of Daisy’s life. She didn’t need the child support—she could support herself and Daisy with no help from him, thank you very much—and her father had left her and Grace each a generous inheritance, so financially she was fine.

  Until Natalie had finally broken down and told her mother about Jon’s drug problems, Maggie’d insisted that she locate Jon and let him know he had a daughter. The last thing she wanted was to have that negative, criminal influence in her daughter’s life. It well may have been that Daisy would have questions later and she’d do her best to answer them as honestly as she could. If Daisy chose to seek out her father and/or his family when she became an adult, Natalie wouldn’t stand in her way.

  Once she’d realized what he was using and how often, his strange disappearances had begun to make more sense. But since Daisy’s birth, she’d had recurring nightmares about Jon taking her daughter with him when he drove to Kensington, that section of Philadelphia where heavy drug use was most rampant and lethal, and losing the baby somewhere in the maze of abandoned houses that made up the warren of shooting galleries. Of him putting Daisy down in the midst of a trash-strewn room and forgetting about her. Of someone stealing her and taking her God knew where.

  Natalie had definitely inherited a wild imagination from someone.

  She skimmed the list of mostly third, fourth, and fifth cousins, and finding nothing new returned to her research to locate James Flynn, her fraternal great-great-grandfather. Two hours had passed, and while she’d identified four possibilities, she couldn’t differentiate between them, James Flynn apparently being a relatively common name in Ireland in the eighteen hundreds. Tired of staring at her computer screen, she decided to give up the search for the night and pick it up again at some point over the weekend. Maybe if Daisy napped on Saturday.

  Natalie’s phone buzzed, alerting her to an incoming call. She glanced at the screen, then smiled.

  “Hello, Mom,” she said.

  “Hey, pet. How’re my girls tonight?”

  “Your one and only granddarling is sleeping like the angel she sometimes is. She had a full day at nursery school, so she’s beat. She was out like a light by eight.”

  “She’s a growing girl. How ’bout you? How was your week?”

  “Busy. We have midterms in two weeks, and I have a stack of papers to read. But I didn’t make any big plans for the weekend. I just want to take it easy and hang out with my baby girl tomorrow.”

  “But you’ll be here on Sunday for dinner, right?”

  “Of course. Dinner at Mom’s on Sunday is a great American tradition. We’ll be over around three, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. Whatever time works.” Maggie paused. “Have you spoken with Grace recently?”

  “Not spoken, but we did text a little tonight. She said she was going out for drinks with some friends, but she’d see us at your house on Sunday.”

  “Oh, good. I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. I wonder who she went out with.”

  “I had the feeling it might have been some new friends, but as long as she’s out of that house and socializing and hopefully having a good time, I don’t care who she’s with.” Natalie sighed. “I almost wish she’d go get another job. I mean, I realize why she doesn’t—the firm was Dad’s baby. But for her to have to face that shithead Zach every day—well, it has to be killing her. You know how much she loved him. I think she still does.”

  “I can’t help but wonder if he’d have left her if your father had left the firm to her outright instead of to me. Someday she’ll be the senior and managing partner, but I understand why your dad didn’t hand it over to her now. He felt she needed more experience, needed to make her own name, not just get by on his.” She fell silent before adding, “Now I can’t help but wonder if he’d had some sense of things not being right between Grace and Zach. He thought Zach was a brilliant lawyer. Why wouldn’t he have made some provision for his brilliant son-in-law to have a larger profile within the firm? Art made that new will a week before he died. I’d have expected him to have provided for Zach, but there was no mention of him.”

  “You think he left the firm in your hands to see how things played out between Grace and Zach.”

  “I have my suspicions. I’ll be going into the office soon for my monthly walk-around, when I smile at everyone as if I had a true purpose there. Mostly I meet new employees. Water the plants in your father’s office, dust his bookshelves. Then I close it up again, take Lois to lunch, then try to catch a train by two thirty or so.”

  “What exactly does Lois do there these days?”

  “Anything she wants,” Maggie quipped. “She was your father’s first hire when he started the firm. She was his right hand for thirty-two years.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, but what does she actually do?”

  “Mostly, she keeps his spirit alive. She’s there to reassure the old clients that even though Art’s gone, the firm still is behind them one hundred percent and the clients are comfortable with that.” Maggie laughed softly. “And yeah, whatever all that means. The bottom line is that I promised your father that I’d keep her on until she decided to retire, and that’s what I’ll do. Now and then, I ask her to look up something inane for me. Most recently I’ve asked her to go through your dad’s files and make a list of the firm’s oldest clients so I could be sure they’re on the Christmas card list. What can I say, Nat? She was faithful to him, so we’re faithful to her.”

  Nat was still thinking about her father while she checked for any new DNA matches and pondered how randomly certain traits were passed through DNA. Nat looked like her mother, her hair the same honey-blonde, her eyes the same green, but her build—tall and lanky—was her father’s. Her no-nonsense approach to life was Art’s as well. Grace, on the other hand, who was a traditionist down to her toes, was a dead ringer for a younger version of their father’s mother—dark hair and blue eyes, like Art—but she had the soul of a romantic, like their mother. And like Maggie, Grace was long waisted and petite. From their father, Grace had inherited a love of the law, Italian food, and Paris, while Natalie shared his love of crime shows on TV, hiking, and an appreciation for sixties rock bands. Reading the names of past generations on her computer screen, Nat wondered which of her ancestors had passed on her free spirit, and who, like Grace, never colored outside the lines.

  She had only one really cool find through her research, but it was a beauty. Lily Mullin, their father’s Irish immigrant maternal great-grandmother, had been a cook at the home of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families. She’d disappeared from the household at the next census, but Natalie later discovered her in the home of her great-great-grandfather, John McKeller—as his wife. How, Natalie mused, did one rise from a young cook’s apprentice—sixteen years old!—to become the wife of a man who was heir to a fortune and years older? Whatever the story, she was certain it was a romantic one: Lily and John had gone on to have nine children, all of whom were alive to celebrate their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Natalie pondered the list of her DNA matches, wondering if the story was known to any of her second, third, and fourth cousins. It wouldn’t be difficult to figure out which of the names were connected to her father’s side of the family—just a little checking to see who had a McKeller in their family tree.

  “A task for another day,” she muttered as she exited the site and did a quick check of her email before turning off her computer. She’d promised Daisy a
visit to the Please Touch Museum on Saturday, and she hoped to get an early start.

  But first—baking for the weekend.

  Scones for the morning, cupcakes for dessert after dinner tomorrow night, and some to take to Maggie’s on Sunday. Daisy loved cupcakes, any flavor, any color frosting—fancy or otherwise—with or without sprinkles, gummy bears, or chocolate shavings (Natalie’s favorite). This weekend they’d celebrate autumn: the scones would be pumpkin spice, and the cupcakes would be chocolate with cream cheese frosting and orange, yellow, and brown sprinkles. Natalie would bake the cupcakes tonight, and Daisy would help frost and decorate tomorrow after they returned from their outing.

  Four years ago Natalie would have laughed if anyone’d predicted she’d be spending her Friday nights baking and her Saturday nights home tucked under a cozy throw sharing popcorn with a three-year-old. But then came Daisy, and Natalie’s life did a complete one-eighty. Even when she was with Jon, Friday nights were usually girls’ nights for her and her besties. And before Jon, her dance card was always filled. These days, if she occasionally missed male companionship, well, there were any number of men who’d be happy to date her and who weren’t put off by the fact that she had a three-year-old. Unfortunately, she hadn’t met anyone who appealed to her on every level that mattered to her.

  Natalie’s father was the standard by which all men were measured. Art Flynn had been handsome, intelligent, warm, kind, thoughtful—and had a playful humor that she’d adored. For a while, she’d thought Jon had measured up, but once the facade had begun to crumble, he’d been left with nothing but his handsome face, and even that had begun to show the wear and tear of an addict’s life. While she wished she’d recognized the signs sooner, Natalie refused to beat herself up over it. Jon’s sins were not hers, nor would she take any responsibility for them. Her father had been one hundred percent in her corner when she’d opted to have her baby and to raise Daisy on her own, whereas Maggie had wanted her to pursue Jonathan for support. Art had disagreed, and his last gift to Natalie had made Jon’s help unnecessary. She didn’t live extravagantly, but she and Daisy were comfortable, and there’d be money for her daughter’s education.