The Path to Sunshine Cove

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Her sister was a good mother. These girls were lucky to have Rachel on their team. She would never put her own fulfillment, her own obsession, above their happiness.

  Jess considered herself healthy. She ran, she lifted weights, she jumped rope. Not to mention that her job was usually physical, moving boxes, carrying out furniture, hauling bags of trash to the garbage.

  When she was in the military, staying fit had been a necessity and she had carried many of those healthy habits with her after she left the service.

  Still, pedaling a bicycle she wasn’t accustomed to up a hill pulling a trailer containing a little mixed-breed rescue dog and a particularly adorable preschooler was harder than she might have expected. By the time she reached Eleanor’s house, she was sweaty and her leg muscles ached.

  Grace didn’t seem at all fazed by the exertion. In fact, she kept up a running commentary about her school, about her friends, about the trip she wanted to take to Disneyland someday.

  Her conversation was punctuated by Ava’s occasional contributions, usually centered around when she saw a dog or a cat or a pretty bird at a house they passed.

  Jess should have brought water along, but at least she had cold water in the Airstream.

  “The ride down will be easier,” Grace said cheerfully as they turned into the Whitaker House driveway. “We won’t even have to pedal!”

  Just as she pulled up to the Airstream, she spied a figure in a black wet suit walking toward the path down to the cove with a long, curved surfboard.

  For a wild instant, she thought it might be Nate and her heart rate accelerated. All day, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that incredible kiss.

  As soon as she got a true glimpse of the surfer, she realized her mistake. It wasn’t Nate, it was his daughter.

  “Hey! That’s my friend Sophie,” Grace exclaimed. “Hi, Sophie!”

  The girl paused at the top of the trail, her surfboard under one arm and her cell phone in her other hand.

  “Hey there. What are you guys up to today?”

  “This is our aunt Jess. She’s our mom’s sister. She’s staying over with us tonight,” Ava announced.

  “Cool.”

  Something was wrong. Jess could see Sophie looked distracted and her eyes were edged with red, as if she had either been crying or trying to keep herself from crying. Had she been fighting with her dad again? And what was she doing heading down to the cove by herself?

  “What about you?” she asked, trying for a gentle tone. “Are you waiting for someone?”

  Sophie looked at her surfboard, down the path and then back at Jess. “Oh. Yeah. I was telling this kid at school, Tyler, about the waves we have here. He’s a ninth grader. He just moved here a few months ago and hadn’t heard about the cove and said he might come over after school to check it out. I guess he changed his mind, or something came up or something.”

  She spoke in a casual tone that didn’t fool Jess for an instant. Sophie was interested in the boy. Did Eleanor or Nate know she had prearranged a surfing rendezvous with someone from school? And that he hadn’t showed?

  Was she planning to go down there by herself? That had to be against the rules. There were no lifeguards on what was virtually a private beach. During her time here in Cape Sanctuary, Jess had only seen three or four other people going down there besides the Whitakers, usually at low tide when people might be beachcombing. From what Eleanor had told her, there were better surf breaks in town, all of them more easily accessible.

  What should she do? She was the adult here.

  “Are you supposed to go surfing by yourself?” she finally said.

  Sophie gave a nonchalant shrug. “Sure. I do it all the time.”

  Jess frowned but didn’t know how to push the issue. If Nate and Eleanor let her go by herself, how could Jess argue that it couldn’t be safe?

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Well, be careful.”

  “Maybe I’ll wait up here for a while longer to see if Tyler shows up.”

  Disquieted, Jess parked the bike and helped Ava and Freckles out. “I need a drink. What about you?” she asked the girls.

  “I’m so thirsty!” Ava exclaimed, with all the drama a five-year-old girl could muster.

  “You didn’t even do anything.” Grace sounded outraged. “You sat in the trailer while Aunt Jess did all the work.”

  “I had to hold Freckles,” Ava protested.

  “We all worked hard to get here,” Jess said to keep the peace. “We can all have a nice glass of water. I’ve got some in the refrigerator.”

  The girls were excited to visit her Airstream again, exclaiming over the desk and the mini-sized appliances. The whole time Jess poured them water and even found them a non-Rachel-approved Oreo for a treat from her secret stash, she fretted about Sophie.

  She just didn’t feel right about the girl surfing on her own and couldn’t believe that Nate, who seemed so protective in so many other ways, would allow it.

  Through the window, Jess watched Sophie look at her phone again, then down the street from town.

  “Can we sleep here tonight?” Grace asked.

  “Yes, can we?” Ava pressed. “It’s so cute and little.”

  She gave them a distracted smile. “You have school and preschool tomorrow. You had both better sleep in your own bed. But before I leave, maybe you can come spend the night here, okay?”

  “Promise?” Ava asked, looking so much like Rachel when she was that age that Jess couldn’t help smiling.

  “Promise.”

  She sensed movement outside and saw Sophie take a step down the path. Apparently, she had given up waiting for the boy she liked and was indeed going on her own.

  “Hold on a minute, girls. Why don’t you show Freckles my bed?”

  Not waiting for a response, she opened the door to the Airstream.

  “Your friend didn’t make it?” she asked.

  Sophie gave another shrug, not meeting her gaze. “I guess not. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to come anyway. Guess he had something else.”

  Jess knew it wasn’t her business. But how could she just stand by and let Sophie risk her life? “I don’t feel good about you surfing on your own.”

  “It’s fine. My dad surfs alone all the time. He did it just this morning. He wanted me to go but I didn’t want to get out of bed. If he can do it, why can’t I?”

  Because you’re thirteen? Because your dad has decades’ more experience swimming and surfing in the ocean? Because of a hundred other reasons.

  First, she said she did it all the time. Now she was giving a completely different impression.

  Jess knew she wouldn’t be able to convince Sophie not to go. She had been a teenage girl once, too, obstinate and determined.

  She had a couple of options. She could let Sophie go and call Eleanor, who wouldn’t be able to make it down the path easily.

  Alternately, Jess could let her go and call Nate, who might be working across town for all she knew.

  Or she could keep an eye on Sophie herself.

  “Do you mind if the girls and I come down with you? We were thinking about making a sandcastle,” she lied. “We can hang out on the beach while you surf.”

  Sophie looked surprised and, if Jess wasn’t mistaken, a little relieved.

  “I guess that would be okay,” she said after a long pause.

  “Okay. Give me a minute to grab a few supplies. I could use an extra pair of hands with my nieces.”

  She had no idea if this was a good idea. It was the best she could come up with on short notice.

  “Girls, how would you feel about going down to the beach and building a sandcastle?”

  “I’m really good at sandcastles,” Grace informed her. “I know just how to shape the towers so they stay together. Ava’s always fall apar
t.”

  “They do not,” her sister protested.

  “I’m sure you’re both great. You’re just the girls to help me out.”

  She quickly grabbed a few empty plastic containers for shaping sand and put them in a bucket, then added water bottles, a blanket and her supersize umbrella.

  “I can take the umbrella,” Sophie offered, reaching for it with the hand not holding her surfboard. Her phone was now in a dry bag around her neck, Jess noticed.

  “Are you going to help us build a sandcastle?” Grace asked.

  “Maybe. Or I might go surfing if my friend comes later.”

  The trip down the path was slightly more difficult than it had been this morning. This time she was holding Freckles’s leash in one hand and Ava’s hand with the other. Grace insisted on carrying the bucket of sand supplies down, which helped.

  By the time they reached the cove, Sophie seemed to have forgotten all about the boy who had stood her up.

  “Did I tell you I got an email back from the school in Japan? Finally. They were on a school break.”

  “That’s terrific!”

  “Yeah. No package yet with postcards or a gift, like they said in the letter, though.”

  “I’m sure it takes time to get mail from Japan, especially if they’ve been on a school break.”

  “What school in Japan?” Grace asked.

  Sophie told both girls about finding the message in the bottle and the budding scientists in Japan who were studying ocean currents. By the time they reached the sand, both girls looked excited.

  “Can we look for a bottle with a message?”

  “Sure. But I’ve been looking like forever and only found one in all that time. You can look for other things, though. If you want.”

  Sophie seemed to have forgotten all about surfing as she walked up and down the beach with the girls, pointing out agates and driftwood and the occasional sea-polished rock.

  They didn’t find much this time and quickly turned their attention to building a sandcastle.

  “We should build the best sandcastle ever,” Grace said. “Then we can take a picture and my mom can put it on her Instagram.”

  “Let’s just do our best and see what we come up with,” Jess said.

  She left it to Grace and Sophie to strategize where to build the castle and how big they should go.

  Soon they were all happily using the bucket to scoop seawater to mix with the sand for packing and creating.

  Jess couldn’t remember the last time she had done something like this. Maybe when she was Grace’s age.

  The castle came together quickly. In short order, it had a structure and form, with turrets and even a moat.

  “So,” Jess said to Sophie casually while her nieces had hurried to the shore to get more water in one of the containers, “tell me about this boy who didn’t end up coming over to surf. Tyler. Is that what you said his name was?”

  Sophie flashed her a quick look then returned her attention to the sand she was packing. “It’s no big deal. He said he might come. I guess he was busy or something.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s no big deal. It’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything.”

  The girl’s jaw tightened, which made Jess suspect she would have liked to have the kid for a boyfriend.

  “Well, I’m glad things turned out this way. You’re really good at this.”

  “I’ve built a lot of sand sculptures. My grandpa and I used to come down to Sunshine Cove all the time. We didn’t make just sandcastles. We’ve done mermaids and ships and once a troll that was awesome. Gram even made a scrapbook with all the pictures of us in front of our sand sculptures. I can show you sometime.”

  She hadn’t heard Sophie talk about Jack Whitaker before. The grief in her voice made Jess’s heart ache. “I would love to see that.”

  The girls returned with water to add to their sand, Freckles trotting behind them.

  “This is the best sandcastle ever,” Grace declared as they carefully set the final turret in place.

  “I wish we could live here,” Grace said wistfully.

  “I wish we could take it home so I could play with it in the backyard,” Ava said. “Aunt Jess, can we build another one in our sandbox when we get home? I want to play with my princess toy in it.”

  “Our sandbox is too tiny for a castle like this,” Grace informed her. “Plus Silas will only smash it the minute we build it. He smashes everything.”

  Jess didn’t know how to answer that, sad all over again at the challenges her sister’s family had to face.

  “It really is a great sandcastle,” Sophie said. “I haven’t built a sand sculpture in a long time. Since my grandpa got sick, anyway. This was fun.”

  Better than surfing with a cute boy might have been? Jess highly doubted it.

  “Thanks for helping us,” she said.

  “We should add some water to our moat,” Grace said.

  “Right. What good is a moat for keeping out invaders if it doesn’t have any water in it?” Jess said with a smile.

  The girls hurried to the ocean’s edge again to scoop up more water.

  Just as they finished, Jess spotted someone coming down the path. For a minute, she thought it might be Sophie’s absentee friend, finally here, but this figure was too tall and didn’t have a surfboard.

  Nate.

  He looked big, tough, gorgeous...and upset. His expression was tight, his eyes stormy.

  “Sophie. Here you are! You scared us. I came home early and you weren’t there. Your grandmother didn’t have any idea where you might be and you didn’t answer your phone, even though we both called and texted.”

  “I never got any calls or texts. I would have answered if I had. I probably didn’t have cell service down here,” she muttered, unrepentant.

  “It’s a good thing I thought to look in the garage and saw your board missing, though I can’t believe you would come down here by yourself. You know the rules.”

  She looked annoyed at being called out. “I didn’t even go into the water. We made a sandcastle instead.”

  “So why are you wearing a wet suit and why is your surfboard down here? Were you planning to go out on your own?”

  She lifted her chin. “I’m thirteen. I’ll be fourteen in five months. I’ve been surfing since I was younger than Grace. I’m old enough to go by myself. You do,” she pointed out.

  Nate frowned. “That’s not the same thing at all. I have been surfing the cove for much longer than you have. Regardless of what a great surfer you are, the more important point is that we have a rule and you were going to break it.”

  “I wasn’t going to be by myself. A kid from school was going to come check out the break at Sunshine Cove. I guess he couldn’t come.”

  “Then you should have put your gear away when he didn’t show up. If you’re not responsible enough to follow that simple rule, maybe we need to go back to you staying with Grandma Eleanor after school instead of being on your own.”

  “I’m not a baby! When are you going to stop treating me like one?”

  “I hate to state the obvious but maybe when you stop acting like one.”

  Sophie made a sound of deep frustration. “I didn’t break any rules. Maybe I thought about it but I changed my mind when Jess asked me to build a sandcastle with her and the girls, okay? I am so tired of you treating me like I’m some dumb baby all the time. I hate you.”

  She grabbed her surfboard and marched up the path toward home without another word, leaving a long, awkward silence in her wake.

  15

  Nate

  There it was.

  The H word.

  How many times had he flung it at his own father when he was frustrated at some rule or other?

  Raising a teenager was hard. He
wasn’t sure if he had the stamina to make it through another five years of Sophie flaunting the rules and then snapping at him when he called her on it.

  Okay, maybe he had freaked out a little when he saw her surfboard gone and couldn’t reach her, imagining all sorts of grim scenarios. It was just Sophie’s bad luck that a college student had drowned just a few weeks earlier while surfing alone down the coast, leaving Nate slightly more paranoid than usual about water safety.

  “Sorry,” he said now to Jess. “We’re having some boundary issues, if you couldn’t tell. Namely that Sophie seems to be pushing against every single one of them.”

  “For what it’s worth, she never did get in the water. I didn’t want to let her come down alone so we decided to build a sandcastle as a diversionary tactic because I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Thank you for that. None of this is your fault.”

  “Do you like our sandcastle?” the smaller of the girls asked him.

  “It’s only the best sandcastle in the whole world,” her older sister declared.

  She reminded him of Sophie at that age, with her blond braids and gap-toothed smile. “It looks like a great one,” he agreed. “I especially like the moat you’ve built there.”

  “I want to build another one at my house,” the smaller one said, “only Grace says we don’t have enough sand in our sandbox and our brother will smash it anyway.”

  “Brothers can be like that,” he said. Their brother had some unique challenges, or so he had heard.

  “Do you have a brother?” the youngest girl asked.

  “Nope. I’m an only child.”

  “Our mom doesn’t have brothers either,” Grace informed him. “Only one sister. Aunt Jess. Our dad has two brothers, though, and one sister. Uncle Dallas and Uncle Wade. Uncle Wade has two kids and lives in the country and Uncle Dallas has one baby and lives by us.”

  He knew both men as they worked with Cody in the family roofing company, but didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to this recitation of the family tree. To his relief, Jess stepped in.

  “Let’s take a picture of the sandcastle so we can send it to your mom, then we need to go find some dinner.”