Chapter Five
Five
Colleen made dinner reservations for the two of them. But after the blowup with Hunter, Shelby just wanted to check in to the B and B and hide.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Colleen. “You’re welcome to come over. I just don’t want to be out.” She felt raw. Wounded. And also well aware that she had absolutely no right to feel that way. She wasn’t the victim. She was the one who’d hurt someone.
“No problem,” Colleen said, agreeable as always. “Let’s go. We can pick something up on the way.”
They walked a few minutes up Commercial to the Beach Rose Inn, a three-story, gray-shingled Georgian with a wrap-around veranda, red brick steps, and a mosaic sign out front. On the way in, Shelby dropped off a signed copy of Secrets of Summer at the front desk for the beloved innkeeper, Amelia Cabral. She’d known Amelia since her college summers. But considering the way the night had gone, she wished she could ship every book back to the warehouse.
Colleen followed her into the guest room, effusing about the cuteness. It was lovely. The queen-size bed had a white bookcase headboard, sea green sheets and a white down comforter topped with a green-and-blue afghan that was clearly hand-knit. A wooden side table had china knobs painted with cornflowers. A decorative piece of driftwood rested against one wall.
“Let’s eat outside,” Shelby said. They had lobster rolls from the Canteen.
Glass-paned double doors opened onto a terrace. Shelby and Colleen got comfortable on two lounge chairs. A foghorn sounded in the distance.
“For the record, I think Hunter overreacted,” Colleen said, uncapping a bottle of water.
Shelby wasn’t so sure. She was second-guessing everything. And she kept replaying the confrontation she’d had with Hunter directly following her outburst during the Q if anything, Hunter was just so interesting and had made such an impression on her, the urge to write about her was hard to resist. And Ashley was the heroine of the novel, not the villain. But Shelby could see, looking at it now, how some aspects of Ashley hit too close to home: she’d been born into an old Boston family—tremendous generational wealth—but flouted it to create her own wild-child identity. Which landed her in boarding school, where she acted out by sleeping with a lot of guys. It was just background characterization. Ashley didn’t look like Hunter or share any of her interests. And the character’s big mistake that set the plot in motion was pure fiction. Ashley triumphed in the end. And after two years of writing and rewriting the novel, Ashley had become her own entity. Shelby had all but forgotten the genesis of the character.
She turned to Colleen.
“Did I cross a line with the character Ashley?” She assumed Colleen would have told her.
Like other booksellers across the country, Colleen had read an advanced copy sent out by her publisher.
She waited a beat before answering her. “I recognized some details. And I understand why Hunter might have been a little freaked out seeing them in black-and-white on the page. But anyone reading your book comes away loving the character in the end. I know you didn’t mean to hurt her.”
Shelby nodded. She appreciated Colleen’s understanding. Still, she was relieved to be leaving in the morning for the next stop on her book tour.