Chapter 23
Twelve years ago
“You need to stop dwelling,”
Katie said, and plopped into the chair at Noah’s hospital bedside.
Noah sent an incredulous look to his sister. “I’ve never dwelled a day in my life.”
“Not true.”
Katie paused. “And I miss Olive too, you know. She came to see you before she left. You were out cold, she didn’t want to wake you.”
Her Dear John letter had been propped up next to a water bottle at his bedside, saying nothing more than she was sorry, she’d decided to take an internship and leave for New York early, and she hoped he could understand.
Basically, she’d left town like the last four years hadn’t happened.
Katie offered him some water, but he shook his head and closed his eyes, not willing to admit he missed Olive too. “Dad’s furious with me, any possible baseball career is over, and you want me to stop dwelling,”
he muttered. “It’s not like I ran myself over with that ATV, you know.”
This wasn’t fair and he knew it, but exhaustion and pain had worn him down.
“Well, who stands in front of an ATV?”
Katie asked.
“The guy trying to clear the road for the ATV!”
“You’re fast, you should’ve run. Remember that time you got that home run in like five seconds? You couldn’t do that when your life was actually on the line?”
With a sigh, Noah reached for the pain meds pump and hit the button like he was playing Whac-A-Mole . . .
Present day
When Olive got to the Turner Rents & Supply’s semiannual sale, it was organized mayhem. Amy and Noah were running the front while Katie and Olive handled the customers.
They had ducklings, baby rabbits, supplies for everything outdoors, equipment on deep discount, and also Holmes and Pepper, because Joey had a meltdown about leaving his “brother and sister”
home alone.
On top of all that, they also had a crowd.
Olive honestly had expected to hate every second of it, but being outside in the early-spring sun, helping kids hold the ducklings and rabbits, while not a single person mentioned how she’d once run over the town hero, did her a world of good.
“Hard to hold on to negative emotions while holding a fuzzy little baby, isn’t it?”
Katie asked, having come up to her side.
“I’m not holding on to negative emotions.”
Katie snorted, and as she walked off, tossed back, “I might not be great at reading people, but your shoulders are at your ears.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
Olive said to no one, but she consciously lowered her shoulders.
“Olive?”
This from a woman around her age with two little girls, clearly twins, in her arms, each with a candy bar in their hands, the chocolate mostly melted and all over them. “Olive Porter, is that you?”
She smiled politely. “Can I help you?”
“It’s Holly McNeers,”
the woman said. “From school? I’m Holly Freestead now.”
Right. Holly had been . . . well, obnoxiously perfect. One of the most popular girls in her grade, she’d also been class president and homecoming queen, among other things—such as someone who’d been rumored to have gone out with Noah a few times. “Gone out with”
being a euphemism, of course, for what Olive had hoped to do with him that long ago night at the party.
Holly hoisted her little girls further up on her hips. “I heard you and Noah are a thing now.”
In Olive’s mind, she was cool, calm, and collected. In reality, all systems were down. “You heard wrong.”
Holly arched a single brow. Damn, Olive really wished she could do that. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Yes, actually,”
Holly said. “Or so I hope. I’ve got a candle shop. It’s very popular.”
Then she lowered her voice and leaned in. “That’s a lie. I hear you’re the best PR person on the planet. What you’re doing for the zoo is just . . . incredible. I need to hire you.”
“You . . . want to hire me?”
“Here, hold this.”
Holly thrust her two chocolate mongers—er, children—into Olive’s arms and then proceeded to search her purse while the twins stared at Olive.
Olive stared back.
“I like your hair,”
one of them said, and then touched it with her chocolate fingers.
“I like your clothes,”
the other said, and touched Olive’s top.
It didn’t matter since she already had dirt streaked across her front and a questionable stain on her jeans from where she’d been loving up on a sweet black Lab puppy earlier. “And I like the chocolate perfume you’re wearing.”
The girls giggled.
Holly finally found her phone and asked for Olive’s contact info. “So we can get together soon and discuss?”
Olive nodded. “Sure.”
Holly took back her girls, who waved, and then they were gone.
“Fraternizing with the enemy?”
Katie asked, coming back to Olive’s side.
“You vanished on purpose.”
“Of course I did.”
Looking entirely unrepentant, Katie moved on. “What did she want?”
“I should refuse to tell you.”
“But you won’t.”
Olive rolled her eyes, even if she was right. “She wanted to talk about my handling some PR for her candle shop. Weird, right?”
“Maybe not. I actually think she grew up.”
Katie looked at Holly’s retreating back. “A few years ago, she apologized to me for being so awful in high school.”
“Wow. Did you do that thing you do, where you pretended to be deaf so you didn’t have to talk to her?”
“Nope. I let her take me out to lunch.”
Olive raised both brows. “So who’s fraternizing with the enemy now?”
Katie shrugged. “You’re the only friend I’ve ever needed, but you haven’t been around.”
That sucked up Olive’s good humor in a blink and she opened her mouth to apologize, but Katie shook her head. “It’s okay. I understood why you left and stayed gone.”
“Do you think you can explain it to me?”
Katie’s lips curved.
“I’m actually being serious.”
“You know why,”
Katie said. “Because of your erratic upbringing and a few assholes you gave your heart to, you don’t trust love.”
Olive stilled. Was that it? Four simple words to explain why she felt so messed up all the time? It couldn’t be that simple, could it?
“And you still don’t,”
Katie said. “Because if you did, you and Noah would be doing more than having a secret thing that you’re both pretending you’re not having.”
“Noah and I are not having a thing, secret or otherwise. I mean . . . I thought we were, but it turns out we’re not, so . . .”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t. Really,”
she said at Katie’s doubt. “I just never . . .”
“Knew that you avoided love?”
Her best friend and sister of her heart nodded. “We know.”
Oh dear God. “We?”
Katie grimaced and started to walk off. “I think my mom’s calling me.”
“Coward.”
Katie waved without looking back. “Sticks and stones!”
Olive sighed and looked around to see where she was needed.
“Excuse me,”
a male voice said, catching her attention. He was midthirties, good-looking, with a smile that turned him from pleasant to handsome.
“You’re Olive Porter,”
he said. “You and Noah—”
“We’re not a thing, secret or otherwise!”
The man looked startled. “Okay . . . but that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Fine. Yes, I ran him over. One time!”
The man blinked. “Maybe I should start over. I’m Scott Ellison. I own a local café, the one on Lake Drive? We’re looking for a PR person and Noah highly recommended you.”
“Oh. Sorry,”
she said, feeling ridiculous. But also . . . Noah had recommended her? “You’re the place that makes the crack fries, right?”
“Crack fries?”
Batting a thousand . . . “As in they’re addicting.”
He laughed. “Yeah, that’s us. Maybe I should put that in the advertising—come for the crack fries, stay for the burgers.”
He grinned. “Do you think we could set a meeting?”
“Of course.”
They exchanged contact information, and when he walked off, she found herself smiling. Feeling pretty good about herself for a change, she turned and plowed into a brick wall named Noah.
His hands came up to absorb the impact, keeping her upright when she would’ve bounced off him and hit the ground. “Sorry,”
she gasped.
“No problem.”
He flashed a wry smile. “Other than the earlier kiss, this was the best two seconds of my day so far.”
She’d seen him working on some equipment, wielding tools with an expertise that had really done it for her. What was it about a guy who could work with his hands? And why couldn’t he be bad at something? “That rough?”
“Just busy.”
He looked around. “I think the entire town is here.”
“It’s the ducklings. They’re a big draw.”
“That’s not what’s drawing me,”
he murmured.
Nope, don’t buy into it, her brain tried to remind her body, but her body wasn’t having it. She made the mistake of looking up into his warm golden-brown eyes and lost her breath. Then there was the fact that she was still plastered up against him. “Noah—”
“Not here.”
He took her hand and started walking with her in tow.
She didn’t ask him where they were going. At the moment she didn’t care. All she could think about was how his warm, slightly roughened hand felt in hers, how his ass looked in those jeans, how his back seemed so strong and sinewy beneath his T-shirt, and how fast could she get his mouth on hers. Clearly, she’d lost her mind.
He pulled her into the empty office and turned to her. She’d been about to say something to him out there, she was sure of it, but hell if she could remember what.
“Olive?”
“Yes?”
“You’re . . . staring at my mouth.”
She scowled. “Ignore me.”
“I’ve never once been able to do that, and believe me, I’ve tried.”
Stepping into her space bubble, he lowered his head. “Maybe we should try again to have that one last kiss.”
Excellent idea, because with his mouth on hers, she couldn’t say anything stupid, right? “Yes.”
She hadn’t even gotten the single-syllable word out before his lips were warm on hers, causing her brain to cease working and the floor to fall out from beneath her feet. Someone moaned. She was pretty sure it was her as she pressed even closer to his big and very hard body—
“Mommy, look! They’re kissing again!”
At the sound of Joey’s voice, Olive nearly jumped out of her skin.
Noah didn’t jump. In fact, he took his damn time pulling back, slow to let his hands drop from where he’d been holding her close, one at the small of her back, the other threaded in her hair.
Joey stood very close at their side, head tipped back to see them, wearing a chocolate mustache and beard. His “siblings”
were sitting like sentinels, dog and kitten on either side of him. “Hi!”
“Hi.”
Noah ruffled his hair. “Did anyone ever tell you that the chocolate is supposed to go in your mouth?”
Joey grinned. “Want some?”
He held out his fisted hand, opening it to reveal a semisquished, mostly melted small candy bar.
“Sweet offer,”
Noah said. “But pass.”
Joey looked at Olive.
“No, thank you,”
she said, her eyes meeting those of Katie, who stood in the doorway, brows arched.
“Can I play Candy Crush on your phone?”
Joey asked Olive.
She’d taught him how to play one day in the hospital when he’d been bored. She swiped her phone screen, opened the app, and then handed her phone over. “Good luck, little man. I kicked some serious booty on my last round, so you’ve got a lot to live up to.”
He grinned and sat on the floor to concentrate on the phone. Holmes sat with him. Pepper was very busy attacking Noah’s bootlaces.
Noah scooped the kitten up by the scruff of her neck, just like her mama would’ve done. But since she appeared to think that Holmes and Noah were her mommies, she merely starting purring, switching her tactics from beating up his bootlaces to batting at his nose.
Noah chuckled, then carried her over to Holmes. “Keep your baby in line.”
Holmes licked Pepper from chin to forehead, and Pepper snuggled in, her eyes closing in bliss.
Katie was tapping her foot on the floor impatiently as she stared down her brother and Olive. “Tell me you two still aren’t a thing. Go ahead, I dare you.”
“We’re not,”
Olive said.
Katie arched a brow and said, “No? Because from where I was standing . . .”
She crouched and covered Joey’s ears. “You were attempting to climb into each other’s bodies. If you’d stop trying to keep this a secret, you two could kiss wherever the heck you wanted, you know that, right?”
Olive rolled her eyes and went over to a tall filing cabinet. “I don’t know about Noah, but I came in here looking for something.”
“Like what?”
Katie said.
Olive opened a drawer and had to wave her hand at the dust bunnies that arose in the air. She coughed, and then stilled, because in the drawer was a framed collage of old pictures. Pulling it out, she stared at the pics of Amy and Violet as teenagers, arms around each other, grinning.
“What’s wrong?”
Katie asked, and came closer, peering over Olive’s shoulder. “Huh.”
Noah pushed off the wall to take a look just as Amy came into the room. She took in their faces. “What?”
Katie handed her the frame. “After your fight with Violet the other night, I assumed you two had always hated each other.”
Amy took in the pictures, then quietly set the frame back in the drawer and slid it closed. She turned to Olive. “I’m sorry. I owed you the whole story the other night, but I wasn’t ready to face it.”
She paused, looking worried, regretful, and . . . guilty? “Once upon a time, Vi and I . . . well, we were best friends.”
“I don’t get it,”
Olive said. “All that time I lived next door to you, when you treated me like one of your own, when you knew I was having a hard time with my parents, you never said anything, not about you two hating each other, and certainly not about being best friends before that. You never even let on that you really even knew her.”
“I know.”
Amy drew a deep breath, shuddered it out. “I always thought she’d rat me out, but she never did. I was so relieved that I just kept telling myself no one needed to know. But I was wrong.”
She paused. “We met in middle school and became instant best friends. It lasted until our freshman year, when we had a falling out and never made up, and . . .”
She hesitated. “I’m ashamed of this, I really am. But your mom, she was . . . different. She marched to her own beat, didn’t care what anyone thought.”
“Like me and Olive,”
Katie said softly.
Amy’s eyes had gone suspiciously shiny, but she nodded. “Yes. And all I wanted was to be normal. So when the popular kids started talking to me and inviting me to hang out with them, I was thrilled. But then they made it clear I couldn’t bring Vi with me into the fold.”
Her mouth tightened. “So I started being mean to her. I was . . . awful,”
she whispered. “It took her a while, because she was that kind of a person, she didn’t want to give up on me.”
“But she did?”
Katie asked, sounding angry, very angry.
“She didn’t want to, and it took her a long time, but yes, she did finally give up. We stopped communicating. We graduated and life went on, and then, all those years later, when Olive came to live with her grandma . . .”
She looked at Olive again. “I loved you right from the start. I thought maybe I could make amends by taking care of you.”
“Mom”—Noah shook his head—“you know that’s not how it works.”
“Not to mention,”
Katie said, “all those times you told me that being normal was overrated, that I was special and people would realize they were wrong for how they treated me—when all along, you were those people! You were the mean girl!”
“Yes.”
Amy looked tortured. “And I’m sorry. All I can say is that I was a different person back then, and one I’m not proud of. For what it’s worth, I told your mom this too. Just this morning, right before I came in here, in fact.”
Noah turned to Olive and asked softly, “You okay?”
“It was a long time ago.”
She looked at Amy. “Whatever went on between you and my mom is in the past, I consider it none of my business. I know you only as a warm, compassionate, loving mother. You took me in and treated me like one of your own. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.”
Amy’s eyes filled as she hugged Olive to her. “Thank you,”
she whispered.
Katie was shifting on her feet, something she did when anxious or faced with too many emotions.
“Katie needs a subject change,”
Olive said.
“No, that’s not it.”
She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face, then opened them and looked at Olive. “I need to say something too.”
Olive’s heart knocked around in her chest. “Do I want to hear it?”
“I think so.”
Katie bit her lower lip, then finally said, “I’m sorry I never say the words, but I feel it. I do. I love you.”
“Aw,”
Olive teased around a throat thick with sudden tears. “Did that hurt?”
Katie dropped her head and laughed before meeting Olive’s gaze again. “Only minimally. I’m sorry I never say it when you need to hear it.”
“Don’t be. You’re just better at show than tell. And also, I love you too.”
Katie smiled. “To the moon and back, right?”
“To the moon and back.”
Amy was watching, swiping at her tears. “Are we all okay?”
she asked quietly. “Did we get out everything that we need to in order to move on?”
The last thing Olive wanted to do was cause a rift over something that belonged in the past. “We’re okay, even if I’m sure we all still have our own secrets.”
Amy swallowed hard, since obviously she still had a secret from her kids, a big one—that her husband had extracted a promise from Olive to leave and not look back.
Not that Olive would judge. She had a secret too. Hers being, of course, that despite her efforts to the contrary, she was still in love with Noah—something she had no intention of sharing with anyone. Ever. “We should probably get back out there—”
“Wait.”
Amy swallowed hard. “I’m . . . not done confessing.”
Olive turned back, already shaking her head. “Amy, don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Both Katie and Noah looked confused.
“What’s not worth it?”
Noah asked, moving closer to Olive.
Amy never took her gaze off Olive. “You love my son, right?”
Everyone’s head swiveled to Olive, whose heart had just stopped.
“Mom,”
Katie said, sounding horrified. “You can’t put her on the spot like that. If you’re going to do it to anyone, do it to Noah.”
“It’s okay,”
Olive said, because she didn’t see a reason to hide anymore. She let out a breath and met Noah’s gaze. “Yes,”
she said quietly. “Yes, I love your son.”
Noah didn’t often broadcast his feelings, preferring to show the world a strong, impenetrable front. But it was gone now.
“She always has,”
Amy told Noah. “It’s the reason she never explained why she left all those years ago. Because when you love someone, you protect them. And she most definitely was protecting you.”
Noah shook his head, not taking his gaze off Olive. “Protecting me from what?”
It was Amy who spoke. “The night of the ATV accident, your dad asked Olive to leave. Said you would need time and space to heal, and it would be best for you if you did that without distractions. Otherwise, Olive never would’ve left Sunrise Cove and all the people she felt so safe with.”
Noah’s eyes narrowed on his mom. “Are you kidding me?”
Amy’s eyes went shiny with more tears. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I didn’t know either, at first. But shortly before he passed, he told me. And then he was gone, and I didn’t want one more thing to taint your memories of him.”
He stared at her. “You should’ve told me anyway.”
Olive was caught by surprise when she felt Noah’s hand slide to the small of her back, gently nudging her around to face him.
“This is why you left? Why you stayed gone?”
Not seeing any reason to hide it anymore, she nodded.
“Olive,”
he said softly, his voice filled with aching emotion.
Only five minutes ago, she’d have welcomed that tone from him, but something inside her couldn’t take it. She didn’t want him this way, not because of a secret from the past when they’d been young and stupid, a secret that no longer mattered.
Okay, she’d been the only stupid one, but still. “Don’t be mad.”
He looked horrified. “I’m not. At least not at you.”
“Why?”
she asked, throat raw. “If not when I was eighteen, then certainly in the years after I should’ve realized that my staying gone hurt you. So if you’re not mad at me, don’t be mad at your parents either.”
Unable to keep the tears from her voice, she went on anyway. “Your dad did what he thought he had to do to protect what he saw as your future, and right or wrong, he saw that future as baseball, not me.”
“My parents were authority figures to you,”
he said, shooting his mom a long look that, to her credit, she winced at, but she didn’t try to defend herself. “My dad never should’ve put you in the position that he did, or at the very least in the following years, he should’ve taken it back. My mom should’ve done the same, if not when he told her, then certainly after he died.”
“They did me a favor,”
Olive insisted. “I didn’t realize it until after I’d left, but it forced me to go out and find a life for myself. And I did, a good one.”
She gave a smile that hopefully signaled she was fine despite the quiver in her voice. She definitely needed a moment in private, maybe two . . . So when Noah reached for her, she took a step back. If she let him touch her right now, she’d fall apart. And she was barely loosely put together to begin with. “I’ll be back, okay?”
Then, before he, or anyone, could stop her, she left.