Chapter 4
Scarlet sat in disgruntled silence, mulling over what he’d said. Her meeting with Mr. Shorboro was scheduled for the next day. He would have the keys to the place and the paperwork to make it hers.
But Scarlet didn’t want it. It was just a hassle, something else to slow her life and take her away from work. The money from the sale of the property could help start her own company, one she hoped she could use to sell unique fabrics that didn’t always get culled from production.
And yet, sitting there in front of the red door, the books still on display in the front windows, books her aunt had set there, made Scarlet not want to touch the place or alter it in any way. Some part of her felt that if it stayed the same, it was like a breath in time, a piece of her aunt that could never die.
Scarlet looked down at her right knee, the one she’d scraped on that very sidewalk the summer she’d spent in town as a child. Aunt Ann had bandaged her up, sat her down with a story about the bumps and bruises of growing up, and then taken her out for ice cream.
The memory made Scarlet feel guilty about wanting to sell, so she got up and climbed into her car. She couldn’t look at the place any longer without crying.
It was easy to leave things behind when they’d been absent from life for months at a time. But it was Scarlet’s fault, and she knew it.
She could’ve answered Ann’s calls or made some sort of effort to call her back. But she was so buried in her own life that she didn’t think of it.
She listened to her aunt’s messages as she drove to the Bed and Breakfast out by the lighthouse.
“Scarlet, I know you’re busy, but I need to talk to you about something important. It’s about the bookshop I’ve got here. I want you to have it when I’m gone. My doctor says the ulcer in my stomach is pretty bad. If it ruptures, I could bleed to death internally in a matter of minutes. He says it will hurt badly, but I will just get sleepy and feel nothing, as if that’s supposed to make me feel better.
“Anyway, I know you’re busy with your life back in NYC. Your mother loved that place’s fast pace, the lights, and the energy. And I know Ben is there. But I want you to consider what that stress is doing to you. I— I don’t want you to end up like me.
“Take the chance to change your pace before it’s too late. I always thought I was in charge of my life until my body decided on my behalf.”
Scarlet parked outside the B and B she’d be staying for the next two weeks and turned off the car. The tears started and wouldn’t stop. All that time, her aunt had tried to get her attention, and Scarlet had been caught up in the mess at work while her aunt fought through her last days in pain, alone. Scarlet felt like a terrible niece even though it always felt like a struggle just to make it through each day at work.
Exhaustion gripped Scarlet as she stared out at the lighthouse, its beacon sweeping the landscape in the first hints of dusk. Between her regret and Everest’s remarks, she felt that selling the bookstore would be a lot harder than she’d originally anticipated.
The B and B was an old Victorian home in white, complete with a manicured lawn and a well-trimmed hedge fence. Lace curtains fluttered in the windows, letting in a bit of early summer’s breeze. A windsock danced from a pole, sending a light clang echoing out into the early night.
People laughed and talked inside one of the second-story rooms, contrasting Scarlet’s growing disappointment with her actions in the last few months.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care, more that she planned to call when she got home. Then she wouldn’t get home until after Aunt Ann was in bed. Scarlet always swore she’d call her the next day at lunch. But she often forgot to take her midday break.
She’d still managed to have flowers sent to her for her birthday in April, but it was a pathetic amount of effort to stay connected. And guilt overpowered Scarlet until she was a sobbing mess, alone in a rental, in an unfamiliar town to take charge of the one thing her aunt cared about most. Scarlet didn’t feel like she deserved any of it.