Chapter 18
Eighteen
The next three days flew by, and Cretia stuffed as many memories as she could into every moment. She captured many of them on her phone—Joe Jr. leading a parade of furry black dogs through the tall pasture grass, Abner rolling around in the sunshine, and Sonny and Cher prancing around the barn.
Some she couldn’t record—like the smell of the harbor as she and Finn walked Joe and the Fab Four down the boardwalk. The way it was easier to breathe in the island air than any other place she’d visited. The way the faces and greetings of the locals had become familiar and welcome.
Some memories, though, were only for herself—the smell of Finn’s aftershave, the strength of his embrace, and the safety she felt at his side. Even if she could have recorded those, she wouldn’t have shared them with anyone else.
She’d come to this island to share it with her followers. But some memories were only hers.
And some things would break her heart.
Like her love for Finn.
So when Jack yelled up the stairs that a box had arrived for her, Cretia could barely pluck up an ounce of excitement at the news. Yanking the quilt over her head, she closed her eyes and prayed for a reprieve. Just another day. Another week. Another year.
It would never be enough. She would always hate leaving.
But just because she hated doing it didn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing. She’d made that decision long ago.
Rolling out of bed, she ran a hand through her hair and then slipped on the same gray hoodie she’d worn the night Bella gave birth. She paused only long enough to duck into the bathroom and brush her teeth before slumping down to the kitchen.
Jack had disappeared, but Marie puttered around the kitchen, wiping down countertops as Jessie sat in a wooden high chair inspecting and then eating individual Cheerios from the tray before her. Her pudgy fingers were damp and probably sticky and ridiculously adorable as she jabbered in her seat.
Marie looked up as Cretia reached the bottom step. “I thought maybe you’d already gone to Finn’s this morning.”
Cretia shrugged as she reached the island and stared at the mailing label on the brown box before her. Someone had scribbled “CANADA” in black marker above an extra sticker or three. The corners of the box were a little roughed up, but she had no doubt that the white box inside it was still in pristine condition. The tech company always packed her equipment carefully.
“I’m not going to lie. I half expected you to hug that box when it finally arrived.” Marie began to chuckle at herself but stopped short.
Three weeks ago, she would have. Without a doubt, she’d have scooped it up, pulled together every meager thing she owned, gotten a ride to Charlottetown, and hopped on the next plane to anywhere else.
“You don’t even look pleased that it’s here,” Marie said.
“I am.” The lie slipped out far too easily.
“Are you hungry? I can make you some frozen waffles or something.”
Her stomach threatened to mutiny at the very thought of food of any kind. “No thanks. Let me help you.” She marched to the dishwasher and began unloading it, never once having to ask where something went. A perk and a responsibility of kitchen privileges.
Marie shot her a smile as she put away a stack of plates. “We’re going to miss you around here.”
“No, you’re not.” Though she liked the idea of someone missing her more than she cared to admit. “Your guests will start arriving with the tourist season, and then you’ll be way too busy to think about me.”
“Oh, that’s not true.” Marie wet a washcloth under the faucet and wiped up Jessie’s mouth and fingers. “I guarantee you that guests don’t help clean up the kitchen.”
“So you just want me for my manual labor?”
Marie laughed. “Not at all. If I thought it would influence your decision, I’d offer to let you stay here as a real guest—with no manual labor—for as long as you wanted.”
The weight of Marie’s words settled heavily on her chest, and Cretia rubbed at the spot over her heart. “That’s very kind of you,” she managed to get out.
“You don’t have to go, you know.”
“Yes. I do.” Cretia pulled out the top rack of the dishwasher and grabbed a towel to dry off the plastic sippy cups and colorful plates. “But if it matters at all, this is the first place I’ve ever wished that wasn’t true. No place has ever felt quite so safe. And you and Finn—I’ve never had friends like you before.”
Marie took a slow breath as she released Jessie from her high chair and set the toddler on the floor. “Forgive me, but I don’t understand. I mean, I get that your job requires you to travel. But couldn’t you have a home base, a place—people—to come home to?”
Cretia turned away as her eyes began to burn, but staring at the ceiling didn’t ease the stinging. It all sounded so lovely.
In theory.
“I tried to.”
Marie froze, the teakettle suspended in her hand over the stovetop. She opened her mouth and then quickly closed it again, questions flashing across her face.
Cretia closed the dishwasher, leaned a hip against the counter, and turned to face her hostess. Fighting for at least a hint of a smile, she gulped a little breath. “My mom is ... difficult. She’s the only parent I’ve ever known, but after my abuelita—my grandma—died when I was seven, my mom changed. She’d lost so much that she refused to get rid of anything else. We never used the term, but she became a hoarder. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Marie’s eyebrows pinched together, and she whispered, “I’m so sorry. That must have been so hard.”
“It certainly wasn’t a picnic.” She snapped her mouth closed and glanced up apologetically. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
Marie waved off her apology. “Family relationships are hard. Sometimes they bring out the worst in us.”
Cretia nodded slowly. Finn hadn’t said it in as many words, but he was trying to make his father proud and prove him wrong at the same time. It wasn’t bringing out his best either. Apparently, they had more in common than she’d thought.
“I moved out when I was a senior in high school and worked a live-in nanny job for a few years. The family asked me to go on a cruise with them, and that’s where I began taking videos and picking up travel tips. My platforms grew from there, and before I knew it, so did my income.”
When the kettle whistled, Marie nodded to it, an unspoken question between them.
“Yes, please.”
Marie got out two cups and set them on the counter. “So, you started making money?”
Cretia couldn’t hold back a good-natured snort. “That’s putting it mildly. I grew up in a border town, living in a two-bedroom stucco house with no air-conditioning and temperamental plumbing. I barely graduated from high school, and I thought making fifteen hundred dollars a month as a nanny in addition to a room was upper-class. But I discovered a whole section of the internet eager for tips and tools to make travel easier, more affordable, more enjoyable. And I could give them that. I did my research. I explored the world. I was real about what I liked and what I didn’t. Pretty soon I had a million followers. And that year, I made almost that much money. Of course, most of it goes into traveling and equipment. But my followers kept growing, and with them the opportunities and income.”
With a chuckle, Marie said, “Natalie and Brooke said you were famous, but I didn’t realize. Here we’ve been hosting a star, and we didn’t even know it.”
Cretia responded with a laugh of her own. “Absolutely not. I’m not a star. I just found my niche, my people. And I thought I could use that money to help my mom. I thought maybe I could have a place to go home to.” Her smile melted away, and her lips trembled as the memory surged through her.
Pressing a flat hand to her back, Marie ushered Cretia to a stool at the counter and set a steaming cup of tea before her. “What happened with her?”
She shook her head, not sure if she could speak the truth, or even begin to convey the way her mom’s face had twisted with rage or the way her screech had rung through the house. “I-I-I hired a professional organizer. A team, really. I called my mom and told her we were coming. That we were going to help her take her home back. And that I could come visit—stay with her when I wasn’t traveling—if she would just clean it up and throw out the trash.” Cretia took a sip of her tea, the warmth sliding down her chest to her stomach. “It didn’t work.”
“What do you mean? She couldn’t keep it clean?”
“No. She wouldn’t even let us start.”
Marie looked stricken, though Cretia didn’t know why. It wasn’t like Marie’s mom was so far gone.
“When the team picked up a trash bag—even before they threw it into the giant dumpster they’d brought with them—my mom lost it. Crying and raging, screaming and throwing things at us.” Cretia wrapped her arms around her middle, trying to ward off the memories that, once begun, flowed off her tongue. “I tried to calm her down. I tried to rationalize with her. I even resorted to blackmail. If she didn’t get her house in order, I told her I would never set foot on her property again. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hear me. She wouldn’t. She’d made her choice. She’d rather have her junk than have me in her life. And just before I left that day, she screamed that everyone always said I was just like her. And I was going to end up in a house just like hers.”
From the other side of the island, Marie reached out a gentle hand. “Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry.”
“This is the part where you tell me that she’s the only mother I’m ever going to have and I need to try again.”
Marie’s forehead wrinkled along her hairline. “Not at all. Why would you think that?”
“Because that’s what the organizer said. She said I should wait a few months and call her so we could try again.”
“Well, it sounds like that organizer didn’t come from a dysfunctional family.”
Cretia shrugged. Probably not. But she was also one of the few people who had witnessed her mom’s meltdown.
“Can I tell you about my relationship with my dad?” Marie asked.
She nodded silently, hiding her trembling lips behind her teacup.
“My dad is difficult too. He’s a wealthy and powerful real-estate developer in Boston, and when I was twenty-eight, he tried to use the worst thing that has ever happened to me to get a land deal.”
Cretia nearly spit out her tea. That wasn’t difficult. That was despicable. “What happened?”
“I ran away from home and ended up on PEI.” Marie smiled, though her eyes still held a dose of sadness. “I met Seth’s uncle Big Jack on the ferry here. I wish you could meet him. He took his wife Aretha to the Bahamas for an extended vacation. But he’s the type of man who recognized my pain and looked for a way to heal it. He asked me to help him get the Red Door Inn open. Seth was here too—and despite my best efforts, he won my heart. Maybe you know what I mean?”
Finn. Why did her mind always go back to Finn?
“So what happened with your dad?”
“My mom passed away when I was sixteen, and since then, my dad has tried to make my life miserable. It’s like he wants company in his own misery. And for years, I thought that’s how fathers were. I thought that’s what family was—dragging each other down. But Big Jack showed me a different love. He showed me that family isn’t always the one you’re born into. Sometimes it’s the ones you choose to love. The ones who choose to love you back. My dad always chose money over people. And that’s not love. That’s greed.”
“Do you still speak to your dad?”
“No. And my kids won’t know him either. But they know the love of their dad Seth and their adopted grandfather Big Jack. And they know that God loves them more than anyone here on earth could.”
“You just cut your dad off?”
Marie dunked her tea bag a few times as she chewed on her bottom lip. When she looked up, there was a certainty in her eyes. “No matter what I chose, it was always going to be hard. I could choose to keep him in my life and deal with the way he treated me and my family. Or I could set boundaries so that I wouldn’t continue to let him hurt me—and so he wouldn’t ever hurt my children. Both would be hard. But I chose the one that was best for my kids. I can’t change him. I can pray for him. I can hope the best for him. But I can’t deny what he’s done and how he’s hurt those around him. I can’t make him into a different man, but I can choose how I will respond. I can choose how I will treat those I love.” Marie leaned forward, her gaze heavy and solemn. “And I choose not to carry on any of those hurtful traits.”
So can you.
Marie hadn’t spoken the words, but they hung between them as loud as if she had.
Cretia cringed. It wasn’t that easy. She’d spent eighteen years in a broken house with a broken mom. Eleven years with just the two of them. The fractured parts were ingrained in her. If she never settled down, she couldn’t succumb to them. And she couldn’t pass them on to anyone else.
“I’m sorry you’ve had such a hard relationship with your mom,” Marie said. “But there are people here who would welcome you into their family. I saw Kathleen again today, and she was still talking about how much she enjoyed your visit. I would love it if you stayed. And I have a feeling that there’s a certain dog breeder down the road who would be pretty happy if you stuck around too.”
Just say yes.
That was all she had to do. Say she would stay. Choose the island. Choose a home. Choose them.
Choose this hard instead of the hard of not having a home.
Her hands began to tremble, and she snatched them into her lap before they could betray the battle within.
“I appreciate you saying that,” she whispered.
“Just know that you always have a place here when you come to visit. And I do hope you will.”
“Thank you.” Cretia grabbed her box and hugged it to her chest with a swift farewell. Then she ran up to her bedroom, closed the door, and did what she should have done more than a week before. She bought a plane ticket off the island.