Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Wade
“Wade Stevens.”
I sat up straight, doing a double-take at the familiar wrinkled smile and purple perm of the hunched woman in front of me.
“Gigi?” I stood to greet her, and she immediately gestured that she was expecting a hug. “What are you doing here?” I asked, awkwardly embracing her.
“Oh, Thelma just had her hip replaced yesterday. I called to check on her, and she said they were going to keep her an extra day or two, so I figured I’d better bring her some sustenance. The food they serve here, not to mention the entertainment options…” She shook her head, not a single strand of hair moving.
I looked behind Gigi and saw Harper standing a few paces back.
“Hi, Harper.”
The younger woman seemed to be in a daze, taking a second to realize I was talking to her before she came forward and greeted me with a loose hug.
“Hi, Wade.” Her mind was definitely elsewhere, and for once, I was sure it wasn’t on my brother. She didn’t even glance toward the two rooms closest to us.
“Excuse her,” Gigi muttered, her mouth drawing tight. “She’s dealing with a scoundrel, and I was hoping a visit with Thelma would help distract her.”
“A scoundrel?” The word made me want to chuckle, but the old woman’s expression told me it was no laughing matter.
“Adam Eastwood. Owns a bunch of bee farms in the area, Honey Trap Farms. Thinks he has a monopoly on the whole local honey business in Maine.” She tapped her cane on the ground as though she wanted to rap the man over the head with it. “He’s threatening some legal trouble. Saying her branding is too similar to his and some other blarney. Causing some ruckus online. Heaven forbid two honey farms both use a bee in the logo. Scoundrel,” she grumbled under her breath.
“Gigi…” Harper shot her grandmother a warning look.
“I know, I know.” She raised her hands in surrender and then looked up at me and added, “She can handle it, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t call him a scoundrel.”
I nodded, recalling what Max had told me last week at Ailene’s house. This must be the guy he was referring to.
It always surprised me the level of entitlement some people had for commonalities. Like using a bee to promote honey, a tooth to advertise a dental office, or a scale on a law office logo. There were concepts that belonged to an industry, not an individual, and I always wondered about the sanity of those who argued otherwise.
“If there’s anything I can do, Harper, please let me know,” I offered again.
After everything Lou had done for my brother, I’d be happy to take a look at whatever legal smokescreen was thrown in her path. Based on what Gigi said, it was probably something strong enough to deter a small business from fighting back, especially when fighting back would entail legal fees .
Her smile was fleeting before she changed the topic. “Where’s Lou?”
I nodded to the room in front of me. “In with my mom and Blaze.”
She finally turned and slowly moved to the window, peering through it as though it were a snow globe, wanting to be inside but knowing it wasn’t possible.
“I’m glad I’ve run into you, Wade,” Gigi started again, Harper sufficiently distracted.
“Oh?”
“I have something…” She dug in her purse, her cane swinging freely off her arm. “You know, I took this pocketbook because it was big enough to hold the jar, but do you think I could find it?” With another huff, she unhooked the cane from her shoulder and held it to me as though that was the thing holding her up.
I took the rod and waited another minute before she exclaimed, “Aha!” And held up a jar of blueberry preserves. I’d opened the very same jar enough times for the breakfast buffet to recognize it on sight.
“For you.”
“Me?” My head cocked, and I lifted my hand. “Gigi, I don’t need?—”
“You do.” She shoved the jar into my hand just as the door to Blaze’s room burst open.
“Harper?” Lou stood in the doorway, her eyes landing on her cousin and then snapping to her grandmother. “Gigi? What are you doing here?”
“My word,” Gigi huffed and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m ninety-five years old, young lady. If anyone here has the right to be at the hospital, it’s me.”
“That’s not?—”
“I was visiting Thelma down the hall. She had her hip replaced yesterday and is bored out of her mind. And starving.” Gigi patted her cloud-like perm as if there were any force in nature that could cause her hair to move .
“Oh.” Lou stepped out of the room. The door almost shut behind her when it swung right open again.
“Lou—oh.”
Everyone turned to Mom who looked a little startled by the crowd she’d just walked into.
“Joanna, this is?—”
“Hello, I’m Gigi, Lou’s grandmother,” the old woman interrupted Lou and approached my mother with a smile. “And this is Lou’s cousin, Harper.”
“We met briefly at the inn before…” Harper murmured softly, the information lost as Gigi claimed Mom’s attention.
“Hello, I’m Joanna. Wade and… Blaze’s… mom.” Her voice caught on my brother’s name.
“It’s lovely to meet you.” Gigi didn’t even feign an attempt to shake Mom’s hand before hugging her. “I’m so sorry about Blaze, but I’m so happy Lou has found your son.” It was drastic, the way Mom’s stiffness melted then into Gigi’s embrace.
On the surface, Gigi could’ve been referencing Blaze—should’ve been referencing him since Lou’s family thought they were together—but it didn’t feel like she was talking about my younger brother at all. Not the way she said it. Nor the way her eyes flicked to me behind her thick-framed glasses.
She wasn’t talking about me—she couldn’t be. Lou hadn’t told them… No, she’d lied to them about Blaze. About me. Still…
“Me, too,” Mom murmured as they pulled apart.
“You know, Joanna, Harper and I were about to head down the hall to entertain my friend with a friendly game of Go Fish. Would you like to join us?”
“Oh.” Mom looked over her shoulder, her expression crestfallen once more. “I would love to, but I can’t leave Blaze. I don’t want him to wake up alone.”
“I can sit with him,” Harper offered in a meek voice, banding her arms over her chest. “I brought a book with me. I could read to him. It’s Treasure Island . ”
“A book? Harper Lee, I thought you were going to play Go Fish with us.” Gigi sounded affronted.
“I was, but sometimes, you and Thelma start sharing stories, and all of a sudden, we’re fishing for four hours.”
Gigi harrumphed while Harper looked to Lou whose only confirmation of her cousin’s statement was the color in her cheeks.
Meanwhile, Mom bit her lip and faced me like I could make the decision for her. I couldn’t, but I did think it would be good for her to get out of Blaze’s room for just a little bit.
“He did always love a good adventure,” I said low. No matter the consequences.
Lou gently reached for Mom’s elbow, the touch the soft encouragement she needed.
“Alright,” Mom said, smiling a little. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, the more the merrier. At least Thelma’s stories about her trained cat, Constance, will be new for someone.”
Everyone—even me—let out a small chuckle.
“Alright, I’ll join you in a minute. I just want to talk to my son.”
Gigi repeated the room number she was heading to and then took off at a far too brisk pace for a woman who held a cane but wasn’t using it.
“I’ll take Harper to Blaze,” Lou murmured and then took her cousin’s hand and let her into my brother’s room, leaving Mom and me alone.
“Wade…”
“I’ll find out who the mother is—where the baby is,” I began before she could. I didn’t know what else to say—what else I could do to make everything okay. “I’ve already got Mikey on alert if anyone mentions even a hint of this?—”
“Wade.” She pushed just hard enough to get me to stop and do the thing I was trying to avoid—looking into her tear-drenched eyes .
“I’m sorry,” I rasped in spite of what Lou had told me. “I should’ve known—should’ve done something?—”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” she interrupted, curling her hand into my shirt and pulling me to her.
I stood stock-still the moment her arms encircled me. This wasn’t like the halfhearted hug she always gave me. This was the kind of embrace usually reserved for Blaze—for the son who struggled with failure.
“He was never going to be your father—never going to be you,” she said softly.
My jaw pulsed. “I never wanted him to be.”
“I know.” She pulled back. “But maybe you constantly protecting him—taking responsibility—makes him feel like you do.”
“I don’t want him to get hurt,” I told her, my voice painfully taut. “I don’t want… this… to happen.”
“I know. Neither do I.” Her smile was wistful. “But maybe all he’s ever wanted from you was a big brother. Not a protector. Not a savior. And the same goes for me.”
“Mom…”
“We had good intentions. We really did,” she said, placing her hand on my chest. “But maybe all we’ve done is show your brother we don’t trust him to take care of himself.”
“I only want him to be happy.” And safe and not self-destructive.
“So do I. But if this has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t know—can’t know—how strong you can be until you’re forced to break a little. And if we’re always here, making sure nothing is ever broken…”
I followed her gaze back to Blaze’s room. Through the window, I caught Lou and Harper sharing a pastry as they stood talking at the end of the bed.
Seeing her youngest son like this had definitely broken something in Mom and in me. Even though I hoped— believed—Blaze would wake up, it didn’t dim the reality that he might not. That the fall could’ve been a lot worse.
The idea broke something in me. It broke my drive. My ambition and urgency to work like I had something to prove to a man who was dead. It broke the mold I’d lived in for so long, a mold made of Dad’s dreams. It broke the rules I thought I had to live by and left me with a single thought: If I had fallen… if that were me in there… what would’ve happened? What would I have left behind?
What did I want to leave behind?
The answer to that question was nothing that I’d had when I’d arrived here… and everything that I’d found in Friendship.
“We were broken, too, Wade,” Mom added, her lip quivering as she regarded me.
Family was complicated. Decades of memories piled into a wall between us, one that wasn’t dismantled in a single night or week or month, but could be. With effort. Brick by brick, day by day, the wall could be repurposed—reformed into a bridge over all of the things that had kept us apart.
My jaw tightened, and I replied, emotion thickening my voice, “I think we can be strong again.”
She smiled and then hugged me. The good kind of hug. The kind of hug that started us down a different path.
“You know, deep down I didn’t believe it… knew it was too good to be true.”
“What was?” I asked as we pulled apart.
“Lou.”
I winced. “Mom?—”
“I wanted to believe it though,” she went on, insistent. “I wanted to believe Lou would be a part of our family.” As she looked at me, my chest tightened. “And now, I think she still will be.” Her watery smile widened.
Lou exited Blaze’s room then, bringing our conversation to a swift halt. “I’m sorry.” She blushed, sensing her interruption. “I can go to the waiting room?— ”
“Oh no, sweetie. It’s okay. I should go meet your grandmother. I don’t want them waiting on me.” Mom went and hugged her close, and then hugged me again whispering, “Don’t let her go, Wade.”
Mom pulled away before I could tell her I’d never let Lou go. I couldn’t. To let Lou Kinkade go would be like letting all the blood from my veins.
“Do you mind if we stop at the Pastry Queen on our way back?” Lou buckled her seatbelt as we pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “This way Ella doesn’t have to drop them off in the morning.”
“Sure. It’s in Stonebar?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Right on the main road, so just follow the signs for town.”
I’d driven this stretch of road enough to know exactly where the left-hand turn was with the sign directing visitors to the seaside harbor.
The drive was insulated by trees and suddenly opened up to a sprawling town harbor.
Stonebar was larger than Friendship, drawing a bigger crowd with its lighthouse and harbor filled with lobster-scavenging boats. But today, the throng of tourists swelled for the donut festival going on.
“There’s Max’s storefront.” The MaineStems boutique passed by on our right as we crawled closer to the store. “The Pastry Queen is up here on the right, so we can park—oh, right there!” Lou pointed to a car pulling out of a spot just ahead.
In another minute, I’d snugged my car up to the curb, and we were walking the rest of the block to the brightly lit and warmly decorated store .
“So, what’s on the menu for tomorrow?” I asked, holding the door open for Lou.
She looked at me, smiled, and answered, “Schnecken.”
Ella, the joyful Ukrainian baker, was a sight in and of herself. We’d caught her in the middle of filming a clip for her social media accounts and stood rapt as she tossed flour into the air and then threw nuts at the tray of pastries with exaggerated comedy.
It took her only a few minutes to finish filming, after which she washed and warmly embraced Lou and then me as though she knew me well by extension of knowing Lou.
After a fifteen-minute conversation about Schnecken and far too many samples, we walked out of the store holding two big boxes of pastries in our arms. Schnecken, as I’d learned, translated into ‘snails’ from German, and was more or less the equivalent of a cinnamon roll topped with a honey-pecan crumble.
“She uses Harper’s honey for these?” I thought I’d heard her mention it, but she talked so fast and moved so wildly, there was a lot to take in.
“Yeah.”
“Gigi said some guy is giving Harper problems…”
Lou frowned. “Adam Eastwood. He used to supply honey to a lot of the local businesses, and we—Mom would sell it at the Stonebar Farms store in town. She still does, but I think he sees the writing on the wall with the way Harper’s honey is gaining traction. Ella just switched to using Harper’s brand last month.”
I hummed low, the picture coming in clearer. “So, he’s trying to bully her?”
Never one to say a bad thing about anyone—even when it was the truth—Lou countered, “He’s framing things that aren’t a problem as if they were and letting the internet do his dirty work.”
“Well, if there’s anything I can do?—”
“Thank you, but it’ll be okay,” she was quick to interject.
“Really, Lou, I’m happy to help. ”
“I know.” Her head bobbed quickly, and she repeated with a softer voice, “I know.”
We reached the car, and I opened the door for her, but instead of getting in, she set the pastry box down on the seat and straightened.
“Do you want to walk down to the harbor and check out the donut festival?”
My woman loved her pastries. I tensed. My woman. Lou was my woman.
“Sure.” I closed the door and locked the car. “When do you have to be back?”
Lou checked her watch. “Oh, we have plenty of time. Violet was so excited to cover for me at the inn. She loves working with my brother, don’t get me wrong, but she gets a little nostalgic for the hospitality business.”
“She used to work for a hotel, right?” I tried to recall the bits and pieces I’d learned from the afternoon at her mom’s house.
Lou nodded. “Her family owns Royale Hotels.”
I tipped my head. I’d heard of the giant luxury hotel corporation before. They’d been really big a few years ago—a lot of good prospects on the horizon, but lately… “Why do I feel like they aren’t doing so well?”
“Because they aren’t,” Lou said. “Violet was doing everything to revive the brand and really make it something unique, but her dad had in his mind that Violet’s brother was going to take over the company, so he promoted him instead of her. That was when she came up here… and never looked back.”
I hummed low. “Fathers.”
In the span of a second, the word had taken on new meaning. Prior to this morning, father had been reserved for a man of admirable success in spite of his poor character. A title that left a bad taste in all our mouths. But now, father also belonged to Blaze. It was still hard to wrap my head around.
My head swiveled as we reached the start of the festival, tents lining the pedestrian street all the way to the harbor. I dragged in a deep breath, the air thick with the scent of sugar settling into my lungs like syrup.
“What if this is all my fault?”
Even in the middle of the milling crowd, I heard her breath catch. “Wade…” She stopped, forcing me to stop, too. “It’s not.”
A line for one of the tents swelled behind her, a group of kids bumping into her back. She was forced to step forward, and I reached for her instinctively.
“How do you know?”
“Because a relationship isn’t built by one person. Two people share the responsibility for building it or breaking it.”
“And what if me trying to build it is what broke it? Is what broke him?” Because that was certainly what it felt like, and after what Mom said… Every time I stepped in, Blaze stepped farther away. Every time I fixed a problem, the next one was only bigger.
And now, he’d found out he was going to be a father, and we were too broken for him to tell me.
“You didn’t break him, Wade. You loved him and wanted to help him.” Her hand rested on my chest. “But maybe he just didn’t know how he needed to be loved… or how to tell you.”
I’d never thought of it like that. I’d loved my brother the only way I knew how: by protecting him and then cleaning up all his problems. But maybe loving someone wasn’t taking all their responsibility away. Maybe for Blaze, loving him meant trusting him to fix his own mistakes.
“Telling someone that isn’t as easy as it sounds,” I murmured and slid my fingers under her chin.
“No, it’s not,” Lou said, her breaths labored as I rubbed my thumb along her lip.
“It means being vulnerable… and trusting.” Like she’d been with me—vulnerable every time I asked what she wanted. When she’d risked getting involved with her ex-boyfriend’s brother.
Trusting me every time to give her what she needed.
“Yes.” The word was a whisper, her hooded eyes pinned to mine .
“It takes a brave heart to tell someone how you need to be loved.”
Lou’s eyes flashed, and her tongue slid along her lips. “I guess it does.”
Suddenly, the people, the conversation, the music, the festival… it all disappeared for her. My head dipped and I pressed my lips to hers, finding them the sweetest possible thing this festival had to offer.
I didn’t mean for the kiss to deepen. For it to slide from something slow and tender into something impatient and ravenous. But it did, and I realized it was because I needed the honesty of her emotions. I craved it like oxygen. I craved her brave heart, the exquisitely empathetic part of her that went out on a limb for every goddamn person she loved. The part of her that went out on a limb for me. The part that was vulnerable and trusting for me.
It was the part I loved most about her.
I pulled back with a sharp breath. The tide of the crowd drew us apart, giving space to the huge realization that was impossible to ignore. I was falling in love with her.
But after what Blaze put her through, how was I going to tell her how I felt without scaring her off?
I shoved my free hand into my jacket pocket, colliding with the glass jar I’d forgotten I’d put in there earlier.
“Wade, I need?—”
“Lou, why did Gigi give me this?” We spoke at the same time, but the jam jar I pulled out won over the topic of conversation.
Lou’s eyes rounded as soon as she saw it. “Oh no.” She whimpered and reached for it, but I quickly held it high.
“Oh no, what?” I probed and glanced up at the jar. “Is it poisoned?”
Lou shook her head. “Worse.” Her groan turned into a strained laugh. “It’s a premonition.”
“A premonition? Like a fortune?” I looked at the jar again, my eyes narrowing on the label.
When Gigi handed it to me, my memory filled in the details of the label from what I’d seen on the ones Lou opened for breakfast, but now that I looked closer, I realized it didn’t say anything about blueberry jam.
“Gigi gets… premonitions… for certain people. It’s a word or a couple of words, and she puts them on a label on a jar of jam and gives them to the person. It’s probably nothing?—”
“It says Brave Heart.”
Our eyes collided. It takes a brave heart to tell someone how you need to be loved.
“Maybe you’re supposed to watch the movie,” Lou said and yanked her gaze away, clearly avoiding mention of what I’d said earlier.
“It’s two words.”
“She’s ninety-five. She probably made a mistake.”
“Lou—”
“We should probably head back.” She made a point to look at her watch. “I don’t want to keep Violet there too long.”
I swallowed down the rest of what I wanted to say—everything I wanted to say. She was afraid of what was happening between us. The way it happened. How fast it happened. I understood… but it didn’t change how I felt.
Whatever it took, however she needed… I was going to love her until she felt safe enough to love me back.