CHAPTER 3 #2
Rebecca clenched her stomach, her chest tight and itchy beneath the light cotton.
Today was meet-the-staff-day, always awkward anywhere, but especially here, where she barely knew the dialect, let alone what to wear.
She pictured her closet full of suits and wrap-dresses, the labels that used to mean so much.
Somehow she doubted they’d matter one bit here.
Granny was letting her borrow the Buick.
Car shopping would come later in the week, after she had a day or two to get her bearings.
All she needed to do now was muster the get-up-and-go.
Except she had no get-up or go.
The heaviness settled again like a cloak.
How in the world was she going to run an office, even one in the middle of nowhere, when she couldn’t even keep the job she’d had?
Peter had seen it, cut his losses. Jumped ship.
If she was being brutally honest, she had, too. Weren’t the pills proof of that?
She managed two strips of bacon and a forkful of eggs, slid the rest in the trash beneath the coffee grounds.
Even the thought of food made her queasy right now.
Sleep, when it finally came, had been restless and sporadic, filled with dreams she couldn’t remember and a deep pool of dread in her belly when she woke.
The coffee cup felt slick in her palms, and she forced herself to breathe.
You’re not the first person to start a new job in a new city, Rebecca. Not the first person to rebound after life’s tanked beneath you.
But it just felt too soon. She wanted to run back upstairs, bury her head in the feather pillows.
Instead, she gulped down the rest of the coffee and headed to her room.
Extra concealer hid the dark circles, and she slid on a pair of black trousers, a lavender silk blouse.
Not too dressy for Dahlia. A coat of lip gloss and some blush, then she faced the mirror, gave her best nice-to-meet-you-this-will-be-fun smile.
You’ve got this. Except … she didn’t.
The dread sank ever deeper.
At the newspaper office, she slid out of the car, surveyed the squat wooden building set back from the road, baskets of pink and yellow petunias flanking the entry.
The sign out front looked like it’d been scrubbed down with sandpaper, and the last “a” in Dahlia was so worn it looked like an “o.” Dahlio?
For a moment, an unbidden image of the elegant glass-and-steel high-rise, her daily backdrop in New York, filled her mind. No.
She bit her lip, stepped inside. The brown fake-wood paneling had to be straight out of the seventies—sixties, even—and the place smelled like mildewed paper, dry-erase markers, and someone’s gardenia perfume.
The staff wasn’t impressive either. The reporter, Tiff, looked sixteen and sounded eleven, with a breathy voice and stilettos so high Rebecca took mental bets whether she’d fall flat on her face standing up to shake hands.
The ad representative, Dinah, had a spray-on tan and cracked her gum when she talked.
Millie, the secretary, pursed her lips so tight Rebecca would have sworn she’d just eaten a sour pickle.
“Pleased to meet you,” Millie said in a thick Southern accent, sounding anything but pleased.
Rebecca’s throat tightened. “Likewise.”
She got out of there as fast as she reasonably could, mentally berating herself as she drove toward Granny’s and the solace of her guest room.
What in the world did I get myself into?
She surveyed the homes as she drove—pretty wooden houses, all of them at least sixty years old, a few renovated surprisingly well, nearly all with porch swings and rockers and wide expanses of lawn that boasted tree houses and gardens and tire swings, everything wholesome and sweet and classic Americana.
Everything she was not.
The early summer sun was high and bright as Rebecca navigated the busy Main Street, making a mental note to remember the coffee shop, Joe Mama’s, a surprisingly chic little place for Dahlia.
It was nestled between a frumpy boutique and the hardware store her Granny and Gramps used to own before he died.
As she drove, she peered down a side street, caught a glimpse of water.
The Wahca River, where she used to spend hours fishing, first with Gramps and later with her pal JJ, a freckle-faced, chubby, pimply kid who’d taught her to net the fish without killing them and hung out, mostly content to let her talk at him while they baited hooks and cast lines.
Fishing. She didn’t think she’d done that in twenty-something years.
She glanced down at her sleek trousers, her leather briefcase in the passenger seat next to her—both entirely wrong for Dahlia, she knew it—and felt light years away from the girl she’d been in those summers.
She didn’t even have the same hair color anymore, all blond and streaky now, thanks to her colorist. Had that summertime girl ever really existed?
Sometimes she felt like she was living in a dream, like she was completely separate from her body, swimming an inch above her skin.
Treading water. Holding her breath. Like she wasn’t even real.
A wave of longing for her old life back in the Big Apple struck her like a gut-punch.
Sarah and Marisol, the bustle of the streets, the galleries, the restaurants, the pace of the city, everything.
Now here she was in Dahlia, South Carolina, about as far away from New York as she could possibly get.
While Granny and Dr. Carter thought that was a good thing, Rebecca had some serious doubts.
Forget doubts. This was a mistake. A Class A, one-hundred-percent mistake.
She gripped the steering wheel, heart thrumming as she stared at a man in overalls in the car next to her, a woman on the corner in a bright yellow “Jesus Is My Co-Pilot” T-shirt.
What on earth am I doing here?