Chapter 1
Chapter One
Lily
Three Years Later
The salt air clung to Lily Hartman’s skin as she wrestled with the rusted shutter hook, trying to latch it against the spring wind that whipped in from the Atlantic.
The ocean, once her lullaby and muse, something she loved dearly and looked to for peace, now sounded too loud, too alive.
It roared in her ears like a world she no longer belonged to.
She finally forced the shutter into place with a metallic clang and stepped back to survey the front of her seaside pottery studio.
It looked tired, like her. Her late husband, David, had worked hard to bring her studio to life.
He made her dreams a reality by integrating his woodworking skills with her pottery.
It had all been so cheery and bright, but over the last year, it had faded and chipped from too many storms and too little care.
The hanging sign above the door, which read Hartman Pottery Studio in David’s handwriting, swayed with a gentle creak.
He’d been so proud of all of it, and she’d loved it, too. Everything that had once been so breathtakingly beautiful only served as a reminder of her own heartbreak. She couldn’t bear to look at any of it.
Lily lowered her gaze and blew out a long breath as she fought back the tears that were threatening to spill from her eyes.
She hadn’t touched a piece of clay in over a year.
Not since the accident. Not since the night her husband drove into a twisted mess of black ice and never came home.
David had been the one to coax her into opening this place, insisting that her art deserved more than the garage shelves and dusty sketchbooks where it used to live.
He’d believed in her long before she ever believed in herself.
She turned the key in the lock twice, as though double locking could hold back more than just the salty wind.
It was April. Martha’s Vineyard would begin blooming with tourists in a few weeks, and by mid-May, her little studio would be expected to open its doors.
But not this year. Maybe not ever again.
Lily took one step back and then another, until she was standing on the edge of the weather-beaten porch.
Her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, though she wasn’t cold.
She just felt empty. As though the grief had hollowed her out and left behind a shell that functioned enough to make tea and brush her teeth, but not much more.
Some days, she couldn’t even bring herself to do that.
Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her cardigan. She didn’t look.
Only a few people still called her: bill collectors, her daughter, Anna, her best friend, Margot Davis, and her son, Cody, but she didn’t feel like talking to any of them. Cody and Margot both lived on the island, too, and would show up unannounced a lot. Lily hated that.
Lately, she hadn’t felt much like being social with anyone.
Anna called every few days, always gentle, always tiptoeing around Lily’s silence.
She tried to fill that canyon of silence with stories about the twins, Blaze and Nora, or news from Langley Air Force Base, or reminders that spring would eventually reach the mainland and not just the island’s edges.
But Lily rarely answered. And when she did, she couldn’t find the energy to be what Anna needed her to be.
When Lily made it to the house, Cody was sitting on the front porch swing, looking down at his phone as he gently swung back and forth.
Lily’s throat squeezed, and she felt tears pricking at her eyes.
Cody was the spitting image of David. It was as though David’s younger version had time-jumped to the future.
They had the same black hair, bright blue eyes, the same set of jaw, and the same tall, lean build.
Cody had a lot of his dad’s mannerisms, too.
“I swear we’re in Back to the Future, and that’s you from the past,” Lily would tease David. “He looks just like you at that age.”
“I was more handsome,” David would bellow with laughter. “He’s way smarter, though. He’s got a better head on his shoulders.”
The thought of the conversation with her late husband made her stomach clench. She could still hear his voice—barely.
“Hey, Mom,” Cody said as he gave her a forced smile. “I thought we could have dinner together.”
“I’m not really hungry, honey,” she answered softly.
Lily let out a long breath. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but she wasn’t hungry, she knew that.
“You’ve got to eat, Mom. When’s the last time you ate something?”
“I had lunch with Margot,” she lied.
“No, you didn’t,” he sighed as he shook his head sadly.
Lily unlocked the front door, and her son followed her inside. He went directly to the kitchen and started unloading the bag of food he brought. “Ignore the mess, honey. Please.”
She watched as her son gave her a small, sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry, Mom. I get it.”
Lily’s phone started buzzing. She ignored it and went to put her purse down on the couch. A few seconds later, it started buzzing again and again.
Three calls in under five minutes.
Lily sighed and pulled the phone from her pocket. The screen glowed with Anna’s name and a photo of her daughter laughing on a summer day, holding a dripping ice cream cone between both hands, twins flanking her on either side.
Reluctantly, she swiped to answer. “Anna.”
“Oh, thank God,” Anna exhaled. Her voice sounded tight, worn thin. “I was starting to think something had happened to you.”
Lily blew out another slow breath. “Still here.”
There was a long pause.
“Hi, Anna,” Cody called out from the kitchen.
“Your brother is here, too,” Lily sighed.
“Mama,” Anna said softly.
Lily tensed. Her first thought, irrational and immediate, was that someone else had died.
“Luke’s been deployed,” Anna said quickly, sensing her mother’s panic. “He left this morning. It happened fast. We barely had a day’s notice. Yesterday was spent getting him packed and doing everything we needed to do before he left.”
Lily sank onto a wooden chair, her knees weak. “What? Where?”
“They can’t say exactly,” Anna replied. “But it’s serious. At least a year. Maybe more.”
There was another heavy silence that followed as Lily swallowed hard.
Her stomach clenched as she wrapped her head around the words.
A fast deployment wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t a good thing either.
Usually, because he was a fighter pilot, it meant that he was needed somewhere and fast.
Anna and her husband, Luke, had gotten married just days after he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy, but they’d been together since their junior year of high school.
Anna had been through a lot as a military wife: long periods of time without talking to her boyfriend/husband, deployments, and crazy schedules.
Lily knew that her daughter always worried about her husband, but today, there was something different in Anna’s voice.
“Why wasn’t there any notice? Did something happen?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but it does happen sometimes. It’s all classified, you know?” Anna replied slowly. “Luke is highly decorated, so there are times that he’s handpicked to do the job.”
“Handpicked? What does that even mean?”
“Just the way it sounds, Mom. He’s one of the older fighter pilots, which means he’s seen more than some of the newer guys. Sometimes he’s requested by whoever is the head of the mission.”
“An honor and a curse,” Lily muttered under her breath. “And the twins? How are they handling it? He’s not been deployed like this since they’ve been born.”
“We live on a base, Mom, so they understand it as some of their friends have parents deployed, too. We’ve always prepared them for it.
It’s the same as the training missions he would do.
They’re sad, of course. Blaze has stepped up and has a permanent swell in his chest because he thinks he needs to be the man of the house now. ”
“Bless his heart,” Lily said, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
Lily shut her eyes. The twins were so full of life, funny, and intelligent. They questioned everything and barely stopped moving. She was exhausted just thinking about it. Maybe Lily should offer to stay with Anna and the kids; maybe a change of scenery would do her well.
“And you don’t know when Luke will be back?” Lily continued.
“No. I…this feels different, Mom.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know how to explain it, but…it just feels different. School is almost out, but I’m going to take the kids out of school a month early. They’ll e-learn for the remainder of the year. It’s just a month or so. I just want to come home to the island.”
Lily opened her eyes. “Home?”
“To the Vineyard. With the kids. I can’t do this alone, Mom.
I need help. I need to breathe. I need to not be alone while Luke’s gone, because I’ll go insane.
It’ll be nice to be there with you, especially now that Cody is home.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Claudia, plus Jess and Maisie.
It’ll be good for me and the kids to be around family. ”
Lily stared out at the empty beach beyond the porch.
The sand stretched endlessly, as the sun began to set in the sound.
She’d spent the last year convincing herself that isolation was healing.
That distance was safety. That silence was a sanctuary.
Her family didn’t like to allow her that, but she’d gotten to the point where most of them weren’t coming by daily to bother her, anyway.
But the sound of her daughter’s voice cracked something inside her.
“I’ll make up the guest room for the twins and make sure your room is cleaned up,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “When will you be here?”
“I’ve already got the car packed up. I…I didn’t know where we were going to go if you didn’t say yes, but I know that we can’t stay here. When he was deployed before, we didn’t have kids, and…I don’t know, it just feels so different now. I’ll go crazy here. I can’t do it, Mom.”
“I understand,” Lily breathed.
Anna released a long breath on the other end. “Thank you, Mom. We should be there sometime tomorrow.”
Lily ended the call and sat still for a long while.
She closed her eyes and inhaled and exhaled slowly a few times.
She remembered back to when Luke graduated from the academy and had his first duty station in Colorado.
It was the first time Anna hadn’t lived in the same state.
She had already been struggling with Cody’s enlistment, and then she added Luke and Anna leaving her, too.
She had struggled with it—anxiety and worry, not sleeping, and a lot of pacing. David had been her rock.
“They’ll be back, Lily,” David had said as he wrapped his arms around her waist. “Colorado is a long ways away, but they’ll always come home.”
“She’s out there living a life without us close by, David. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Not a bit,” he said with a wide smile. “It’s the same thing I told you with Cody.
Do I miss her? Of course. But I know that we raised our kids right and well, and I know that she picked the best husband she could.
Luke isn’t going to let anything happen to her.
They’ll always be just a phone call or a flight away. ”
“What do we do without them here? What about when she has babies and…”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, sweetheart,” he said with that deep chuckle of his. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, okay? For now, let the baby birds fly away from the nest and focus on taking care of yourself.”
“I worry about Luke and Cody in the military. What if…what if something happens to them?”
“You had those same worries with me, and I was safe the whole time. Luke will be, too. And so will Cody.”
She nodded, leaning into him as he wrapped his arms around her tightly. He kissed the top of her head, and she inhaled his scent. For whatever reason, the feel of his arms wrapped around her and the pine scent that defined him always made her feel at peace.
Lily wrapped her arms around herself, trying to mimic the feel of David’s arms around her, but it wasn’t the same. Since losing David, Lily had shut herself off from the world.
Luke and Anna had been to a lot of different places in his almost twenty years in the Air Force. They started in Colorado, then went to Wyoming, Mississippi, and settled in Virginia at Langley AFB for the last few years. It was hard for Lily to have her daughter so far away.
“Is Anna coming for a visit?” Cody asked softly.
Lily jumped, forgetting that he was there. “Sort of. It may be a little longer than a normal visit. Luke was deployed and she doesn’t know much, just that she wants to come back here while he’s gone.”
“Oh, this is the best place for her and the twins,” he said softly.
Lily nodded. Cody had struggled after David’s death, too.
He had always talked about being a lifetime Marine and retiring as a soldier, but after his father’s death, he had gotten out when the time came and returned to the Vineyard.
He had ended his longtime relationship with Nessa and started a new job working from home.
He tried to stop by and visit her as much as possible, but it was clear that he was sad and overly worried about his mother.
Lily knew this, but there wasn’t anything she could do to help his pain. Especially not when she couldn’t stop her own grief.
Maybe having Anna and the kids here would be good for all of them.
Lord knew that Lily needed something or someone to keep her mind off the grief that was consuming her.
Maybe having Anna in the house and being forced to focus on the twins would help to keep her head above water long enough so that she could get back to feeling more like a human rather than a zombie.