Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Jess
The late morning sun filtered through the gauzy curtains in Claudia’s sunroom, painting the table in golden rectangles.
Jess sat at the dining nook, laptop open, fingers hovering above the keyboard.
Her shoulders ached from the tension she hadn’t been able to shake since returning to Oak Bluffs.
Job applications lined her browser tabs like tiny paper boats, each one threatening to sink.
Her resume, tweaked and rewritten more times than she could count, stared back at her with silent judgment. None of these jobs appealed to her.
Jess had another document open, a list of all the side hustles she had contemplated when she first began her tech company in Silicon Valley.
She had done the marketing, the accounting, and all the photography and videos for her company.
She was a one-man show, doing the job of fifty people by herself.
She had gotten good at all of it. She’d started consulting other entrepreneurs and helping them with their marketing and business plans. She had an entire folder in her Google Drive with business plans for other companies—her fail-safe if her company didn’t take off in the first few years.
Except it did.
She had made her first million within two years, and her income continued to climb. She turned around and poured it right back into her company, her people. She was unstoppable.
Or so she thought.
She let out a long breath and shook her head. She closed that folder and went back to looking at the “grown-up” jobs her parents thought she needed to look for.
In the backyard, she could hear Maisie’s shrieks of laughter as Claudia pushed her higher and higher on the old wooden swing set Henry had restored last fall. The sound should have brought Jess peace. It didn’t.
She forced herself to click another application link and start the process all over again.
Upload resume. Fill out fields. Answer questions that boiled years of experience and sacrifice down to checkbox bullet points.
She hated this. Not the work, she’d always worked hard, but the way it made her feel: small, invisible, unaccomplished.
Once, in another life that now felt a million years away, she’d been a business owner. Her own hours. Her own clients. A community she built from the ground up. Until Clark tore it all down.
The screen blurred a little. She blinked, then shoved back from the table and stood. “Lunch,” she called, her voice catching slightly.
Outside, Claudia and Maisie came in through the sliding doors, both pink-cheeked and laughing. Claudia had leaves in her hair. Maisie had dirt smudged across her forehead and grass stains blooming across both knees.
“We built a fairy house!” Maisie beamed, climbing up onto the barstool at the kitchen island. “Grammy says if we leave a little sugar out, they might come visit tonight.”
“Do they take coffee too?” Jess asked, fetching sandwiches and apple slices.
Maisie grinned. “Fairies don’t drink coffee, Mama.”
“Pity,” Jess murmured.
As Jess poured lemonade into three mismatched glasses, Maisie looked up suddenly, her eyes big and blue and far too knowing. “Mama, when can I talk to Daddy? He didn’t answer my call yesterday.”
Jess froze for just a breath. Then she smiled, tight and practiced. “He’s working, sweet pea. Super busy right now. You know how it is. Lots of phone calls. He can’t always talk, but he said to tell you he loves you very, very much.”
Maisie nodded solemnly, accepting the lie the way kids sometimes do when it feels safer than the truth.
Claudia dried her hands on a dish towel and sat beside her granddaughter. “Clark always was a good dad. And he was a good husband, too. I hate that you two couldn’t work out your differences.”
Jess didn’t reply. Her jaw tightened as she placed the sandwiches on the table. There it was: the slow, subtle judgment.
“Sometimes,” Claudia continued, oblivious, “when both people have such demanding careers… well, something has to give.”
The knife Jess held clattered a little too loudly against the counter.
Claudia looked up, startled. “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean anything by it. Just that it’s hard. I remember when your father was coaching and teaching, and I had three kids at home. I was a ghost by the end of the day. I can’t imagine if I’d been working outside of the home at the same time.”
Jess said nothing, too afraid of what might come out if she opened her mouth.
Her older brothers were married, had kids of their own, and were super successful.
They’d both gone the traditional route, being the perfect kids, with one being a doctor and the other a lawyer. Following in their footsteps was hard.
That didn’t even matter, though. Jess’s thoughts were stuck on what her mom had said about Clark.
Because what she wanted to scream was that Clark hadn’t just been demanding, he’d been a saboteur, a mooch, a manipulative jerk.
Charming to everyone else, sure. The golden boy.
The doting father. But behind closed doors, he chipped away at her business, her confidence, her ability to breathe.
He left her to handle the child, the finances, and the chaos, while he built a facade that only she saw through.
He’d never laid a hand on her, but the mental attacks were just as bad.
But how could she blame her mother for still believing in him? Jess had believed in him, too, once.
“Anyway,” Claudia said quickly, clearly sensing the shift in the room, “I had an idea. About the summer solstice. Do you remember when you were little, and we’d send lanterns out onto the water? Back when they did it to honor the fishermen who didn’t come home?”
Jess nodded slowly. She remembered the soft glow of paper lanterns floating out into the sea, her little hand in Uncle David’s, his voice whispering stories of the men they honored, including one great-uncle she’d never met.
“I want to bring that back this year. A solstice dance on the beach, lanterns and music, and a potluck, maybe. I think it would be good. For Lily, especially. But for you, too, Jessie. And Margot. And Anna. All of us, really. A reason to look forward, you know?”
Jess bit into a slice of apple, chewing slowly to buy herself time. Her mother was trying. She meant well. And it would be nice—for someone else. Not for Jess. Not right now.
Planning events, corralling people, dealing with the looks and whispers from townsfolk who hadn’t seen her since her big return, her tail tucked between her legs? It was the last thing she wanted.
But Claudia’s face was so bright with excitement, her eyes practically dancing.
Jess nodded again, more carefully this time. “It’s a nice idea.”
“It’ll give us all something to focus on. Get our hands busy. Lord knows we need that.”
Maisie looked up from her sandwich. “Can I wear wings? Like a fairy?”
“Absolutely,” Claudia said, smoothing her granddaughter’s hair. “You can be the solstice fairy.”
Jess forced a smile. “You’ll be the best solstice fairy ever.”
“Maybe Daddy will come home for it and see me as the fairy,” Maisie said excitedly.
Jess felt the bile rise in her throat. She closed her eyes and tried to inhale, tried to swallow the truth. Maisie idolized her dad, and Jess hated that some day she would see the truth for what it really was.
Clark wasn’t working late nights with a lot of phone calls. As far as she knew, he was in Cabo celebrating his new single life with a nurse he met on Tinder. He wanted nothing to do with being a father.
“If you file for divorce, you’re only hurting Maisie. I won’t pay child support, I’ll make sure of it. I also won’t be in her life. I didn’t want a kid. You wanted one. I only got you pregnant so you’d shut up. It’s on you that I won’t be in her life anymore.”
“You’re the reason we’re getting a divorce,” she’d hissed through clenched teeth. “The only reason why I’m not pressing charges for fraud and embezzlement is because I don’t want Maisie to visit her father in prison. Don’t turn this on me.”
“Where’d you learn those big fancy words?” He chuckled. “We’re married; that’s my money, too. It’s not my fault you didn’t track your finances better.”
Jess swallowed hard and fought back the anger that wanted to bubble out.
Clark had told her that he had a bachelor’s degree in finance.
That he was an accountant, and because he was her husband, she didn’t think to check his story.
She’d been too busy building her company to visit him at work or look into his story at all.
The man had run an entire line on her for a very long time, and she hadn’t even thought he was telling lies. It never occurred to her.
Jess and Clark had met not long after Jess moved to California to start her business.
One of her mentors in the tech field introduced him to her, claiming Clark was a successful financial coach.
Clark told her that he was an accountant but also ran a side gig in which he helped people build their financial portfolios, save money, and budget better.
In reality, Clark was building trust with clients and getting them to use a fake bank as their savings account.
He scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars from people.
He used her company to continue doing so.
As head of her accounting department, he had access to her profits and was writing off expenses that didn’t exist, skimming money off the top, among other things.
No one wanted to believe that he acted alone.
He had ruined her credibility. And because she felt she had to protect Maisie from the truth, she didn’t press charges.
She let him get away scot-free while she dealt with the aftermath.
Looking back, it made sense why he wanted to get married so fast, why he pushed her to have a baby so quickly.
It was all part of his ploy. Jess wanted to collapse as she faced the reality that she had married a man who didn’t even love her; she loved him, but she was just a means to an end to him.
That was gut-wrenching. The only thing that kept her from breaking down was Maisie.
She couldn’t let her daughter watch her fall apart.
When people raved about how great he was, it was so hard for her to keep her mouth shut. But she did, for Maisie.
Her mother moved on, talking about lantern designs and gathering driftwood and recipes she wanted to dig out of old church cookbooks.
Jess listened, nodded in the right places, but her mind was still wrapped tight around the things left unsaid, the pressure of trying to move forward while everyone else clung to a past version of her that no longer fit.
She would apply to more jobs this afternoon. Keep her head down. Focus on Maisie. On healing. That was the only dance she had energy for.
The rest of it? She just didn’t have the heart.