Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Present Day
Since Wren’s return to Bluebell Cove four days ago, she’d hardly left the bedroom she’d been given in Ivy’s house, the same house where all four sisters had been raised.
From the foyer, Celia eyed the door that Wren had closed behind her, her heart pounding with curiosity and fear.
If she and Ivy tore down the door, if they refused to allow Wren the privacy she so craved, what would they find behind it?
Would they find a tired, weak, and entirely too-thin Wren?
Would she ever tell them what was going wrong? Or would she fight them tooth and nail?
It didn’t make sense that Wren had quit her European adventure to come back to Bluebell Cove. In May, after the reading of their father’s will, she’d been so keen to leave them behind. But what had changed in the few months between? Why had she lost so much weight? What had happened back in Paris?
“Any sign of her last night?” Celia asked Ivy.
“Nothing,” Ivy said. “I heard her get up to use the bathroom and drink water, but that was it. I brought food to her room, but she was sleeping, and I don’t know if she touched it.”
Ivy stood at the kitchen counter, scraping peanut butter onto toast, while her two children, Lily and Tyler, drank orange juice, stared at their phones, and prepared to leave for the inn.
In the wake of showing Ivy Margaret’s journal entries, Ivy had recruited both of her children to help out, to clean and paint and sand and move things around.
This pleased Celia to no end. For the first time, she had a niece, a nephew.
It was summertime, which meant she never worked Ivy’s kids too hard.
During the previous few days, they’d already taken plenty of breaks to run through the woods and to the beach below, to swim beneath a splendorous summer sky, to stretch their legs and wash their hands of the paint they’d used back at the inn.
Like her mother before her, Celia had made everyone sandwiches; she’d told them stories; she’d asked them about their dreams. And Sophie was already falling for her cousins, thrilled to have an extended family she could call her own.
Things were slowly mending between Celia and Sophie.
Celia hadn’t yet told Sophie that she’d seen Landon, that they’d been on a sort of “date.” She wasn’t sure how she wanted to refer to it in her mind.
She wasn’t sure why she thought about it so often, either, nor why she texted Landon nearly every day to see how he was, to ask about his marine biology field, and to marvel at how evil the Smith family still was.
She was getting up the nerve to ask Sophie if she could read over her article.
Maybe she could help out. Perhaps she could do what she hadn’t been able to do all those years ago.
Maybe she could finally be instrumental in taking down the Smith family—and Hanson—once and for all.
It was unlikely that the Smith family would see Sophie coming. Sophie was an outlier, a Washington, DC-born-and-raised idealist. Maybe she was the key.
Now, Sophie burst through the door of Ivy’s place, gasping for air, sweat glinting on her forehead.
That morning, she’d been at the inn to meet some antique dealers who’d come to deliver the furniture that Ivy and Celia had picked out two days ago.
“Any sign of her?” Sophie asked, eyeing Wren’s closed door and kicking off her shoes.
Just as their father had done when they were children, Ivy didn’t let anyone wear them in the house.
“Nothing,” Celia said, her shoulders sagging.
Ivy dotted two plates of toast in front of her children and put her hands on her hips.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, her eyes churning like two storms. “We need to take her to the doctor. There’s no telling what’s going on with her.
And you read Mom’s journals…” She trailed off, as though remembering what they’d read together felt too dark and painful to mention.
Ivy looked down at her teenagers, who were eager to listen, their eyes bright. “What are you still doing here?” she asked in her stern-mom voice. “Take your toast to the inn and get cracking.”
Lily and Tyler carried their toast to the foyer, their eyes down as they shoved their feet into their shoes and scampered across the lawn to the inn.
Celia, Sophie, and Ivy watched them disappear through the front door.
And then, Ivy traipsed up the stairs and didn’t pause to knock on Wren’s door before barging through.
From downstairs, Celia could hear Wren groaning.
“I’ll be fine,” Wren said in that small voice of hers. “Really. I just need to rest. I need to regroup.”
Celia and Sophie crept up the stairs behind Ivy. Fear wrapped around Celia’s throat.
“Wren, you know how worried we are,” Ivy stammered, sounding more like a teenager than the forty-year-old woman before them.
Celia prayed that Ivy wouldn’t bring up the journals, that she wouldn’t refer to Wren’s illness in relation to their mother’s.
Ivy stepped into Wren’s bedroom and stood in the corner, gazing out the window at the inn.
The siding still needed painting, and the eaves required repair.
But now that there were brand-new shutters, now that the porch no longer hung crookedly, now that all the glass in the windows had been fixed, it was starting to look less like a haunted house and more like a quaint New England inn.
Celia felt a rush of euphoria. We did that together, she thought.
Sophie and I. And now, Ivy’s children are helping us.
The family’s back together again. She remembered how eager she’d been to flee Bluebell Cove, how frightened she’d been when the Smith family went after her.
But now that she understood about her mother’s affair and her mother’s depression, now that she understood that the complications between their families went back at least a generation, she was less hard on herself.
She’d been a teenager who’d wanted to prove something. She’d failed.
She’d lost so much time with her sisters. She hated that.
“Wren,” she breathed, walking into the room to sit at the edge of Wren’s bed. Wren looked thinner than the Barbie dolls they’d once played with together—Celia, too old for them, and Wren, eager to play with her eldest sister. “Wren, please. Will you consider letting us take you to the doctor?”
Wren shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I don’t want to go to the doctor. Please, don’t take me.”
Wren had sweated through her sheets, but she was shaking.
It reminded Celia of their mother’s last month of life, how she hadn’t managed to get out of bed, how her sheets had had to be changed regularly because of her sweat, how her eyes had seemed unable to see them.
There had been whispers about what was really wrong with her.
In the years that followed, their father had been cagey about it, never willing to say what her illness had really been.
The doctor said that he couldn’t have saved her.
But Celia was newly obsessed with the idea that they might have been able to save her if only they’d allowed her to live the way she’d wanted to live.
If only she’d been able to love the man she’d wanted to love.
If only their father had managed to love her the way she’d needed to be loved.
It was all so complicated. It hollowed her heart out.
“I don’t have health insurance anyway,” Wren said, coughing into her hand.
“We’ll make it work,” Ivy assured her. “You don’t have to worry about that. Money is just money; we want you to be well. We want you to heal.”
Wren turned over and curled into a ball, as though she wanted to pretend her sisters weren’t there.
“Please, Wren,” Celia whispered. “We’ve already lost so much.”
This time, Wren’s voice came out like a howl. “You left, Celia. So don’t tell me about losing so much. You’re the one who first turned your back on us. I barely remember anything about you.”
It felt like a terrible smack, one that forced Celia out the door and down the stairs.
Sophie was hot on her heels, her eyes widening as she threw her arms around Celia and held her until she stopped shaking.
Upstairs, Ivy continued to beg Wren to go to the hospital.
“Please, Wren. I was there for you. I was always there. Won’t you go to the doctor for me?
Won’t you let me call the ambulance? Something?
Please?” But Wren cursed her and told her that if she called the ambulance, she’d call a taxi to take her away, and they’d never see her again.
Celia couldn’t take it anymore. She went out on the porch, dropped to the steps, and sobbed into her thighs.
Seeing Wren like that brought back endless memories of her mother.
It reminded her of being ten, taking care of her little sisters, learning how the oven worked, asking Ivy if she’d done her homework, and watching her father’s shadow out of the corner of her eye.
She wondered if her father had known about her mother’s affair.
Had he made her life miserable as a way to punish her?
She knew that her mother hadn’t died on purpose, not really.
She hadn’t died by suicide. She hadn’t abandoned them.
But a part of her body had given up on her, whether she wanted it to or not.
She hadn’t been able to fight through that disease.
And she’d left her daughters damaged. She’d left their family splintered.
And now that their father was gone, it felt harder and harder to repair their hearts.
Suddenly, Sophie dropped down beside Celia and put her head on her shoulder. Celia had half forgotten her daughter was there, the next generation of Harper, watching. Sophie whispered, “I’m starting to understand why you wanted to run away.”
Celia pulled her head back to get a better look at her daughter. “It wasn’t the right thing to do. I was scared. I thought I was too big and powerful and smart to be scared, but I was wrong.” Celia swallowed. “I’ve been so wrong about so many things over the years.”
Sophie wet her lips. “We’re all wrong. All the time.”
Celia blinked back tears and turned to look at the inn.
She knew that her niece and nephew were handling their task all right.
She could sense that things were ticking away nicely.
They were committed to their paint job and eager to please.
But today, Celia didn’t have the nerve to go inside the inn.
She didn’t have the nerve to face her memories.
“I want to ask you a question,” she said now.
Sophie was quiet, listening.
“In your article, have you included any of the so-called ‘illicit’ business practices of the Smith Company?” Celia asked.
Sophie placed her hand over her mouth. “What are you talking about?”
Celia understood now that this was her destiny—that she had to work together with her daughter to unravel the sinister business at the dark heart of this town.
She thought of Melody in the records’ office, who, she knew, still worked there.
She thought of the files that were most certainly still piled high down there, a result of Melody’s anger at their mistreatment of her.
“Tell me everything,” Sophie said.
Celia’s ears rang. “I need to see your article first,” she said. “I need to see what we’re working with and how we can flesh it out to include everything else.”
Sophie gasped with excitement. Back on her feet, she started rattling off her problems with the article, how one-dimensional it felt.
“Landon helped me as best as he could, but all the science stuff doesn’t feel easily graspable, you know?
” Sophie said. “And I’ve been editing the thing like crazy and seeing so many problems in the text.
I’ve been dying to ask you for help, but… ”
“But you thought I didn’t care anymore,” Celia said.
Sophie grimaced. “I guess I said a lot of things to that effect.”
“You weren’t wrong. Or, not exactly.” Celia got up.
“Over the past few years, I’ve lost so many writing gigs.
I’ve lost thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Plenty of editors have told me they aren’t interested in the environmental angle anymore.
When you told me you wanted to be an environmental journalist like me, I was floored.
But for whatever reason, I figured you’d become jaded by now.
I figured you’d head out into the world and try to make something of yourself in, like, tech journalism instead. ”
Sophie snorted and jabbed Celia in the side with her elbow. “Do you even know how insane that sounds? All I ever wanted as a kid was to be like my mother.”
A sob welled up in Celia’s throat. With Wren, so sick and tired upstairs, and Ivy, still bruised and angry, and Juliet somewhere so far away, Celia would have felt painfully alone without her daughter here.
She hugged her tightly, unsure why she’d gotten so lucky in this life.
But then, when her hug broke, she said, “All right. Let’s head back to the house and get cracking on your article.
Let’s make an appointment with Bethany and tell her the new angle as well. ”
Sophie clapped her hands joyously. “Bethany’s been dying to see you again. She said that it’s been her dream to have you write for the Bluebell Cove Gazette. But she never imagined it would happen. You’re too good, she said.”
Celia laughed. “I’m not too good for anything.
I’m certainly not too good for Bluebell Cove.
” And I’m not too good for Landon Brooks, either, she thought, her pulse dinging in her fingertips.
Maybe this is the life I was always meant to lead.
Perhaps my optimism was always here in Bluebell Cove, waiting for me.