Driftwood Promises (Magnolia Shore #4)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“All right, folks, that’s our tour,” Winnie Burnett said, clapping her hands together cheerfully as she addressed the group who had turned up for today’s historical society tour.

“Let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, feel free to explore the exhibit and take a second look at whatever calls to you.”

“Hey, Winnie.” Delia Irving, a middle-aged local who had brought all four of her visiting sisters to take the tour, spoke up. The Irving sisters were in their fifties, and they were all proud that they were each still “Miss Irving,” despite their “advanced ages.”

These were their words, of course.

They’d proven to be a surprisingly raucous group of attendees. Eager and engaged, but raucous.

A few months ago, this would have annoyed Winnie so much that she would have been pulling out her hair by the roots. Recently though, she’d shaken things up a little, both in her tour repartee and in her personal life.

The new-and-improved Winnie, as she sometimes privately thought of herself, was cool to hang with the Misses Irving.

Okay… maybe she wasn’t hip with the ‘cool kid’ lingo, but that was fine. She was a woman in her thirties. One who, after many years of being a loner, had actual, honest to goodness, bona fide friends.

No rambunctious tourgoers could dim that light.

“What’s up, Delia?” Winnie asked.

“I just wanted to say that you have really pepped up this tour recently,” Delia praised, giving an approving little shimmy to punctuate this statement. “I like it.”

“Oh move over, Delia,” the eldest sister, Amelia, interjected. “I have some actual historical questions!”

“Don’t rush me, Amy!” Delia protested.

“Winnie,” Amelia said, speaking over Delia, “tell me about how they excavated those train track parts. Did they use TNT?”

“Um, no,” Winnie said, surprised. “They were actually uncovered when a resident nearby was renovating their yard.”

“Oh.” Amelia was visibly disappointed. “Did they use TNT when they put the railroad in?”

Winnie scrunched up her face. “Also no. Sorry.”

“Doesn’t anybody explode anything anymore?” Amelia muttered.

“I think they used dynamite on Mount Rushmore?” Winnie supplied. Mount Rushmore was about two thousand miles from Magnolia Shore, so it really stretched anyone’s definition of what counted as “local history” but Winnie didn’t think any explosive of any kind had been used in constructing the town.

And, well, Amelia seemed satisfied enough.

“Ooh, yes,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “They did explode that.”

She looked so delighted that Winnie had to chuckle. “Indeed, they did. Any other questions, ladies?”

Delia raised her hand. “I have a question. How are you still single, Winnie?” She had the sly, eager look of a matchmaker.

Winnie held up her hands as if to show that she was innocent. “I’m not saying that the questions have to be strictly historical, but let’s leave my personal life out of it.”

Delia looked chagrined, so Winnie gave her a smile to show that she wasn’t really upset.

And, indeed, she wasn’t. That recognition was a surprise to her.

She would have been pained by the admission just a few months prior.

It would have reminded her that she was not just alone romantically, but that she was friendless, had always been friendless.

She wasn’t anymore, though. She had made some friends at the ripe old age of thirty-three. No, she wasn’t entirely confident in those friendships yet. She’d felt like an outsider for twenty-five years at least. It wasn’t as though those wounds healed overnight.

But it was more progress than she’d ever made before. Even with the doubt, it felt good.

And that good feeling had filtered out into other aspects of her life, Winnie was overjoyed to find.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence though, Delia,” she said warmly.

Delia gave her a wink.

There were a few more lingering questions, most of which were requests for a little more detail on topics she’d already covered. Winnie answered them happily, then waited for the last few stragglers to wander out of the exhibit before heading toward her office to end the day.

She tended quickly to a few lingering tasks, shot off a few emails, then closed down her computer for the day. She checked to make sure that her copy of the latest book club read was inside her work bag before she headed home. She’d taken up reading a few chapters over her lunch break.

On her way out the door, she paused to chat with Cherry, the receptionist for the historical society.

Cherry had worked at the historical society longer than Winnie had been alive, and knew where to find every piece of paper in the building without consulting any sort of reference.

Winnie hadn’t talked to her much in the time she’d worked at the historical society, but perhaps this was another way that her newfound relationships had spilled over.

“Hi Cher,” Winnie said brightly. “How was your weekend? You saw your grandkids, right?”

Cherry gave her a smile. “Ooh, Winnie, you know I love those kids, but I am tired. Did you know they wanted to play at the park for three hours? And, then, of course, they needed Grandma to be part of a game of Monkey in the Middle. I’m too old to be a monkey!”

Despite the language of complaint, Cherry looked positively thrilled to have spent her weekend playing the monkey.

“You’re as spry as a much younger ape,” Winnie teased.

Cherry waved a hand at her. “You’ve been too sweet lately, Winnie Burnett. Go home, okay? Have some fun. You’re young. Get out there and cause some chaos, huh?”

“Oh yeah,” Winnie said, laughing. “That’s me. Chaotic to the bone.”

They shared a laugh as Winnie headed out, but Winnie couldn’t stifle the internal wince at Cherry’s allusion, however well-meaning, to how distant Winnie had been to her co-worker for years. The first time she’d asked Cherry a question about her personal life, Cherry had blinked at her in surprise.

“Oh,” she had said. “I didn’t realize you…”

She had trailed off, but the word cared had hung in the air between them anyway.

It had made Winnie feel downright terrible. Not that she had blamed Cherry for being suspicious about her motives. It wasn’t as though Winnie had been the most open and welcoming colleague prior to that.

Winnie felt proud that she’d gotten close enough to Cherry to know all of her grandkids’ names and that Molly, the youngest, was obsessed with unicorns.

These past few months had felt… really good. Winnie hoped beyond hope that this trajectory was here to stay. She hoped beyond hope that she could start to believe that it would.

Winnie headed through the halls of City Hall, which housed the historical society as well as most of Magnolia Shore’s municipal works.

“Bye, Natalie,” she called out to an admin from the city treasury, waving at her down the hall. “See you tomorrow?”

“Bye Winnie!”

Even these little greetings felt good.

Whenever the urge to judge herself for her reticence reared its ugly head, Winnie remembered that this desire to protect herself hadn’t come out of nowhere.

She had come to Magnolia Shore as a teenager, only to learn that the bullying she’d suffered in her previous school had left her uncertain how to navigate the perilous waters of adolescent friendship.

She’d kept herself apart, but she’d done it from a place of pain.

And blaming her childhood self for being scared of being hurt more would only bring that agony into the present.

She knew now that her love of history and books wasn’t something to be ashamed of. She knew now that it was something that could make her friends instead of lose them.

But that lesson had been hard won. She hadn’t learned it until she had struck up a friendship with the members of her book club, and she’d nearly torpedoed that friendship by badgering Eleanor Ridley when she’d first moved to town.

In Winnie’s defense, she hadn’t meant to alienate Eleanor. Winnie just got a little bit passionate about town regulations when she got into things. But she recognized that she’d gotten a tad overzealous when it came to things like fences and their proximities to sidewalks.

But that was behind them, or at least Winnie really hoped so. Eleanor assured her that it was, but there were those darn doubts that kept bobbing up in Winnie’s brain.

Those would fade in time, though. After all, Winnie’s interference hadn’t stopped Eleanor from opening her bookstore, which was now a few months into its successful tenure.

And Winnie was a proud member of the book club that their eldest member, Miriam Landers, called the “friends of the bookstore club.”

Winnie loved being friends of something, even if it was just the bookstore. Though she hoped she wasn’t flattering herself to say that she was a friend to the book club members too.

Even if declaring that was the teeniest, tiniest bit terrifying.

Even if she was still a little nervous whenever it was book club night.

Because… what if her friends still weren’t ready to trust her, given how she had been difficult and distant for so many years?

Winnie got into her car, then pressed her hands to her cheeks to banish these challenging thoughts. Just because people had let her down in the past didn’t mean that they would do so again in the future. The women who made up that book club seemed genuinely kind.

“You can do this,” she told her reflection. “You can do this.”

The bookstore was an adorable building, Winnie’s meddling notwithstanding.

Eleanor had done an incredibly nice job turning the downstairs floor of her home into a business.

The front picture windows gleamed with light, and Winnie could see the bustle of the women who had beat her to the meeting moving around inside.

She took a steadying breath and then turned into the back seat of her car to grab a bag with a few bottles of wine in it.

She wanted to bring something a little bit nicer, partially to show her appreciation to the group and partially because she genuinely did enjoy cooking.

But with the late tour she’d given this afternoon, she hadn’t had time to return home and whip something up before the meeting.

So she had texted the book club group thread that she would be the one to bring the wine this time around.

It had made her very nervous to send that text, but she had gotten nothing but compassion in return. Everyone in the group had been extremely understanding. They’d all been there, they’d promised her. It happened.

But that little flutter of nerves? It was still there.

Gathering her courage, Winnie took her offering of wine and entered the bookstore, a smile naturally crossing her face as she walked into the cheer and chatter.

The group was standing in a casual, lopsided circle, listening while June Caldwell told a humorous anecdote about a customer at the diner where she often took on shifts.

“So this guy orders a French dip, which, it’s a diner.

Nobody ever orders the French dip! But, as it turns out, this guy didn’t want that either.

He wanted a Reuben. But he was adamant that he knew the name of the sandwich.

So, he kept asking these pointed questions.

‘Why does this come with juice? Where is the cheese?’ It took us forty minutes to figure out what he really meant. ”

The group laughed.

“Did he leave you a good tip, at least?” Cadence Meadows asked, flicking a strand of her strawberry blonde hair that she had recently trimmed into an adorable bob.

This had been part of Cadence’s quest to reinvent herself after she’d separated from her husband, with whom she had recently reconciled.

It seemed as though the separation had been good for the couple, not that Winnie had known them particularly well previously.

Still, she couldn’t imagine a couple happier than Cadence and Tyler seemed to be.

“Oh, yes,” June said, chuckling. “The poor guy felt so bad that he left me twenty bucks, which was basically a two hundred percent tip.”

For a moment, Winnie hovered, not sure how to enter herself into this cluster. She often had this feeling, that pause where she felt like she didn’t entirely belong.

But then Eleanor spotted her, and a smile spread broadly across her face. “Winnie, hey!”

Eleanor had a naturally friendly face, and Winnie felt so grateful to now be the recipient of her smiles and welcomes. She came over and gave Winnie a quick hug, her wavy auburn hair briefly tickling Winnie’s cheek as they embraced.

“Come on over,” she said brightly. “I’m sure that running historical society tours gives you as many ‘wacky customer’ stories as working at the diner does.”

“Also, you brought wine,” chirped Miriam Landers. “We always are happy to see someone bring wine.”

Eleanor’s welcome had broken the ice; Miriam’s addition shattered it. The other women warmed visibly.

“Yeah,” Diana Madsen added, putting her hands in her well-tailored pockets. Diana ran a local boutique, and Winnie was, if she was honest with herself, totally jealous of her sense of style. “We need your insight on whether the history in this book was accurate.”

“Oh, never,” Winnie said immediately. “I mean, historical fiction becomes a lot less fun when you are forced to remember that there was no deodorant.”

Diana scrunched her nose, but it wasn’t disapproval for Winnie.

“That’s a good point. Yuck.”

Eleanor looped her arm through Winnie’s, then began to lead them all toward the circle of comfortable chairs where they generally sat for book club meetings.

“Come on, ladies,” she said. “Let’s pick Winnie’s brain for this one, huh?”

Winnie flushed with pleasure. She really was lucky that Eleanor Ridley was such a good friend… the first and very best friend that Winnie had ever had.