Escape to Lighthouse Cove (Lighthouse Cove #1)

Chapter 1

It was not a good day for fresh starts. Grace Wyatt huddled beneath the broken-down roof of the Salt Cove ferry terminal, shed that it was, under the sheeting rain.

Her six-year-old son Jacob was clinging to her legs as she waited for a ferry that seemed like it didn’t exist, never mind was ever going to appear.

They’d been waiting by this ramshackle dock on a rocky outcropping in northeastern Maine for the better part of an hour, and that was after an exhausting nine-hour drive from New York City.

Grace was ready for this day to be over.

She’d been ready for a lot of days to be over.

Salt Cove, Maine was scenic, it was true.

At least, it might be if she could see anything through the downpour besides the fuzzy outlines of weathered wooden buildings, the mountains no more than a jagged gray-green blur in the background.

When you were soaking wet and freezing cold, as well as seriously disheartened and kind of damaged, well then…

the scenery didn’t impress so much. Nothing did.

Grace was hoping six months on Lighthouse Cove Island were going to help her overcome that flat, empty feeling inside of herself.

Lift and fill it a little, maybe, so she could start thinking about life as something to be enjoyed rather than endured.

She could start forgiving herself and feeling more positive about the future, whatever that future might look like.

Right now, that seemed like no more than a desperate dream, but one she was determined to hang onto.

Jacob tugged on her sleeve, tilting his face upward, the expression in his wide, dark eyes a silent question as rain ran down his face like tears.

“Soon, buddy,” Grace replied softly, cupping his cold cheek with her hand as she did her best to get her frozen lips to curve upward into a smile.

“Soon.” Or so she hoped. Because if this ferry didn’t come soon, she had no idea what she was going to do.

Find a hotel, she supposed, back down the highway, and wait till morning, and hope that things looked better—or at least drier—then.

Except… she was pretty sure Salt Cove didn’t have a hotel.

It didn’t have much, that she could see—a gas station, now shuttered for the night, a lobster shack that was closed for the season, and a couple of houses of weathered shingle that looked unlived in.

The nearest town with an actual store of any description was a good forty minutes in her rearview mirror.

She’d left her SUV in the empty lot across from the ferry station, before schlepping their two suitcases across the street to this dock, Jacob clutching her leg as he walked so closely to her that she nearly tripped several times.

The only reassurance she was in the right place was the word “Ferry” painted on a weathered wooden sign in faded letters…

and yet still with absolutely no sign of a boat.

Suppressing a soul-deep sigh, Grace shifted where she stood as she peered out into the wintry gloom.

It was nearing the end of March, and back in New York the daffodils were already tipping their bright heads to a sunny spring sky, but it was a different story up here in northern Maine. A very different story.

Which was what she wanted, Grace reminded herself, far from the first time. After the awful publicity and scandal of the last few months of her life in the city, as well as the heartbreak and hopelessness, she’d wanted space. Solitude. Privacy. Quiet. Peace.

Well, she was likely to get all those in abundance living on Lighthouse Cove Island, population all of twelve, she told herself, although peace still seemed likely to be pretty elusive.

Every time she closed her eyes, Grace saw one of the lurid social media reels posted by an AI bot, gloating about her fall from grace, pun intended, ha ha, not.

Or she saw something far worse… Brad’s red-faced fury, spittle flying, his hands…

Briefly Grace closed her eyes and willed the painful memories away.

She didn’t want to think about all that up here.

She couldn’t, or she would, very soon, go completely crazy, second-guessing her choices yet again and overdosing on guilt even more.

Maybe it had been crazy to accept a job as a warden for a nature reserve nobody visited or had even heard about.

The job description had been no more than a pithy sentence about supervising a protected area, no details needed.

No salary, either, just a house she could live in rent-free at basically the end of the earth.

And yet when Grace had seen the ad online—she’d been scrolling through a job search website, looking for positions just about as far from New York as she could get—she’d experienced a surge of something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

Hope. It had been a heady feeling, and one she’d been desperate to hold onto because it had eluded her for so very long.

For pretty much all twelve years of her marriage.

Getting the job so quickly, in just a matter of days, with a friendly email signed only from the “Lawrence Estate,” assuring her that everything would be ready as soon as she arrived, had felt like a sign.

Finally life would start looking up. She wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night with her heart racing and tears she’d shed in her sleep tracking down her cheeks.

She wouldn’t feel that seething pit of anxiety in her stomach so she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think. And Jacob…

Grace glanced down at her son, her heart squeezing painfully with a rush of mother love.

He was small for six, as pale and silent as a ghost as he gazed out at the stormy sea, still no boat in view.

She rested one hand on his head, sliding her fingers through his silky dark hair as she anchored him to her.

On Lighthouse Cove Island, she vowed, Jacob would heal.

He would come back to himself, the shy yet smiling boy who had made her laugh like no one else with his funny, amazingly astute observations, who filled her with wonder at his adult-like interest in the world around him, his incredible intellect and humbling gentleness and glimpses of mischievous humor.

She wanted that boy back. She needed him back, and she would find him, he would find himself, here.

In the rain-filled, twilit gloom, a foghorn sounded, low and mournful, echoing across the restless waves. Grace tensed, then glanced at Jacob and saw the question in his eyes.

“Is that the ferry?” she surmised. “I think so. I hope so, buddy.” She reached for his hand, tugging the suitcases toward her with the other as they both squinted through the rain. It was still coming down in sheets, obscuring the view of almost anything.

Not, Grace knew, that there was much to see out there on the ocean.

Lighthouse Cove Island was off the southern tip of Birch Point Peninsula on Cobscook Bay, only about twenty miles from the Canadian border, and over a hundred miles north of Bar Harbor, which Grace had already thought was pretty far north in Maine.

Until she’d driven it, she’d had no idea just how far north the state went, mile after mile of empty road leading ever onward, the rolling hills and dense evergreen forests punctuated only occasionally by a lonely-looking farmhouse or barn.

Now she knew. She felt it, in the endless sweep of landscape now obscured by the rain but still seeming to reverberate with emptiness.

Tomorrow, when it was hopefully not raining, she’d be able to appreciate the dramatic landscape of salt marshes and sea, evergreen-covered mountains and rolling meadowland, all of it seeming utterly untouched by human hands.

But for now… Grace was simply glad to see a boat. There it was, what looked like a small trawler with a little cabin on its deck and a lantern hanging from a chain on its bow, moving slowly through the waves toward them. Thank God.

Jacob squeezed her hand, and Grace squeezed it back.

“Just in time, right?” she remarked with a shaky laugh.

Goodness, but she was so very tired. Tired of so many things.

It was hard simply to stand here, holding herself up.

“Let’s hope they have room,” she joked, just as a fleeting look of anxiety flashed across her son’s face, and Grace cursed herself for a thoughtless moment of levity.

“They will, Jacob,” she said quickly. “Look, we’re the only people here.

” Not many people, it seemed, needed to go to Lighthouse Cove, probably since there was basically nothing there.

She squeezed his hand again. “That boat is coming just for us.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later the trawler pulled up to the weathered dock, bumping gently against it, and a man emerged from the cockpit. He was short and squat, with a bushy gray beard and eyebrows to match, his solid body swathed in a bright yellow mackintosh and matching waders.

He squinted at her through the rain and then barked, his Maine accent making the words nearly unintelligible, “You must be the new warden of the nature reserve? Grace something, ayuh?”

“Grace Wyatt,” Grace confirmed, shouting to make herself heard over the sound of the trawler’s motor as well as the rain.

She’d gone back to her maiden name as soon as she’d left Brad, although her driver’s license and passport still said Bellingham.

That would take longer to change, but she was no longer that person anymore.

That Stepford wife with panic-filled eyes? Nope, not her. “Thank you.”

“You’re late,” the man remarked as he hopped onto the deck to take her suitcases. “Message said six.”

“I’m sorry… did you come earlier?” Grace felt a flare of anxiety that she was already getting off on the wrong foot with this man, this island, this life. “We made a few stops.”

“Nah, I didn’t come earlier,” the man replied cheerfully. “I’m late, too.”