Never Too Late (Magnolia Shore #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

After about a decade working as a small boutique owner in the idyllic seaside town of Magnolia Shore, Diana Madsen knew, down to her bones, that summer days were guaranteed to be busy.

And that was a good thing, of course. Busy meant customers, which meant the survival of her shop.

She was doing well, but she was still a small business.

She was always happy to have someone come into her store.

But there was busy, and then there was busy, and today had been the latter.

Diana bid the last customer goodbye with a smile and a wave, then turned the lock on the front door and flipped the sign to closed. As soon as she’d done so, she slumped, like a marionette with her strings cut.

She rubbed her cheeks, which hurt from putting on her customer service smile all day.

Diana loved her job, she truly did, but today had felt endless.

She’d barely had time to even eat; instead of getting a proper, sit-down lunch, she’d scarfed her sandwich in stolen bites here and there, feeling grateful that she’d had the foresight to pack a lunch instead of planning to go out and grab something. She never would have eaten, otherwise.

She had survived until closing time, but her feet ached, she was a little bit sweatier than she ever liked to be, and her brain felt like it was about to fall right out of her head, that’s how tired she was.

And then there was the stack of boxes from a new shipment. Staring at her. Taunting her.

“I do not have to unpack you today,” she told the boxes sternly. “You can’t make me. And now I’m talking to inanimate objects,” she added with a sigh.

It was moments like these, moments when she was weary and a little lonely, that those old questions started nagging at her.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you didn’t have to do this alone? Wouldn’t it be so much better if you had someone to come home to at the end of the day? Haven’t you been by yourself for far too long? Don’t you wish you had someone else’s strength to help bolster yours when things got tough?

Diana hated these questions because, of course, the answers were: Yes, yes, yes, and yes. She wanted a partner, a family. She knew it would improve her life.

But wanting something was very different from having it. And after having spent the last ten years focusing on her business, on making sure that her professional dream had the kind of solid foundation that it needed to grow…

Well, she didn’t know how to get her personal dreams moving.

Dating in your late thirties was not at all like dating in your early twenties, which was the last time that Diana had really tried to meet someone, back before her shop had become her life.

Back then, she’d either been in college or just finished with it, which meant she always knew somebody who was having a party, or was grabbing drinks at a bar, or had a friend who would be just perfect for her.

Now though, all those just perfect friends seemed to be married.

Her friend group didn’t have the kind of parties that were overrun with singles; she was more likely to find herself at a kids’ birthday party than anything else, not that she minded.

She loved her sort-of niece and nephew, Izzy Meadows and Benjamin Caldwell, daughter and son of her friends Cadence and June, respectively.

But seeing all the other parents at kid events did cause a pang in Diana’s chest, one that reminded her that her own chances at parenthood were likely slipping through her fingers.

She wasn’t old, of course, but she was getting older, and she hadn’t even met her person yet, let alone gotten to know them or gotten married or planned for kids.

And going to a bar? She was tired. Just the idea made her tired.

Diana plopped herself down in the chair behind her front counter, the chair she’d hardly gotten to use all day, since she’d been running back and forth helping customers.

She drew her long, dark hair back into a quick ponytail.

She liked wearing her long, dark hair down when she worked.

It made her feel professional, competent, and, yes, pretty.

But the day was done and she was too hot to think about being fashionable.

Summers in Massachusetts could get hot, even if she was lucky enough to have a sea breeze.

As she stretched out the kinks in her back, her gaze landed on her phone. Maybe…

She picked it up with a tiny sigh and flipped to the online dating app that her friends had cajoled her into trying earlier in the spring. When she flipped to the messaging tab, however, she realized that this hadn’t been her best move, as far as improving her mood went.

The messaging section was basically a visual representation of how hard it was to find someone she liked enough to date. There were the messages that hadn’t gone anywhere, the conversations that had fizzled out after a few exchanges.

But worst, in Diana’s opinion, were the reminders of the conversations that had gone well, or at least well enough to turn into dates.

Never second dates, though.

There had been the man who had thought that Diana’s career was basically a hobby, there to tide her over until she got married. And then there had been the other guy who thought that. And the other guy…

She was starting to suspect the reason that those guys were still single was because they wouldn’t know the meaning of the word supportive if bit them in the behind.

There were also a few people with whom she just hadn’t jived.

The guy, for example, who had been so passionate about fly fishing.

She’d admired his passion, to be sure. But he had been looking for a partner who wanted to go camping with him while he caught some prize trout. And Diana… that wasn’t her.

“Okay,” she breathed. Time to try to shake off her funk. Time to try again. “Let’s see what we have here.”

Except the new prospects, the matches that had just arisen in the seemingly endless stream, were disappointing too.

She tossed the phone away. It was hard to tell if she was being unfair or if trusting her gut was the right move. It was hard to tell what her gut was signaling at all, through the impersonal remove of her phone.

She was not a fan of online dating, as it turned out. But that was apparently how everyone did things these days.

“These days,” she muttered to herself. “I sound ancient.”

Her phone’s soft landing had been courtesy of the enormous stack of financial documents that Diana really needed to sort through.

This was, in theory at least, the responsibility of her bookkeeper, but Sarah, although a very nice person was not precisely a go-getter.

Oh, she would do things if Diana asked her to do them, in very specific terms, but that meant that Diana had to always be on top of things, had to always know what needed doing.

And in the chaos of the tourist season, that was a big ask.

She probably needed to start looking for a new bookkeeper, but that was just one more thing on her list. A list that felt like it never, ever ended.

“Tomorrow,” she said with a huff, standing up and snagging her phone. “I will deal with it all tomorrow.”

All she wanted to do now was go home, collapse on her couch with some ice cream, watch a girly movie, and go to bed early.

After all, she thought with a touch of bitterness, wasn’t that what old maids did?

“Unpacking is poop,” Eloise declared.

Anthony Whitaker sighed. “El. Please don’t talk about bathroom stuff while we’re eating.”

Eloise looked down at her grilled cheese and tomato soup, clearly thinking hard about this.

Anthony couldn’t believe his daughter had chosen to eat hot soup after the blistering day they’d just made it through, but, if he’d learned anything about ten-year-olds, it was that they were impervious to things like weather when it came to ordering their favorite dinner at a diner.

Anthony, meanwhile, had gone with a club sandwich with a side salad, because he wouldn’t even consider eating something that was warmer than room temperature. The waiter had been over to refill his ice water twice already.

Then again, Anthony had done most of the heavy lifting. Eloise was an exuberant helper, but she did get easily distracted.

“Okay,” Eloise said after contemplatively chewing her bite of sandwich dipped in soup.

“Unpacking is… you know that yucky puddle behind our old house? It’s like the yucky puddle got put in a yucky microwave and got all hot and stinky and there is dirt in it, but not nice dirt.

Gross dirt. With little bugs in it, and—”

“El,” Anthony said. “As much as I appreciate your creative mind, that is also a very gross image for when we’re eating.”

She pouted. “So I can’t say bathroom words and I can’t say gross words. Does that mean I can say bad words?”

“No.”

She sighed theatrically at the injustice of this. “Okay, fine. Unpacking is very, very, very, very, very, very boring.”

“Nailed it,” he told her with a chuckle.

For his part, Anthony would have preferred it if the unpacking was a little more boring.

Instead, it was fraught. He and Eloise had come to Magnolia Shore for a much-needed fresh start.

They’d been muddling along in Cleveland these past few years, after Anthony’s wife and Eloise’s mother had died unexpectedly.

Shannon had slipped when trying to juggle groceries and keys on the icy front porch steps.

It should have been a minor injury, the doctors had told him later, but apparently Shannon had already had a latent aneurysm, one that had perhaps been there for years. The fall had caused it to rupture.

It had been a totally random occurrence. Impossible to predict.

But the impact on Anthony’s family had been immeasurable.

Anthony hadn’t made the decision to relocate lightly.

He hadn’t wanted to avoid his grief, but as the years went on, he’d begun to worry that seeing Shannon around every corner, constantly encountering memories of her had been stopping him from envisioning his next chapter.

And, more to the point, he’d worried that his grief had been affecting his daughter.

He never wanted Eloise to forget Shannon. Of course, he never, ever wanted that.

But he also didn’t want losing her mother to be Eloise’s whole life.

And this town… it had been so welcoming. Anthony was a city guy, born and bred. True, Cleveland wasn’t the biggest city in the world, and it was the Midwest, which meant that being nice was basically a sport, and everyone was a competitor.

But small towns took that to a whole new level, apparently.

He’d taken Eloise into a store called Nautical Crafts to get her a much-needed lamp for her new room, as he’d realized that the ceiling lights didn’t cast as much illumination as she needed, especially since she was a total bookworm.

The owner of the store had lit up when Eloise, who had never met a stranger she didn’t want to turn into a friend, had explained that they were newly arrived.

She’d given Eloise a free paint set as a welcoming gift.

And that wasn’t all. The owner of the office space that Anthony was leasing for his accounting business had brought him over a corn and tomato casserole, courtesy of his wife. The waitress had slipped Eloise an on-the-house strawberry milkshake, too.

Everyone was being so nice.

And yet Anthony couldn’t avoid the nagging question at the back of his mind. What if I made a mistake?

“Hi Miss Amy,” Eloise said warmly as the server approached again.

She and the older woman had hit it off, since Anthony and Eloise had been eating more than their fair share of meals at the diner since they’d arrived in town a few days ago.

The food at Main Street Diner was good, but Anthony was looking forward to a real home cooked meal again.

He’d narrowed down the “where are my pots and pans” question to about four more boxes, which he planned to tackle the following day…

hopefully with minimal self-censure for his inadequate labelling during the packing-up stage.

“Hi there, Miss Eloise,” the server said. “How does tonight’s tomato soup stack up?”

Eloise took a spoonful of soup, assessing it first visually and then taking a thoughtful taste.

She’d been watching a lot of cooking competition shows recently; she liked the ones where kids were the cooks.

Anthony planned to bring her into the kitchen with him once he finally found those pots and pans.

“Good,” she said definitively. “Super tasty. Very tomato-y.” She gave Amy a very serious look. “Please convey my compliments to the chef.”

It was extremely impressive, in Anthony’s opinion, that the woman managed not to laugh.

“I absolutely will,” she promised.

Eloise broke into a grin. “Thanks!” She dunked her sandwich in her soup and took a bite, humming with happiness.

“Thanks,” Anthony echoed. “We can grab the check whenever you’re ready too, but we’re in no rush.”

“Sure thing,” the waitress confirmed with a smile. She left to tend to another table, where the customers also appeared to know her well.

Anthony took another bite of his sandwich. It all seemed good. But the fear was still there. Maybe it always would be.

He just wanted to do what was best for Eloise. He’d made a big change in pursuit of this goal.

Now all he could do was hope that it was the right change for his daughter… and for himself.