2. Andie
It’s been nearly a decade since I was last in Hope Springs, Maine. Truthfully, I’d never meant to stay away from my gran this long. Even though coming back to this place felt like an unattainable task.
The house I grew up in still looks the same. A simple white cottage with bright green shutters and a door the color of the ocean. Sea glass wind chimes my gran made hang on nearly every eve of the wraparound porch. Fresh paint adorns the handrails, and I know that it was Elijah who painted them.
Elijah.My gran told me he was attractive, that he had kind eyes that reminded her of my grandfather. But now that I’ve met him, I can admit she undersold the looks department. Even if she did oversell his personality. He’s strong, built like a fighter, sharp jaw coated with stubble, hazel eyes that shine even in the overcast afternoon.
Every time we’d spoken, and we talked quite a lot, my gran spent more time talking about him than she had about what was going on in her life. Maybe, if she’d focused on herself rather than him, she would have remembered to tell me about the heart problems she’d been having. I could have gotten her to New York, found her good doctors, gotten her on some sort of medication.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, urging the tears to disappear. I do not cry. It’s my rule. Tears do nothing but make things worse.
“Keep it together, Andrea,” my mother would have sneered. “Tears are for the weak, girl. Are you weak?”
No. I’m not.
“Get it together, Andie,” I whisper to myself as I start up the cobblestone walkway, my suitcase in hand. I have one month to get everything in order here before I need to go home and prep for the spring show. One month, and I’ll leave this town behind and never look back.
After all, there’s nothing left for me here anymore. Just bad memories and heartache.
I push open the door and am hit with the delicate floral aroma of freshly cut flowers. It’s like a knife to the gut when I move into the living room and see two vases of wildflowers. Who put them there? Given that they look fresh, it wasn’t Gran who chose them. It wasn’t her who carefully picked every bloom from her garden.
A soft meow fills my ears, and I turn as the largest black and white cat I’ve ever seen steps out of her bedroom and pads down the hall. After carefully setting my bag on the floor, I lean toward him and hold my hand out.
“Hey. You must be Aggie,” I say as the cat touches its cool nose to my fingers then arches up under my hand. “Gran told me all about you.” Hesitantly, I pick the cat up. He rubs against me some more, and I smile.
I’ve never been much of an animal person, but my gran always had a cat. And now, I suppose, I do too.
“I hope you’ll be okay with New York,” I say as I carry him into the living room and set him on the cat tower. Large picture windows make up the back wall of the house, and outside, Gran’s garden is in full bloom. Flowers, rows of lettuce, green beans, and what looks like carrots sticking up from wooden garden beds that have been completely re-done since the last time I saw them.
Elijah again, no doubt.
He apparently made it his personal mission over the last three years to make sure my gran had everything she needed. While the town would pitch in here and there when they could, he’d gone through and polished off her entire to-do list in a matter of months, then meticulously maintained the yard, bushes, and even helped her upgrade a few things throughout the house.
The master bathroom remodeled.
The carpet replaced.
When she’d first told me about him, I’d thought it was sweet. Kind gestures from a kind man. Until she’d told me she’d given him my grandfather’s truck. That was the first time I’d realized that there was probably more to his intentions than simply helping an elderly woman.
A wave of anger rushes through me at the image of him sitting in the front seat. Even if he had looked good behind the wheel.
The moment she told me she’d deeded it to him, I’d realized just what kind of man he was. I’ve seen plenty of them during my time in New York. Elijah Breeth is the type of man who uses older women, offering them kindness and a shoulder until he drains them of everything they have.
What else did he take from her?
With that in mind, and knowing he has a key, I head straight for her bedroom. Seeing her bed carefully made, her slippers waiting for her feet the moment they touch the floor, is a stab to the heart, but I have a reason for being here, so I focus.
Turning, I reach for the free-standing jewelry cabinet my grandfather made for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. It was the last one they’d shared before the accident, and my gran treasured it. I open it, mentally prepared to see it completely cleaned out.
But when I see the glittering diamonds of her wedding ring sitting beside diamond stud earrings, pearls, and other pieces of expensive jewelry, I breathe a sigh of relief. Had he not taken these because they’d be so obvious? Because I would have noticed right away?
Someone knocks on the door, so I shut the cabinet and turn toward the living room, pausing by a mirror to make sure I look relatively put together. My dark hair could use some time with a straightener, thanks to the humidity, but other than that I look relatively put together.
So I reach for the door and pull it open.
Lilly, one of my oldest friends. stands on the other side, still wearing the black dress she’d been in for the funeral. Her hair, nearly the same color as her outfit, is up in a tight bun, and her bright blue eyes are rimmed with red from tears shed for a woman who was practically a second grandmother to her.
“Hey,” I greet, plastering a smile on my face. “Come in.”
“Thanks.” She smiles tightly and steps into the house. “How are you doing?” Lilly asks as she sets her purse on the floral-printed couch.
“I’m okay. It’s just weird being back here.”
“I can imagine.” She looks around the room. “It’s been a long time.”
Nine years, seven months, and three days.But who’s counting? “It has.”
“I remember being so shocked that the town still looked exactly the same as I’d left it.” Like me, Lilly had bailed on Hope Springs the second she could. Of course, her reasons had been quite different than mine. While I was following a man who I had no business following, she was running from one. Her high school sweetheart and fiancé, Alex, had joined the military. Without any warning, he’d broken things off and left town.
We’d caught up a few times when she’d been in New York or I’d been traveling for work, but three years ago, Gran told me that she’d returned and gotten back together with her Alex, who is now the owner of our small town’s diner.
They got married a few years ago and had a daughter.
Sarah, I think, is her name.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I ask as Lilly takes a seat on my gran’s couch.
“No, I’m okay.” Her gaze drifts to the garden, and I wonder if she’s thinking of all the times we’d played tea party when we’d been kids. Sitting out amidst the floral blooms, speaking in fake accents, all while Gran delivered us tiny peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into various shapes. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“It seems surreal,” I agree.
Lilly smiles sadly, tears in her eyes, and I fight to control my own.
I do not cry, I remind myself.
“Do you remember when I’d tried to pierce my nose and it—of course—went horribly wrong?” She laughs, reaching up to touch the side she’d shoved a needle through when we’d been sixteen. She’d been furious with her mother for something—I don’t even recall what now—and she’d jammed that needle through her nose, then came running here before her mother or stepdad had been able to see it.
“Gran gave you a washcloth and told you to make better life choices.” I snort, recalling the way she’d tried to hide her own laughter.
“She did.” Lilly shakes her head, a smile still on her face. “And Felix hadn’t even been mad,” she recalls. “He’d told my mother—who had been furious—that sometimes we have to do dumb stuff in order to avoid doing dumber stuff when we get older.”
“That’s absolutely Felix,” I muse. Lilly and her mom had come to Hope Springs after her mother met and fell in love with Felix during the town’s children’s toy drive. Held every Christmas, a group of volunteers takes presents to the shelters in Boston. She and her mother had been living in one of those shelters, and according to Lilly, it had been love at first sight for the hardware store owner and her mom.
Love.
I’d once believed in such things. Honestly, it was their love story that put stars in my eyes in the first place.
That and the romance novels I’d snuck out of Gran’s home library as a teen.
Now I know better.
“How are things? How’s your daughter?” I ask, trying my best to change the subject.
“Sarah is good. Getting big. She just turned two.” She shakes her head. “They say terrible twos will start any day now, but I’m not seeing it yet.”
I smile. “Then you’re lucky. My assistant a few years back had a toddler. He was a menace.”
Lilly scrunches her nose. “Yikes.”
I shrug. “I thought he was cute, but I didn’t have to deal with the meltdowns.” She’d quit shortly after she’d found out she was pregnant with number two. As far as I know, she’s now on four, and they’re happily living in New Jersey. Occasionally, I still beg her to come back in some capacity since everyone I’ve hired since hasn’t lasted more than two months.
Except this last girl. Mia has potential, thankfully.
“How about you? Any prospects where you’re at?”
It takes me a minute to realize she’s talking about men. “Hardly.” I snort. “I have zero interest in relationships.”
Her expression turns serious. “Have you heard from him since?—”
“You mean since he took off with one of his students and left me a sticky note on the refrigerator of the four-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment he saddled me with? No.” Honestly, some would say it was bound to happen, given the history between the two of us. But I hadn’t seen it coming. I’d been young and na?ve.
“Yikes.” She visibly winces. “I still can’t believe—” She stops talking, and I know what she would have said.
Because I am the girl who ran off with her history teacher. An eighteen-year-old who’d left everything she’d ever known behind to follow the divorced thirty-seven-year-old she’d been too stupid to realize had been grooming her from the moment they met.
The entire town knew it even if they didn’t talk about it. While secrets spread like wildfire in most small towns, gossip is not tolerated in Hope Springs. If it’s good, they’ll share. If it’s bad, it gets buried.
And a troubled teen chasing her high school history teacher is pretty bad.
He’d left me a year later. Saddled me with an apartment I couldn’t afford and a credit card I’d been unable to pay down. My credit took a hit, and I’d been homeless for the better part of a year, sleeping on the couches of my college friends and an occasional park bench. Doing whatever I had to in order to survive. Gran never knew that though.
When I told her I was leaving, she’d voiced her concerns, her disgust, then let me make my own choice. If I’d told her how much trouble I’d been in, she would have sent me more money. But I hadn’t had the heart to tell her I’d blown every penny of her savings not wrapped up in my tuition on the apartment and a car for George.
There are so many things I wish I could take back. It’s too bad you can’t bury your past in a pine box, six feet down.
I clear my throat. “How is Alex?”
“Great,” she says, her cheeks turning pink. “He’s playing softball this season with the guys from Knight Security. Pastor Redding is on the team too.”
“Knight Security?”
She cocks her head to the side. “I was sure your gran would have told you about Elijah. He was with her all the time.”
“She told me about him,” I say. “Just not Knight Security.”
“He works there. They’re a private firm, run out of the old lighthouse. Well, they were above the bakery before it got blown up.”
“I’m sorry, what? The bakery got blown up?”
Lilly throws her head back and laughs. “We have so much to catch up on.”
“Apparently.” Though I desperately want to know what would have led to Pastor Redding’s wife’s bakery being blown up, there’s one person on my mind. As he has been since I saw him in that parking lot. “Tell me about Elijah.”
“He’s nice. Helpful. Keeps to himself most of the time, aside from when he was with your gran.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Since I got back into town. They’d just opened the firm, and he came into the diner with Lance Knight and Michael Anderson.”
“Anderson? Wasn’t he with?—”
“Reyna Acker,” she finishes.
“Gotcha. He’s a few years older than us.”
She nods.
“I don’t know a Lance though.”
“Lance moved his security company here. Both he and Elijah served with Michael.”
“He’s military.” Which makes complete sense now that I’ve seen the man. He looks every bit a soldier.
“Your gran didn’t tell you that? I’m surprised. They were close.”
“She didn’t mention that he’d served. She told me that he helped her. That he fixed things around the house and sat with her on Sundays. She’d tell me about things he said, conversations they had, but that was it.”
“And you didn’t ask the backstory of the man hanging with your gran?” She doesn’t mean it as a jab, and I don’t take it as one. Lilly has always been blunt. To the point, no sugar coating. Which is something I really appreciate about her.
“I was busy.” But it’s a weak excuse, and we both know it. “Our phone calls were brief. Often, but brief.” And how much am I regretting that now that she’s gone?
“Gotcha. Well, he was an Army Ranger, and while I don’t know the details, I do know that all three were involved in some incident that nearly got them killed when they’d been overseas. He’s single though. As far as I know.” She wiggles her eyebrows.
“Hard pass,” I reply. “The two minutes I spent with him in the parking lot of the church were long enough.”
“Not a good impression, huh?”
“You could say that.” I push to my feet and cross into the kitchen. In pure Gran fashion, the large glass jar on her counter is full of cookies. Reaching in, I pull one out. “I need to get started going through her things. The will reading is tomorrow, and I only have a month to get this place cleaned out and sold.”
“You’re not staying?” Lilly stands.
“No. My life is in New York,” I reply.
“You’re not even going to keep the house?” When I don’t respond, she holds up both hands. “Sorry, not my business.”
“No problem. Thanks for coming by.”
“Of course.” Lilly grabs her purse and stops just short of opening the front door. “Come by the diner, okay? We’ll make you some dinner. Best coffee around.”
I smile. “Will do.”