Chapter 19 Willa #2
“I’d much rather stay right here.” Willa sighed.
“I know,” Ace replied, pressing a quick kiss to her lips. “But we have time now. We have all the time we need.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. “Let’s go find your group.”
The rest of the concert went by in a blur as Willa stood closely beside Ace. Their hands met in secret, and their eyes collided as they danced to the beats. Harvey’s phone rang during the final song of the evening.
Willa watched him look at the screen, frown, as if the name on it was unexpected, and step away from the group to take the call. She got a slight chill of déjà vu, which was confirmed when Harvey came back and looked at Ace, then the rest of the group.
“That was Sienna,” Harvey told them, his mouth pulling into a reluctant smile. “Apparently, she and her friends need a lift back to Sandpiper Shores. Something about a cab situation.” His eyes moved to Ace. “She seemed to think I might help.”
“I gave her money for a cab,” Ace replied, entirely without remorse as four pairs of eyes pinned him accusingly.
“If you want to take them home, I can drive Willa, Margo, and Rad,” Ace offered Harvey. “That way nobody’s stranded.”
Harvey looked at Margo.
Margo looked back at him with the patient expression of someone about to say something they’d been waiting to say for some time.
“You can give them a lift on one condition,” Margo told Harvey, like she was his big sister giving him advice. “You stop being Sienna’s convenient option for things like this and you promise me that this is the last time you’ll jump to her rescue.”
Harvey opened his mouth.
“Penny,” Margo added simply, “will not be happy to know about this. And you don’t want to mess up a good thing with her. She’s a wonderful person who is madly in love with you and treats you like the nice guy you are.”
Harvey closed his mouth. He pulled a face that communicated several things simultaneously, most of them involving the understanding that Margo was entirely right and that he’d probably known that for a while.
“I promised Penny I’d stop enabling Sienna anyway,” Harvey admitted, smiling, then leaning over to give Margo a hug and kiss on the cheek. “I’ll even call Penny now and let her know I’m driving Sienna back.” He looked at Ace.
“Why don’t the three of you grab your things from my car while I phone Penny, and then I’ll come find you before I go.” Harvey fished his car keys from his jacket pocket and handed them to Margo.
They made their way out of the venue and across the parking lot. The night air was considerably cooler now, carrying the smell of rain that had finally decided to follow through on its earlier promise. Harvey’s car was near the far end of the lot. Margo unlocked it and pulled the back door open.
Willa reached for her jacket from the back seat while Rad leaned across from the other side to retrieve his.
His jacket caught on the seat edge as he pulled it free. Something fluttered out of the pocket and landed on the blacktop of the parking lot, partly unfolding as it fell.
Willa bent to pick it up before Rad had registered that it was gone.
She straightened with the folded paper in her hand and glanced at it with the automatic, incurious attention of someone picking up something that didn’t belong to them with the intention to hand it straight back.
Then the dates caught her eye.
Willa looked at them.
Her brow pulled together.
She recognized two of the dates immediately, the way you recognize dates that were written into you rather than ones you remember. Dates that your body knew before your mind had finished reading them.
Willa turned the paper slightly in the parking lot light and read what Rad had written beside them.
Seven months later.
Eighteen months later.
Willa looked up at Rad.
Rad had turned around from the other side of the car, seen the paper in her hand, and gone very still.
“Willa,” he said, walking forward, with his hand outstretched to grab the paper in her hand.
“Why do you have this?” Willa asked. Her voice was entirely level, which surprised her, given what was happening in her chest.
“I can explain,” Rad said. He reached out to take the page. “Give it to me, and I’ll explain everything on the way home.”
Willa looked at the paper. Then she looked at Rad.
She pulled it back and held it against her side.
“No,” she said, shaking her head as shock coursed through her. “You’ll explain it now.”
“Not here,” Rad said, his voice dropping, his eyes moving to where Ace was standing a few feet away, watching the exchange with narrowed eyes.
Margo had stopped beside Rad and looked on with curiosity.
“On the way home, I promise I’ll explain.
” He took a step closer. “Please, just give me the page.”
“I don’t think so,” Willa said, folding it. “I’ll keep it, and you will explain what this is about on the drive home.”
Willa turned and walked to Ace’s car without looking back, the paper in her hand. Something cold and certain was settling over her that had nothing to do with the night air and everything to do with what she’d just read.
June
The deck at Willa’s house looked different in the evening.
June had always thought so, from the first summer she’d spent here watching the light change over the water as the day moved through its final hours, the sky over the Gulf at this time of year going through more colors than seemed strictly necessary for a sunset, as if it were making a point.
Tonight it looked especially good.
The dinner plates were stacked inside, the wine was poured, and Holt was beside her on the porch swing with his arm around her shoulders.
“I cannot tell you,” Holt said, looking at the water, “how glad I am that I agreed to come to Sandpiper Shores this summer to recover.”
June smiled. “You didn’t do much recovering,” she pointed out, “for someone who was supposed to be on medical leave.”
“Look who’s talking,” Holt replied, with a soft laugh. “You were recovering from a car crash.”
“I hate sitting still,” June admitted. “I was climbing the walls within the first week of getting out of hospital. To be honest, when Carmen was at work, I spring-cleaned the heck out of my house.” She shook her head.
“Then, when Willa demanded I come here to recover, I thought at least I’d have my grandchildren to keep me busy.
” She sighed. “Turns out teenagers don’t need a parent around them twenty-four seven. ”
“Don’t I know that only too well?” Holt agreed with her. “I thought I’d take Tyler fishing, for hikes, like we did when he was younger.” He sighed and shook his head in resignation. “Turns out now he has better things to do than hang out with his grandfather.”
June laughed. She leaned into Holt’s warmth, looked at the water, and felt like she’d just come home after being in isolation for years.
She glanced at Holt and liked the familiarity of them being together again.
It was home. June acknowledged that there were still unresolved issues that needed to be cleared up.
Like the investigation, and Victoria still being at large.
Guilt suddenly ripped through her, mingled with a bit of fear, as she was reminded of a conversation she’d been avoiding having with Willa for longer than she could reasonably justify.
She glanced at Holt, knowing there was one they still needed to have as well.
A memory of her sister and a breakfast conversation they’d had that morning flashed through her mind.
Carmen had advised her that it was time for the truth before it erupted on its own, like an emotional volcano.
You need to tell her, June. You need to tell both of them.
The longer you leave it, the worse it gets. Carmen’s voice echoed in her head.
June knew Carmen was right. She’d known it for thirty-eight years. The knowing hadn’t made the doing any easier.
She’d been waiting for the right moment, which was its own particular kind of dishonesty, because the right moment for something like this didn’t exist and never had.
“June,” Holt said softly.
She turned toward him, dragging her mind away from her guilty thoughts and dark secret.
Holt’s eyes were warm in the evening light and entirely focused on her in the way they’d been focused on her since the night of the storm.
The night when everything between them had stopped being managed and had simply become what it was.
The space between them closed. His head dipped, and his lips were almost on hers when the front door slammed open with a force that indicated blinding rage.
June and Holt pulled apart and were on their feet before the footsteps reached the deck.
Willa barreled through the glass doors like a furious tornado, her eyes blazing and spitting fire.
Rad was a step behind her as he tried to calm her down and manage whatever situation had just transpired that had set her daughter into such a blind rage. Then June’s eyes dropped to Willa’s hand.
She was gripping a piece of paper so tight her knuckles were white.
June’s heart dropped. Even upside down and in Willa’s shaking hand, she could see enough of what was written on that paper to know exactly what it was.
June’s throat went dry as her sister’s warning from that morning came back to haunt her, and she knew Karma had just slapped her in the face. The moment of truth had arrived without her permission and at least thirty-eight years later than it should have.
“What on earth is going on?” Holt asked, looking between Willa and Rad.
“Is it true?” Willa’s voice came out low and shaking, her eyes fixed on June with an intensity that June had to work not to look away from. The paper trembled in her daughter’s hand. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” Holt asked, his brow furrowing as his eyes moved to the paper.
June said nothing, her voice died in her throat as her mind went blank, and her heart rate accelerated.
Willa turned to Holt, and the fury in her eyes had a specific, targeted quality now.
“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Willa said, her voice climbing. “You admitted to Rad that you knew. That you walked away anyway.”
“I knew what? Willa, I don’t understand what you’re—” Holt’s expression shifted into genuine confusion.
“Stop it!” Willa seethed at him. “Just stop it.” Her grip tightened as she held up the paper.
“What is that?” Holt said, reaching across and taking the paper from Willa’s hand before she could pull it back.
Holt looked at it. June watched his face as he read what was written on it. The dates in their careful sequence, the intervals noted beside them in shorthand that told the story without spelling it out.
She watched Holt’s face change as he put the pieces together in what felt like slow motion.
His confusion gave way to something that moved across his expression with the force of a reckoning he hadn’t been prepared for. Holt’s eyes kept going over the dates, then to June, then back to the dates.
“Stop pretending,” Willa said to Holt, her voice cracking at the edges. “You said you walked away. You admitted to your son that my mother would’ve been Rad’s mother and he would’ve had me as a sister.” Her jaw was tight. “You knew, and you just left.”
“Willa,” Rad said quietly, stepping up beside her. He put an arm around her in an effort to comfort and soothe. “Calm down, let’s talk this out…”
“No,” Willa hissed at Rad, pulling away from him.
She turned back to June and Holt. The expression of pain and betrayal that shone in Willa’s eyes ripped right through June’s heart.
“The time for talking was thirty-eight years ago.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she pulled herself together with visible effort.
“All I want to know right now is…” Her eyes met and held June’s “Is it true, Mother?”
“June.” Holt’s voice was quiet and entirely stripped of everything except the question in it.
“What is this?” He glanced at Willa and then Rad, then back to June, holding up the paper.
“Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.
” His voice was hoarse with pain and betrayal, echoing the look in her daughter’s eyes.
June looked at him. She looked at Willa.
She thought about Carmen. She thought about the thirty-eight years of the right moment that never came.
She thought about the night Holt had left for Virginia and two days later when she’d tried to reach out.
While she knew it still was no excuse for the secret she’d kept.
June let herself hold onto that one moment of Holt’s betrayal as it helped her gather her strength. Like it had all those years ago.
She took a breath.
“Yes,” June said. Her voice was steady as she was able to keep it.
“It’s true.” She looked at her daughter, then at Holt, who was now standing beside Willa.
She was suddenly hit by the full, irreversible weight of what she was saying.
A strange numbness settled over her. “Willa, Holt is your father. He’s your biological father.
” She swallowed, fighting back the tears she knew she had no right to shed.
“And I should have told you both a very long time ago.”
A note from Amy Rafferty:
And so the truth comes out… Several eagle-eyed readers picked up on this already, but now that it’s out in the open, things will never be the same.
There’s one book left. One final journey. And one couple who have been through it all. Join me for the sweeping conclusion of June and Holt’s story in book 6, Forever Flame.
Thank you for joining me on this crazy ride. I love you all.
xoxo Amy
Yes, I want to read Book 6 — Secrets of Sandpiper Shores: Forever Flame!