The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn

PROLOGUE Graduation Day

I t was the kind of almost-summer Saturday unique to coastal Northern California. The sun had risen through a wispy swirl of salt-tinged fog and then proceeded to burn those wisps away, leaving an expanse of unbroken azure so deep and intense one could believe in a blue-eyed god. The air was a cool caress, but the breeze brought the first kiss of summer and sent wind-bent Monterey cypress trees whispering and haggard blue oaks cackling.

Leonora Braddock looked up into the vast blue eye above her and filled her lungs full, like it was the last breath she’d ever take.

“LENNIE! GET OVER HERE!”

Letting out that breath in a rush, Leonora looked over her shoulder in the direction of Erin’s bellow. The golden tassel hanging from her maroon mortarboard swung with her movement, and she ended up with a mouthful of silky strands.

“Blech! Pthht! JUST A SEC!!”

Erin and Jessie, her best friends since they were little, stood by the giant blue oak on the school grounds with Erin’s dad (known by Leonora and Jessie as Daddy Ned) and Jessie’s mom (known by Leonora and Erin and Mrs. Geller). Clearly there was a Fates photo shoot awaiting her.

Maroon-robed students were scattered across the school grounds, almost all of them surrounded by clusters of family in their Sunday best or Casual-Friday good-enough, having photo shoots of their own. Much to the consternation of Mr. Kronsky, the principal, who’d repeatedly asked for applause to be held, almost every one of those family clusters had hooted and hollered when their graduate crossed the stage.

Leonora was here on her own, but her walk had been hooted and hollered by Daddy Ned and Mrs. Geller.

She turned back and grinned at Mrs. Flanagan, her English teacher for both tenth and twelfth grades. “I guess I gotta go. Thank you again, Mrs. Flan. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

Mrs. Flanagan smiled and reached out a hand to give Leonora’s arm an affectionate squeeze. “You would have been brilliant with any teacher, Leonora. You can’t help but be brilliant.”

“Tell that to Mr. Prudhomme,” Leonora said with a rueful smirk. “Trig almost did me in.”

Mrs. Flanagan waved that off. “Everyone has a weakness somewhere. As long as you don’t decide to build rocket ships, I think you’ll be fine without trigonometry.” She sighed. “I hope you do decide to go to college someday.”

The emotional storm cloud looming on the horizon of this day nudged a bit closer, and Lenora’s smile faltered. Since tenth grade, Mrs. Flanagan had lobbied for her to go to college—almost three years of sneakily slipped brochures, emailed links to scholarship and grant programs, FAFSA timelines, names of contacts at Humboldt State, and every other tactic Flan could conjure.

Though Leonora sincerely appreciated her teacher’s care and her dogged attempts to help, she had rebuffed them all. She had no money for college and no way of getting financial aid because every one of those applications had required the financial information of her ‘parent or guardian.’ Bureaucratically speaking, she had a mother, and since they lived together she supposed bureaucrats also considered her mother a ‘guardian,’ but those labels barely applied to real life. Leonora hadn’t bothered to bring the topic up. The woman who’d stopped paying for even so much as her toothpaste when she turned thirteen could hardly have been expected to lift the smallest finger to help her go to college. She expected Leonora to work for room and board for her whole life, like Cinderella’s white-trash cousin, but no handsome prince with a foot fetish in sight.

Anyway, Leonora had a plan in place already.

“There’s no money for college,” she told her favorite teacher for the millionth time.

“I know. But someday there might be, and when the chance is there, I hope you jump at it.”

“I will,” she promised, and meant it. She wanted college. She wanted to be a teacher like Mrs. Flanagan, whom students could trust, to whom they could go for understanding and support. The kind of teacher who went out of her way to help an unhappy, troubled kid find a ray of light to navigate life by. If she ever had a way to make it happen, she would.

“Bye, Mrs. Flan. Again, thank you for everything.” Leonora held out her arms, and Mrs. Flanagan welcomed the hug.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Mrs. Flanagan said as they stepped apart. “Come see me all the time.”

“I will,” Leonora said again—and that time it was a bald-faced lie.

In a few hours, Leonora would walk away from Bluster, California, and she meant never to step foot in her hometown again. Ever in her life.

IT WAS A FAMILIAR AND oft-mentioned frustration among her friends that if Leonora wasn’t home by ten o’clock, any night of the week, her mother deadbolted the doors, and if she slept away without prior permission—rarely granted—the consequences would be a great deal more severe. So nobody thought it was strange when Leonora broke away early from the graduation party on the beach.

Jessie took a party break to drive her home, but Erin was wrapped up with her boyfriend, Billy, and couldn’t be bothered. Leonora tried to make an issue of it at first, but it quickly became clear that pushing any harder would turn it into An Issue. Erin had a short fuse, she went from irritated to taking on all comers in about two moves, and Leonora didn’t want to end this night with a fight.

Erin thought Leonora was making a big deal out of a small thing. She’d even said, “Chill, Lennie! I’ll see you tomorrow, geez!”

Leonora wanted to tell Erin that they wouldn’t be seeing each other tomorrow, or ever again. It broke her heart to walk away from her knowing what she knew, knowing how furious Erin would be tomorrow, how betrayed and hurt. For months now she’d had this secret, and every day that passed had shoved her a little bit farther from her friends, a distance only she could sense because only she knew. Every day she’d wanted to tell them, but she couldn’t.

The only way to get clear of her mother and know she couldn’t be dragged back to her hellish clutches was if no one— no one —had any sliver of information about where she’d gone. She couldn’t tell anyone now, and she could never reach out in the future.

She sat in Jessie’s wonderful, ridiculous old car and tried to maintain the ruse, singing and seat-dancing along with her friend to the music blaring from her stereo. The song was “This Is the Day,” by The The, which was so on point it pierced her heart, but she kept bouncing and singing with her friend as if the only unusual thing about this day was graduation.

At the sign for the Sea-Mist Cottage Inn, the Braddock family business, Jessie pulled onto the shoulder of Highway 101 and parked. She didn’t go up the lane, onto the property, because Leonora’s mother had made it extremely clear that Leonora’s friends were not welcome there.

Jessie put the car in park but didn’t cut the engine. She thought she was simply dropping her friend off, like she’d done hundreds of times before.

“Do you think you can get out tomorrow? Mom wants to do a brunch for us.”

Finding she couldn’t just breezily say I’ll sure try! and get out of the car like it was any other night, Leonora turned the stereo down. “I really love you and Erin. You’ve always been more like sisters to me than just friends.”

Jessie’s brows drew together, and she laughed a little. “Well, sure. I feel the same way about you guys. And Erin does, too. We say it often enough. We’re the Three Fates!”

“I know. I just ... I don’t know. I guess because ... graduation and everything ... I just needed to say it now.”

“Oh, get in here, you dork.” Jessie lunged across the bench seat of her classic Challenger and snatched Leonora into a hug.

Leonora held on like it was the last hug she’d ever get from her dear friend.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Jessie smacked a loud kiss to her cheek and pushed back. “Everybody’s so sappy today! Like the whole world’s about to change just because we finished high school. But big whoop! I promise, tomorrow is gonna be pretty much like every Saturday we ever had—with the addition of brunch. You need mimosas and crepes, so try to break out of the gulag tomorrow, okay?”

There was nothing Leonora could do but keep the lie going. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She got out of the car and watched Jessie make a U-turn and head back to the party. She waved, and Jessie stuck her hand out the window and waved carelessly back.

Now alone, Leonora gave herself permission for a silent cry as she trudged up the lane, along the edge of the gravel parking lot, past the cabin that had until now had been her only home, and around to the woods in back. Two of the guest cabins were occupied and the lights were on, so she stayed in the shadows and skulked carefully to the equipment shed. She eased into its dark recesses and grabbed the backpack she’d hidden there a few days earlier.

A second pair of jeans. A pair of denim cutoffs. Six pairs of underpants and six pairs of socks. Three bras. Four t-shirts. Two flannel shirts. Toiletries. A packet of hair ties. Her journal and a box of off-brand gel pens. A year’s worth of savings in cash: $876. That and what she currently had on—jeans, underwear, her senior-class t-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, her jean jacket, and her Converse knock-offs—now constituted everything she had in the world.

Outside again, she slipped the pack onto her shoulders, clipped the chest strap, and started walking. Back to the highway and away from this life.

Her plan was simple: to walk the twenty miles to the nearest Greyhound station and take the bus going as far away as she could afford to get. From wherever that was, she’d figure out what her life could be.

Anything would be better than the one she was leaving.