Chapter 5
Chapter Five
“Mom, I’m leaving!” Maddy snagged her keys off the entryway console.
Bunny’s voice called out from the kitchen, something muffled and cheerful that Maddy didn’t stop to decode. She pulled the front door open and nearly collided with Aspen on the other side.
“Jesus!” Maddy jumped back, her hand flying to her heart. “What the hell are you doing just standing there?”
“Sorry.” Aspen took a half-step back on the porch, using her hand to still the folded treatment table swinging against her hip. “I was just about to knock.”
The sun was behind Aspen, catching the fine hairs on her bare forearm where her hand now rested on the strap.
Her equipment bag hung from the other shoulder, weighted enough to pull her collar a half-inch to the side, revealing her collarbone.
A hint of coconut came with her—that specific, clean, inconvenient scent Maddy registered every time she was in the same room with Aspen.
Maddy narrowed her eyes. “You don’t knock.”
Aspen readjusted her grip on the treatment table. “Yeah, I don’t know why I said that. I meant I was about to walk. Inside. Of the house.” Aspen’s gaze slid past her face, catching on the doorframe.
She was acting strange.
Yesterday’s text flickered into Maddy’s mind. Sending it had been a tactical decision—five seconds of thumbs against glass versus a guaranteed one-hour detour to Bunny’s bedroom to receive the ten-second answer she needed. She had done the math and texted Aspen. Efficient. Rational.
She had been confirming it was the more efficient and rational choice about every ninety minutes since she sent it.
Today, the plan had been to clear the house before Aspen arrived and run errands across the bridge for the duration of Bunny’s PT session. Avoidance. A strategy that had never let her own.
Until now, apparently. And because of her failed strategy, she had the unfortunate luck of witnessing Aspen awkwardly standing in front of her, avoiding eye contact, and acting…well, strange.
Had she misread Maddy’s text as something it wasn’t?
Maddy’s jaw clenched. The last person on earth Maddy wanted misreading her message as anything other than logistical and avoidance of The Bunny Trap was Aspen St. Claire.
She ran the five words again. Where’s the storage unit located?
It came back clean. Just as it had the other forty times she ran it in the past two days.
Aspen’s gaze caught on Maddy’s outfit. She was wearing her favorite white blouse tucked into navy trousers and four-inch pumps.
Her hair was curled and flowing over her shoulders, makeup done to perfection.
It was the first time since returning to Coronado that she felt like herself again.
It was also the first time she was leaving the house.
Aspen finally met her eye. “Big plans today?”
Maddy’s chin lifted a fraction. “Errands.”
The corner of Aspen’s mouth pulled. “In heels.”
“Is that a question?” Maddy quirked an eyebrow. Judgment. That’s what the look on Aspen’s face was.
“Just an observation.” Aspen’s trademark smirk formed.
The knot in Maddy’s stomach loosened slightly. Teasing. Teasing was familiar. Teasing, Maddy could handle.
Maddy shook her head slightly. The exit. The exit was the point. She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’ll excu—”
“Honey! Wait!” Bunny hobbled into the foyer in a pink leopard-print robe and matching pink slippers with a fluffy feather strap, waving a white letter envelope in the air. “I have a list!”
Oh God. Maddy could see Bunny’s unmistakable handwriting on the back of the envelope. “A list for what?”
“Things I need you to pick up for me while you’re in town, sweetpea.” Bunny held the list out with an innocent smile.
Maddy’s grip tightened on her keys, not moving to take the list. “I wasn’t going into town. I was going across the bridge.”
“Well, that’s just silly, darling.” Bunny wedged herself in beside Maddy at the threshold of the doorway, shoulder, then elbow, then hip, until Maddy begrudgingly shifted her weight to make space.
“We have everything you could possibly need right here in town. Anyway, the things I need are very particular—the pharmacy for my prescription, a package waiting for me at the post office. And just a few other small things.” She grabbed Maddy’s hand and pressed the envelope into her palm. “It’s all on the list.”
Maddy glanced briefly at the very detailed list—her eyes skimming without actually absorbing it yet. “Mom, this is going to take hours. I have my own errands to run.”
“Then you’d better get a move on. No time to waste. Scoot.” Bunny shooed her out the door.
“Ugh.” Maddy stomped past Aspen, who was noticeably failing to suppress a smile, and down the front walk.
“Thanks honey!” Bunny called after her. “You’re an angel!”
Maddy got into her Range Rover and slammed the door. She dropped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Then took a breath, and picked up the envelope.
In Bunny’s looping script sprawled across the back:
Pharmacy: prescription (tell them it’s from Dr. Adler if they say they need to call the office, they don’t), 2 boxes lavender bath salts (NOT rosemary), Icy Hot patches (the large ones with Lidocaine), back massager (the kind with rolling balls—DO NOT GET A WAND, sweetheart, I cannot have a wand in this house with CoCo).
Vons: salmon fillet (ask at the fish counter for Dominic—he’ll already have it wrapped under my name), feta (French, not Bulgarian), 4 bottles Chardonnay (top shelf only, darling), arugula (NOT spring mix), one (1) lemon, 2 avocados (medium softness, if they’re too firm they won’t be ready to eat).
Post office: Pick up the package for Bunny Sterling (if Tammy gives you any gruff, just say ‘upside-down pineapple’, she’ll know what it means)
IB pet: Dog food for CoCo and Chanel (Patrick will have it ready, he’s lovely)
Crown Bakery: 7 chocolate croissants (NOT almond, Aspen prefers the chocolate)
She read the last line twice. Aspen prefers the chocolate.
Bunny was sending Maddy—her actual daughter—to a bakery across town to buy croissants calibrated to the tastes of a woman who didn’t even live there. Why couldn’t Aspen get her own damn chocolate croissants?
Maddy tossed the envelope face down on the passenger seat and started the engine.
* * *
A few hours later, Maddy lifted the heavy pharmacy bag into her Range Rover’s trunk with a heave.
Bath salts, icy hot patches, back massager, prescription—all accounted for.
She slid the bag in next to the dog food and Bunny’s package that Maddy thankfully did not have to use the secret phrase for, and slammed the hatch.
Pet store: done. Post office: done. Pharmacy: done. Next up: Vons.
She locked the car and started back up Orange Ave, Bunny’s envelope folded in her back pocket.
She found that she didn’t really mind running Bunny’s errands today.
It had kept her busy and out of the house all afternoon.
She hadn’t really had her own errands to run anyway.
She was going to go sit at the nicest cafe she could find in Little Italy, order an overpriced coffee, and check in with Renata and Sam on how the finale had gone.
The Vons sign came into view. She turned the corner and saw three beach chairs in a precise row, dead center of the sidewalk outside Vons’s south entrance. Three visors in coordinated pastels—peach, mint, lavender. Three pairs of orthopedic sandals planted on the concrete.
Maddy froze. Shit. The Peepin’ G’s.
Gladys. Glenda. Gilda. Three women in their eighties whose husbands had all passed in suspiciously close succession—all in their sleep.
They each had a thermos and a pair of binoculars pointed at the intersection.
Aside from their collective widowhood, not much had changed.
For as long as Maddy could remember, they’d been what was essentially a civilian intelligence operation run from beach furniture.
The only difference now was that their husbands were resting six feet under instead of sipping beers on the golf course at the east end of the island.
Maybe she could just retreat around the corner—very slowly so as not to draw attention—and enter through the north entrance instead. She lifted her foot slowly to step backward—
“Oh my! Look! It’s Maddy Sterling! Yoohoo! Maddy!” Glenda was waving her arms from the center chair. “What are you doing all the way over there? Well come on over, let us get a look at ya!”
Damnit. Maddy approached.
“Well, as I live and breathe. Maddy Sterling, back from the land of fruits and nuts!” Gladys, the ringleader, said.
Maddy forced a smile. “Gladys. Glenda. Gilda. You’re looking well.”
“You’re looking thin.” Glenda squinted over the rim of her visor. “Are you on that drug, the one everyone’s on in LA these days—”
“Ozempic!” Gilda leaned forward in her beach chair. “My neighbor’s niece swears by it. She lost sixty pounds, looks exactly like Kim Kardashian now, the old Kim, not the new one. Although she says it gives her gas. Does it give you gas?”
“I am not on Ozempic.” Maddy’s gaze drifted toward the Vons entrance, assessing exit strategies.
“Hm. How about a boyfriend? Got one of those?” Gilda waggled her eyebrows.
Maddy shook her head once. “No.”
All three faces brightened simultaneously.
“Well, Trevor—you remember my grandson, Trevor, don’t you?
” Glenda started. “He was a year behind you, or maybe two, he played baseball—anywho, he’s an optician now, and he is very good with frames, a real gentleman, a gentleman down to his toes, and he’s newly single,” Glenda singsonged newly single.
“That Jessica finally moved out, thank goodness, between you and me, I always thought she was a gold-digger, but I would never say that in front of Trevor because you know how he gets about—”