Chapter 5
Seaside, Florida, looked like someone had built a town inside a snow globe and then replaced the snow with sunshine.
Driving Meredith’s compact hatchback, Kate took in the pastel cottages with their white picket fences, the narrow streets canopied by live oaks, the pavilions rising from the dunes like sculptures.
Everything was immaculate and charming and faintly unreal. “Why do I feel like I’m in a movie set?” she mused.
“Because you are!” Emma’s voice rose with the most excitement Kate had heard in a while, her attention split between the scenery and her phone.
“This is where they filmed The Truman Show!” She waved her phone as if it held irrefutable proof of that.
“Jim Carrey, you know! Like, the whole place is the set.”
“Well, that’s cool,” Kate said, eyeing the precious town with renewed respect.
They’d spent the morning cruising from Destin down the picturesque road known as 30A, stopping when the spirit moved or a cute shop beckoned.
Kate’s goal had been merely to get Emma out of the Summer House guest room where she’d been curled on the bed most of the time. She’d hoped that this little one-day vacation would break into the protective cocoon her daughter had spun around herself since they’d left Ithaca.
And it was working, at least on the surface.
She was almost Emma again, shopping with the focus and fun of a teenager, eyeing herself in the mirror without self-criticism, cracking up over the little things—like a bandana-wearing dachshund named Peppermint Patty at one of the boutiques—and happily sucking down her iced latte with vanilla cream.
“Oh, there’s that Daytrader café you saw online,” Kate said, passing a Key West-style restaurant painted the color of orange sherbet. “Want to try it for lunch?”
“Absotively,” Emma replied, with more enthusiasm to warm Kate’s heart.
It took a few passes to find parking, but they did, and soon they were happily seated outside in wicker chairs with ferns hanging overhead as they perused mouthwatering offerings.
“I like the sesame tuna,” Kate said, scanning her own menu.
“I’m going hard on a Smash Burger,” Emma replied. “Don’t judge.”
“I never judge,” Kate replied with a smile at the server who brought them iced water.
After they ordered and looked around, Emma let out a sigh of the deepest contentment Kate could remember.
“Mom?” she asked, her gaze moving toward the water in the distance. “Can we move here?”
Kate laughed. “Here? To Seaside?”
“Anywhere…like this.” She gestured at the pastel streetscape, and the pavilion on the beach beyond it. “It’s like the perfect escape.”
“Which makes it ideal for vacation,” Kate replied. “Not life.”
Emma made a face that said she didn’t want life, she wanted permanent vacation.
While they waited, Kate let the conversation drift. With purpose, she avoided any and all elephants in the room.
No lecture about running away from problems. No logical dismantling of the vacation vibe. Just agreement, because Emma’s eyes had light in them for the first time in weeks, and Kate would protect that with everything she had.
Their food arrived—the Smash Burger had been a great call—and they ate in a comfortable quiet that would have been impossible three days ago. The breeze carried the faint salty smell of the Gulf, and the murmur of other patrons around them.
Kate thought about Vivien’s diary entry—the one she’d read last night, curled up in the bedroom while Emma slept.
Not only had she been impressed with the recounting of Eli’s calm management of a crisis, but she thought a lot about the mother-daughter dynamic woven between the lines of Vivien’s girlish writing.
A seventeen-year-old should have been able to talk to her mother the way Tessa and Kate talked to Jo Ellen. Maggie shouldn’t have lectured young Vivien on the value of a car, but been there to understand that, as Eli had said, people make mistakes.
Kate wanted that kind of conversation and relationship with Emma.
She’d always wanted it, but the years of co-parenting with Jeffrey—who operated on a strict hierarchy of parent-knows-best—had made it harder to build.
Now Jeffrey’s approach had blown up in the worst possible way, and Kate had a chance to do something different… and better.
She waited until Emma finished the burger, relaxed and unsuspecting.
“So, honey, has Destin worked its magic on you yet? You feeling better?” Kate leaned in and asked. “Because you look better.”
“I don’t know,” Emma said quietly, dragging a fry through ketchup but abandoning it before it reached her mouth. “I don’t know how I feel. Numb? Tired? Scared? All the things.”
Kate nodded, understanding that.
“I just…” She leaned back and wiped her hands on her napkin, stalling. “Some minutes I’m fine. Like right now, sitting here, this is nice. And then I’ll think about everything that happened and it’s like this wave that just hits me and I can’t breathe.”
Kate listened, even though she wanted to assure her the wave would pass, but at her age, Emma surely believed this one would drown her.
“I feel like everyone can see me,” Emma continued.
“I keep imagining going back to Eastmont High and standing in front of the whole senior class and not one kid comes to talk to me. Even my friends have been…weird. Like Allison and Bree. I know they’re madly texting the rest of the volleyball team like I’m that Scarlet Letter lady. ”
“I hated that book,” Kate mused.
“So bad,” Emma agreed. “But I feel like I’m wearing one of those signs, and aren’t we beyond that in the twenty-first century?”
“You’d think.”
“As if Allison has never done something dumb for a guy.” She rolled her eyes. “I know stuff, Mom, but I would never say. She’s my teammate and we’ve been close since we played JV volleyball.” She shook her head. “Anyway, back to my original question. Can we move here, please?”
“Probably not in your senior year.”
She snorted. “As if I care.”
Kate weighed all her possible responses and went with something that felt comfortable and natural.
“You know what I’ve learned from twenty-five years in a laboratory?” she asked.
Emma looked at her with amusement in her eyes. “Time for a science metaphor?”
“Probably. Bear with me.” She smiled and gathered her thoughts.
“Every important discovery I’ve ever made started with something going wrong.
An experiment fails, a result comes back that makes no sense, something breaks or burns or contaminates the whole deal.
And in that moment, it feels like a disaster. Like you’ve ruined everything.”
Emma furrowed her brow, skeptical but open.
“But the failure is where the learning is. Not because the failure is good—it’s not, it’s awful, and sometimes it costs you months of work.
But because it forces you to look at something you couldn’t see before.
You made a mistake, Emma. A real one, with real consequences.
But it doesn’t define your entire experiment. And you will learn from it.”
“Yeah, no pictures to morons who you can’t trust.” She flipped her wrist like that kid was a fly near her food. “But my life isn’t a lab experiment, Mom. It’s real.”
“Lab experiments are real,” Kate said, feeling her lame analogy fall to the floor like a discarded napkin.
Emma stared at her plate for a long time. When she looked up, her eyes were damp, but her jaw was set, and Kate saw something in her daughter’s face that she recognized—not from Jeffrey, but from herself. The stubborn refusal to fall apart completely.
“I can’t go back to school there,” Emma said. “I know you think I’ll change my mind, but I won’t. I don’t care about the volleyball team. I don’t care about my friends or homecoming or it being my senior year.”
Did she care about applying to colleges? Kate bit back the thought because it sounded more like Jeffrey and less like…Eli.
“We don’t have to decide that right now,” she said instead.
“And while we’re talking about things that don’t matter?” Emma leaned in, kind of on a roll now. “I’m done with Dad.”
“Oh, Emma, don’t—”
“Mom, you should have heard him. He acted like I was…I don’t know. Horrible. A disappointment. A loser. An idiot. Worse. A…” She shook her head and swallowed. “Very bad girl.”
Kate winced, knowing her ex-husband could never edit his thoughts when he was upset.
“I know he said some things that hurt you,” she replied, always, by default, choosing not to denigrate Emma and Matt’s father. It was an unspoken rule they’d both kept since the early days of their separation.
“He screamed at me, Mom.” The words came out raw, like the pain Jeffrey’s words and tone had caused.
“He didn’t ask if I was okay. He didn’t ask how I felt.
He just exploded about how could I be so stupid and what would people think and—” She squeezed her eyes, grimacing with the memory of her father’s temper. “He doesn’t care about me.”
Kate couldn’t argue because she knew her ex-husband didn’t have an empathetic bone in his body. It was probably at the root of their easy and non-acrimonious divorce—and their passionless, chilly marriage.
He didn’t feel too deeply, which was why, when Kate met him, he seemed safe to her logical brain. It also meant he wasn’t great at…love.
Kate reached across the table and gently pulled Emma’s hands away from her face. “You’ll get through this,” she whispered.
Emma’s whole expression crumpled for a second before she pulled it back together with the determination of a girl who absolutely would not cry in a restaurant in Seaside, Florida.
She took a deep breath and picked up her water glass and took a long drink, composing herself.
How could Kate help her? Who could…well, yes. She knew who.
She took a breath and dove in. “I want to talk to you about something, Em. And I need you to hear me out before you react.”
Emma’s guard went up instantly. “What?”
“I’d like to tell Eli about what happened.”