Chapter 6
The more time went on, the more Raemy loved Wild Rose Point. And she’d been pretty jaw-droppingly in love with the place the first time she’d driven down the main street and had seen the Pacific Ocean gleaming there, playing hide and seek down this or that narrow walkway.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising. After all, she couldn’t really imagine who wouldn’t be delighted by such a charming place. The fact that it was right on the ocean didn’t hurt. Or that the beach was so gorgeous and rugged, with the big rocks rising out of the waves or the sand at low tide.
Sea stacks, a woman in one of the boutiques had corrected her when she’d innocently mentioned the rocks one day. They are actually volcanic basalt.
Sounds like a good name for my band, Raemy had replied. Perhaps a bit too flippantly.
She had not made a friend of that woman, who was clearly on a mission to properly identify the majestic not-rocks that made the beach here—and all along the Oregon coast, Raemy now knew—so breathtaking.
But aside from the boutique that she would never enter again, it was the town itself that she loved. Even on foggy days when she couldn’t see the beach or the sea stacks or the water at all. It was so easy to feel at home.
The locals were friendly, and when it was clear that she was sticking around—as one week turned into three and then more—they opened up more and more.
She spent probably too much of her time in the Water Witch, gathering protective stones, talking about amulets, and buying herself her first personal tarot card deck.
She liked to sit in her room at the inn and ask the universe questions, because it made her feel connected to things that were larger than herself.
She liked to go to the Tufted Puffin Taphouse for the name alone, but she also liked the deeply millennial hipster beer.
For less artisanal beer, there was always the Seaglass Saloon.
Raemy haunted the bookshop, and made sure she always had something new to read, because she was indulging herself in this deep seaside breath she was taking.
That meant that she was letting herself curl up in a chair while it rained outside, and lose herself in a book.
Or sometimes just nap with the sound of the waves to soothe her.
She took herself on long, beautiful hikes along the shore, or in the woods along the headlands.
And she couldn’t remember the last time in her life that she’d had the time or really the ability to just...
let herself trust fall into whatever was happening.
I can’t believe you’re not here in the teacher’s lounge with me right now, smelling Daniel Mckay’s fish dinner, her friend and former colleague Marissa texted her one morning while she was having her favorite breakfast at the Salty Dog.
This is cosmically unfair, though of course, hope you’re having a magical time etc etc
Daniel Mckay had been teaching sixth grade since the dawn of time, and either chose not to understand the effects of microwaved smelly dinners or was actively engaged in warfare. Hard to say.
Raemy grinned down at her phone, and suddenly missed her old life.
The rhythm of the teaching life, and her students who she not only got to teach when they were in her class, but got to watch grow up as they moved through the grades.
Sometimes, depending on the high school they went to, they came back after they graduated.
She’d seen her first crop of third graders do that this past year, and it had felt like they’d all come full circle.
She missed going out with her teacher friends.
Even the school events, that were always hilarious, because even if they were terrible they made for good stories later.
She missed the stuffy principal, the possibly deranged fifth-grade teacher who had made an enemy of everyone in the school district, and all the parents who had been so kind to her. Not so much the ones who hadn’t been.
But as she sat there at what had become her usual table, eating her little omelet that Jeremiah whipped up just for her with her toast buttered just right, she realized that she could miss all of that and still not want to go back.
She had loved her life in Missouri. Then she had been a zombie who just survived her life in Missouri. And now she lived on the edge of the country with the Pacific in one direction and mysterious, lush, misty woods that met the water.
We can pretend it’s all deeply unmagical, Raemy texted back. Like my ugly walk this morning. And she dropped a picture of the beach at low tide, right at sunrise.
It might as well have been a painting. It looked otherworldly, the rocks reflecting in the pools of glassy water, the sky lit up in pinks and peaches and the hint of purple.
I hate you, Marissa texted back.
Raemy sent her an emoji with a halo, and set her phone down, so she could enjoy her meal while watching the usual gruff dance of the men coming in and out of the kitchen. And more specifically, the Noah Kendrick of it all.
Because the best part of Wild Rose Point was obviously Noah.
She didn’t go running with him in the mornings, because she wasn’t sufficiently masochistic, but she did like a walk to start the day.
If she went early enough—and some mornings she was too busy sleeping off what he’d done to her the night before to wake up when he did—she would see him out there, running with all of his usual intensity on the sand.
No matter the state of the tide, he was always there.
He looked tiny next to the huge rocks. He wasn’t made of volcanic basalt. And yet the truth was, he loomed larger in her life every day.
She usually came to the diner for her breakfast, though she was beginning to feel badly about it because she wasn’t allowed to pay.
No matter what she ate, or didn’t eat, or even if Noah was visible behind the counter—every single one of the vets would tell her that her money wasn’t good at the Salty Dog and refuse to engage further.
Raemy learned all of their names, and many of them told her their stories.
Some of them were William’s age, more or less, and it felt like a kind of therapy to talk with them and think about what William might have been like if he’d come home and had needed to figure out his life.
She could see him ending up here. He could so easily have been one of these men who had to sort out how to interact in the real world again, one painful step at a time.
Tank was her favorite, and not only because he’d introduced her to the glory that was his salted honey pie.
Raemy waxed rhapsodic over it, babbling things about how it tasted like the best caramel of all time, and how was it possible that she’d lived her whole life in the Midwest—where, everyone knew, butter and lard and endless desserts were a crucial part of the culture—and had never tasted it?
Tank only inclined his head. “It was my mother’s recipe,” he would tell her every time, sounding rough and serious because that was always how he sounded.
Sometimes she thought he liked it, because he weeded out people who couldn’t handle him at arm’s length, so no need to worry about getting closer. “A family secret.”
“I suppose all families have secrets,” she mused, one time he told her that.
“But I always think that’s silly. Not when it’s pie.
Or really, any other recipe, because I would obviously die before I told you how my mother makes her signature carrot souffle for Thanksgiving.
But the other secrets, the painful ones that you can’t serve for dessert—they’re the bad ones. ”
The big man had been standing at the counter, writing the daily baked good selection on his small chalkboard.
“There are two kinds of secrets. The kind of secrets you keep from other people because you think they can’t handle it.
And the ones you keep from yourself, because, deep down, you know the truth is worse. ”
And maybe he’d already known that Noah was coming into the diner behind her, but it seemed meaningful when she turned and found him there.
“What are you two talking about?” Noah asked, in his usual grumpy, surly, ridiculously and endlessly hot way.
Not that she was a goner where he was concerned or anything.
“Secrets,” Tank said, helpfully. He aimed a grin that could only be called shit-eating directly at Noah. “More specifically, the ones a person keeps from himself.”
“The only secret I’m keeping is how much I’d like you to fuck off into the sea,” Noah replied, in what was almost a happy tone of voice, for him. Then he smirked at Tank. “Oh, wait. That’s not a secret at all.”
And he didn’t kiss Raemy in the diner. He didn’t play with her hair or trace patterns on her thigh with his big hands. But she didn’t think that any of the men who worked there, or any of the locals who frequented the place, were at all fooled by his restraint.
Because even if this wasn’t a small town where everybody knew everybody else’s business and pretended not to, to be polite, surely they could all see the way he looked at her.
As if he could burn her up with a glance.
Raemy didn’t like to think how exactly she looked back at him, or what it meant, because she was sure they could all see that too.
“You look very happy,” her mother said on one of their video calls that Raemy took from one of the viewpoints over the beach, because it wasn’t too windy or wet that day.
Her parents were docked in Sydney Harbour and were sitting out on their balcony with its view of the iconic Opera House behind them, looking wonderfully relaxed. “Though it looks cold there.”
“It’s misty and moody and I absolutely love it,” Raemy replied.
“Travel agrees with us all,” her father said from beside her mother, looking downright jolly again, the way he was in all of Raemy’s memories. “He would love it.”
And there were things they didn’t say, these days, because they’d all been said. They’d bared their broken hearts too many times to count. They’d all cried and held each other through the tears and picked themselves up again and again.
They all talked to William and about William all the time.
He was woven into all of these moments. He was like a golden thread that was stitched deep into each of them, and through them, connecting them to each other and to his memory and to the future he would always be a part of, because he was a part of them.
“Love looks good on all of us,” Raemy said.
They talked a while longer and then her parents had to go and meet up with some friends to explore Circular Quay. Raemy looked out over the ocean, smiling, and imagined her parents all the way on the other side. It had her heart ache in a good way.
And she was thinking about love as she took the path that wound back toward her inn along the beach, breathing in the salt air.
It came to her slowly, like the tide coming in. So slowly, at first, and then the waves were sneaking up higher than you expected, and then you were wet.
Maybe one of the reasons that she was falling so deeply in love with Wild Rose Point wasn’t because it was the prettiest little beach town in this lovely, foggy fall that anyone could imagine, though it was.
Maybe she wasn’t wondering how she’d survived without the Pacific Northwest her whole life because she was partial to fairy-tale-like moss-covered forests and mountains that met the sea, though she was.
Maybe it was because she was falling in love with Noah Kendrick, too.
Raemy stopped dead on the path and laughed out loud, like a loon, startling a woman walking her dogs and a passel of teenagers. She didn’t mind.
Because she hadn’t let herself think like that. Not until now. And it seemed ridiculous that she’d been pretending that the way she’d fallen so in love with this place was anything else.
But that wasn’t why she was laughing.
That was because all she could think about was Noah. Beautiful, impossible Noah, who would absolutely flip out if she ever told him. He might even personally deliver her to a therapist. He would certainly try to break up with her.
Though he wouldn’t call it that, because Raemy was pretty sure he had no idea they were dating in the first place.
But that was okay, she told herself, and smiled out at the ocean and the sea stacks that could definitely keep her secrets. She didn’t have to tell him she loved him.
She could just love him, simple as that. Hell, she already did.
Maybe something in her had known all along. Maybe it had recognized him at the funeral and tucked it away until grief had finished pummeling her the way it had at first, when she couldn’t possibly have handled something like this.
Something like him, so noble and yet so convinced he was the villain when he was anything but, by any measure.
Maybe she’d been in love with him all along, so it made sense that she could just keep on going.
And if she did it well enough, and long enough, Raemy figured—it was entirely possible that Noah himself wouldn’t really notice until it was too late to do anything else but love her back.