Chapter 9
Present Day
It was Sophie’s idea to set herself up with forty-hour weeks at the Bluebell Cove Eco-Lodge.
What she needed was something to distract her, something to throw herself into so that she didn’t spend all day, every day thinking of Ethan, of the fire, of all she’d lost. Of course, her nightly dreams yanked her back to that fateful night, and she often woke up smelling burning ash and fire.
When she told Celia that she wanted so many hours, Celia flinched with surprise. “What about your thesis? Aren’t you supposed to be studying something out there all summer long?”
Sophie explained she could do that alongside her work. “Forty hours per week isn’t that much,” she said, although it was. “And I need the money.”
Celia couldn’t argue with that. Life was expensive.
That afternoon, while Sophie restocked towels in the laundry room, Celia appeared behind her and touched her arm.
Sophie flinched and yanked her sleeve down.
"You okay?" Celia asked, frowning. "Fine.
You startled me." Sophie turned away, heart hammering, and made sure her sleeves stayed down for the rest of the day.
The second week of May, a few days after Sophie’s semester finished up without her back West, and a few weeks after she’d flatly refused to answer her professors’ emails, her cousin Lily came home.
Lily was studying environmental science at a Maine-based university, which meant she could come home far more often than Sophie could.
She was also effervescent after what she called one of the more intellectually stimulating semesters of her life.
“I want to talk to you about all of it,” Lily said to Sophie, grinning so wide that Sophie could see all of her teeth. They were on the back porch of the Harper House, eating guacamole and tortilla chips and watching the sunset.
“It sounds like you’re doing so great,” Sophie said delicately.
“Nothing compared to you,” Lily said.
Sophie winced. She knew that Lily looked up to Sophie, that Lily respected her, and that Sophie was part of the reason Lily had gone on this academic path. It made Sophie ache with guilt.
Beside them at the table, their mothers Ivy and Celia bickered companionably.
Now that the weather was warmer, more and more people were checking into the Eco-Lodge, and they needed to hire another cleaner and another chef.
They pored over applications, their faces scrunched as they discussed people’s attributes and who would best fit the Eco-Lodge mission.
“Mom said you’re working a lot at the Lodge?” Lily said.
“Yeah. I need the money,” Sophie said. “Real jobs feel like a long way off, you know?”
“That’s grad school, right? You’re so broke, yet you’re building something. At least, that’s what I make of it from here,” Lily said. “I think I want to go to grad school, but I’m struggling to figure out where to aim for. Maybe I could come out to East Oregon State?”
“No. You don’t want to go there,” Sophie said flatly, thinking of her beloved campus, her beloved professors, the beloved mountains that had only just stopped burning.
Lily’s eyes widened with surprise. “Really?”
“Why not try somewhere closer to home?” Sophie suggested. “I know your mom loves that you’re close.”
“Mom’s so busy with Elliott and the flower shop these days,” Lily said under her breath. It was a good thing, Sophie knew, as Ivy had previously relied on Lily for far too much, disallowing Lily from moving out on her own.
Now, Lily said, “I’m building my own life, regardless of what people expect of me.”
Sophie smiled, loving and hating Lily’s naivety at the same time. It reminded her of a version of herself that had existed months ago, a version that had died that night in the fire.
* * *
The following morning at the front desk of the Eco-Lodge, Sophie watched as the journalist Ruth Landers came down the stairs for breakfast. “Good morning,” Sophie said brightly.
“Oh. Hi there.” Ruth seemed to try to smile, then give up on it. Sophie was still struggling to read her.
“How’s the article going?” Sophie asked.
Ruth considered this, rubbing the backs of her hands with her thumbs. “It’s taking longer than I thought it would. But my editor’s been understanding, and it’s been a joy to dig deeper into Bluebell Cove.”
“Have you been here before?”
Ruth hesitated, then said, “A long time ago. But it’s really different from what I remember.”
“How so?” Sophie asked.
Ruth gazed longingly down the hallway, toward the breakfast buffet. It was clear that she had no interest in continuing this conversation. “Um, well. It was winter, so I couldn’t experience all the nature stuff back then. I guess that’s the only real difference.”
“Ah. Yes. That is different,” Sophie said. What a meaningless conversation. She couldn’t help but think that each time she chatted with Ruth, Ruth wanted to get away as soon as she could.
“You’re checking out soon, though, right?” Sophie asked.
“That’s something I want to talk to you about,” Ruth said. “Do you think I could stay another month, maybe?”
Sophie was taken aback. It was one thing to extend a guest's stay early in the season, but as things shifted into June, they were usually booked up. “Let me check.”
Sophie dove into the calendar to see that, yes, Ruth’s room was booked starting mid-May. “There’s another room available down the hall. It’s a little bit smaller, but it’s just as comfortable. Would you like to stay there?”
Ruth agreed, thanking her before she flitted away, leaving Sophie stirring with confusion. She had the sense that Ruth was running away from her life, just as Sophie was.
That night at the dinner table with Celia, Landon, Mallory, and Isaac, Sophie was quiet, eating her pasta and listening to the conversations bubble around her.
She still didn’t feel she belonged here, although she truly did adore her stepbrother and stepsister.
So soon after Landon and Celia’s wedding, they were still strangers, sort of. But she hoped that time would fix that.
And then, Mallory turned to her and asked, “What about Ethan? Is he coming to visit you this summer?”
Sophie’s lips parted with shock. She hadn’t mentioned Ethan, not once, since she’d gotten back to Bluebell Cove, and she’d hoped that everyone had gotten the hint that she didn’t want to talk about him.
Now, her mother, Landon, Isaac, and Mallory looked at her as though they’d been aching to ask this very thing for weeks.
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s so busy with an internship,” she said. “But we’re talking about it. I hope we can make it work.”
Her mother seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
“I really want to meet him,” Mallory said. She was endlessly curious about Sophie’s relationship, if only because she wanted to fall in love for the first time herself.
“He wants to meet you, too,” Sophie said. Her relationship with Ethan had been too new for her to invite him to Celia and Landon’s wedding.
“He’s going to love Maine,” Celia said. “We’ll have to take him on a long hike.”
“It’s so cool that you found someone who appreciates nature as much as you do,” Landon said. “Or almost as much.”
Sophie laughed delicately and stabbed her pasta with her fork. “Mom, did you see that Ruth extended her stay again? She’s going to be here into June.”
Celia raised her eyebrows. “Is that right?”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Sophie said. “I checked online, and her article about the Eco-Lodge was published yesterday. What else is she doing?”
“Maybe she’s planning more articles about Bluebell Cove,” Celia suggested.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe she’s thinking of moving here?” Landon proposed. “From what I’ve gleaned about her, she seems lonely. Maybe she feels a community here that she doesn’t have in the city.”
“That’s possible,” Celia said.
Sophie chewed her pasta, thinking that Ruth didn’t seem like the type to want a community, not in the traditional sense. But what did Sophie know?
Sophie might have driven herself crazy were it not for a night in early June, when Lily invited her out for a hike along the water.
Sophie had spent the previous weeks working tirelessly, anywhere between forty and fifty-five hours a week, and she was beginning to feel this would be the rest of her life: plagued with work, hopeless, and lacking in creativity.
She hadn’t even looked at any of her university notes since she’d left Oregon.
What exhausted her the most was pretending that everything was all right. Since that first time, Mallory had asked Sophie three more times when Ethan was coming to Maine. Sophie’s heart was cracked around the edges. It was entirely clear that Ethan had moved on without looking back.
Now, out here at the edge of the Atlantic, Sophie and her cousin Lily stripped down to their swimsuits and swam in the dark.
Had they been younger, they wouldn’t have gone for it.
If Aunt Ivy or Celia found out about it, they might have gotten angry.
But Lily and Sophie were in their twenties now.
They could make reckless decisions and keep them to themselves.
It was also the first time Sophie had been able to swim since the fire. In the dark, she could see that most of her scabs had healed, and she had very few scars.
By the end of the summer, she could probably swim with her mother and get away with not telling her about them. Celia wouldn’t be able to see.
After their swim, Sophie and Lily sprawled out on towels and looked at the moon that hung so low above them. It looked like a swollen fruit.
Out here in the darkness, Sophie couldn’t keep it in any longer.
“Did you hear about the fire?” Sophie asked.
Lily turned and looked at her. “The one out in Oregon? Yeah. We were worried about you.”
Sophie pressed her lips together, daring herself to keep going.
She had to unburden herself. “The thing is, Ethan started it. I mean, Ethan and some of his friends. I begged them not to make a fire, but they did it anyway. I was in the woods, trying to regroup when I smelled the flames. I got burned.” She gestured vaguely at the white scabs on her arm.
Lily’s jaw dropped. For a long time, she just looked at Sophie as though she’d never seen her before. And then, she threw her arms around her and held her tightly. “You’ve kept this to yourself,” she breathed.
Sophie’s eyes filled with tears that she couldn’t let fall. “It’s okay,” Sophie said.
“It’s not,” Lily said. “I wondered. I mean, I knew something was wrong. You’ve been so quiet since I got back from school. And you haven’t talked about your thesis at all.”
Sophie swallowed the lump in her throat, then explained that she’d left school, too embarrassed to face her professors and explain what had happened.
“I’m in legal trouble, too,” she stammered, explaining that she’d have to go back to Oregon to testify soon.
“I can’t trust Ethan and his friends not to lie about what happened. I’m in over my head.”
Lily squeezed Sophie tighter. Sophie couldn’t stop crying. She was relieved, but she was also fully facing the truth. She’d been able to hide from it since the end of April, out here along the coast.
Then they spotted the shadow, lurking at the edge of the cliff.
Sophie shot to her feet, adrenaline pulsing, and Lily joined her, panicked.
But soon, Ruth Landers emerged from the darkness and into the moonlight.
She wore a dark one-piece swimsuit, and her hair hung in half-dried curls.
She looked at them as though she were just as surprised to see them as they were to see her.
And then she said, “You need to be careful out here, girls.”
Lily and Sophie gaped at her, waiting.
“Dangerous people live in Bluebell Cove.” Ruth shook her head. “You need to watch out.”
With that, she strode past them, headed for the little path that snaked back to the Bluebell Cove Eco-Lodge. Sophie and Lily didn’t dare say a word until she was out of sight.