Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
Tuesday
Morning. Again. Only this time, Grace wakes up refreshed.
For the first time in ages, she actually slept.
After Caleb left the Dive, Grace stayed for a few more beers.
She grabbed a sandwich on the walk back, ate quietly while one of Birdie’s Hallmark movies played in the background—the sand dollar, the arcade tickets, the paper bracelet, and the clunky necklace piled on the coffee table like a makeshift shrine—then curled up on the not-so-comfortable bed and passed out.
She didn’t stir all night. If she dreamed, she doesn’t remember it.
Now Grace pulls herself up, sitting. Her limbs are still heavy with slumber, though her mind feels a bit clearer than it did yesterday.
She stretches, rolls out her neck, then reaches toward the nightstand and pulls her journal—the one she had with her out on the jetty—onto her lap.
The room, cast in slices of golden light, feels calm.
She tries not to think too much about the final product.
Instead, she just writes. Not a story—certainly not the one she’s supposed to be finalizing for Mollie—but a mishmash of her thoughts.
Questions. Little scenes that pop into her head.
Bits of characters. Memories she puts back together with a fictional edge.
This is how it starts, Grace remembers. A story.
Not at the end when everything is neat and tidy, when every problem’s already been cleverly solved.
Not on the computer, where the pressure to get each line perfect 178and polished glows back at you from the screen.
A good narrative never starts from a clean place.
It begins when it’s messy. When the end feels so uncertain and far away that you’re not sure it’ll ever come.
When she’s done, Grace closes the journal, knowing she’s nowhere near finished with the work that’s still ahead or even what it might become.
But for now, at least it feels like something.
A step.
Once she’s dressed in a fresh tank and shorts, Grace bikes a few blocks to the bakery, eats a too-big jelly doughnut, and downs a coffee.
When she’s finished, she moves north again, though not with any intentions of traveling as far up the island as she did yesterday.
This time, there’s a different place she knows she needs to stop by, and not just loiter, but actually walk in.
Ten minutes later, she parks the cruiser in front of the shop and goes inside.
It’s a small spot, overstuffed but welcoming in a no-frills sort of way.
Every square inch of the space is in use.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves, stacked with paperbacks.
Bins of books—old, slightly tattered secondhand choices—line the floor.
Unlike some of the bookstores Grace came to love over her years in the city, all offering little cafés in the back or of-the-moment aesthetic choices—moody paint, themed reading nooks, strategic lighting—this beach bookshop is just the basics.
The whole place smells like dust and old pages.
There’s not even a soft soundtrack of jazz or lo-fi playing. It’s just shelved stories and silence.
Grace smiles at the older woman at the counter, then wanders into the stacks and pretends to browse, even though she knows she’s here to find one specific thing.
It’s not out on a front table like it might have been all those years ago when the cover was arranged in artful pyramids in bookshop windows across the country.
It’s not even out on a summer reading 179or “staff picks” table display.
Grace has to walk to the back to find it, searching alphabetically through all the spines until she reaches the W section and lands on it.
There’s only one copy. Grace’s sophomore novel isn’t in stock at all.
She pulls The Tides from the shelf, runs her fingers over its cover—a transportive photograph of a sunset over the ocean filtered with hues of pinks to lightly suggest the novel’s romantic themes.
Grace opens it, flipping through all the pages she once worked so hard to create and get just right.
It’s like seeing the inner workings of her heart in print.
Before she carries it to the register—paying, in part, to remember certain parts of her past—she turns back to the dedication page at the beginning.
For Birdie—we’ll always have our beach.
Now Grace blinks away tears, closes the cover, and takes a step, turning past the next endcap, just to see what else is out.
That’s when she sees her.
At the end of the aisle, sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing too many turquoise rings, the nameplate necklace, cutoffs, and a faded college hoodie. She holds an opened copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—a seaside novel about time, relationships, and the quest for meaning—in her lap.
Cece. Nineteen. Midway through college and on the cusp of a new decade.
She’s not the lovestruck girl in the arcade.
Not a breezy teen, a half-tipsy twentysomething, or a trying-too-hard adult, either.
This version looks a little sleep deprived, sort of overcaffeinated, and completely engrossed.
She doesn’t see Grace; she doesn’t seem to see anything, actually, outside of the pages she’s reading, except maybe her pile of writing utensils and journal, where she keeps jotting down notes.
Grace recalls reading the book a half dozen times that summer.
Not for an upcoming fall class, but because a former professor told her she should.
He’d said she might be too young to understand it, but that if she read and reread it and kept returning to it, eventually the true meaning would set in.
180
Grace considers speaking up, maybe calling out her name just to see how she’ll respond.
Instead, she decides to watch this version from afar.
Cece’s focus is intense and yet relaxed—completely absorbed in what she’s reading, not because she has to read it for a deadline or an exam, but because she wants to understand it, as if some secret she longs to comprehend—something about love or life—might be hidden within the language.
She spent every day with Ray that summer week.
Things between them were the same, but not.
They talked about different topics, not just the beach and whether they wanted to take a bike ride or go play miniature golf, but real things.
Their future. Where they eventually envisioned they’d each end up.
The lives they both saw for themselves—hers off in a big city, his someplace quiet, like Sea Drift.
They wanted opposing things. Still, they were young and hopeful enough to ignore these early cracks.
You liked it, huh? he asked her that week. The two of them. A bench outside the bookshop. A bag of taffy. Heat rising off the asphalt. Not just the internship, but all of it.
Two weeks earlier, Grace finished her first internship at a small regional magazine in Philly. A nice office. A tall building. A few small bylines. A desk with her name.
I did. She still buzzed from the experience.
It was all she talked about—not just the unpaid job but the feeling of it.
Like she was doing something. Becoming something.
Like not only she but also the things she wanted really mattered.
I hope I get a chance like that again. Maybe not the office, but the writing part, anyway.
You will, Porter, he said, a quiet sadness tracing his words. Of course you will.
What makes you so confident? Their hands dipped into the bag at the same time, fingers tangling.
Because I know you. He handed her a green piece of candy. Mint. Her favorite. And because I know you can.
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Grace didn’t respond, just chewed a sticky bite for a long time. It thrilled her, the way he believed in her when she wasn’t so sure she even believed in herself. But it was also terrifying.
Even though he hadn’t directly said it, they both knew he didn’t want that same life.
That just like a perfect vacation, some things—even ones we love—are only temporary.
Back in the bookshop, Grace remains where she is for a few minutes, standing in the stillness, studying Cece as she studies the classic text.
Every couple of pages, she pauses, writes something down.
An observation. Or a question. A brief note about something she doesn’t comprehend.
Not giving up on it because it’s confusing or rushing to reach the end, just content to be working her way through the middle of it.
“Can I help anyone with anything?”
They both turn to look at the same time.
To the right of them, the woman from the register has left her post to restock shelves.
For a second so brief it’s as if it doesn’t even happen, Grace’s and Cece’s eyes meet.
Grace freezes, not sure how to react, deciding instead to let Cece lead.
The girl’s lids narrow, something confusing or maybe very clear, washing over her face.
She sits with it for a moment, then dismisses it as she closes her book.
“Actually, I’m ready to check out now. I’m already running late to meet a friend.” Cece quickly gathers her things, still half looking at Grace. “I need to pay for this one, plus the stack I already left up front.”
The woman nods, shelves the titles she’s holding, then makes her way back to the counter. Cece follows in her footsteps. Before she disappears into a new aisle, she turns back.
“You look familiar.” Cece gives her nameplate necklace a gentle tug. “Do I know you?”
How could she ever explain it? The fact that she doesn’t know Grace, but that Grace does, in fact, know her. That they’re the same and yet so different, too.
“No.” Grace smiles and takes her in. “I don’t think so.”
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At least, she thinks, not yet.
Cece turns to go. As she does, one of her many highlighters falls from the pile she clumsily holds and rolls across the floor. She keeps walking, not even noticing. Grace grabs it, ready to catch up to Cece and give it back. Instead, she slips it inside her own bag.
One more piece. One more small reminder.
Of the person Grace once was. The one who, in time, she might be able to become again.