Page 32 of Beautiful Place By the Sea

She assures me that she will, and, not sure what else to do with myself, I leave Beach Haven early. I figure I’ll walk around town for a bit, but the sidewalks are crowded with tourists, and I’m not able to relax as much as I’d hoped.

I consider heading to the Marginal Way, the breathtaking cliffside walk Eleanor was always talking about in her diary, but a quick check of my phone’s clock puts the kibosh on that plan. I don’t have enough time to get there and back before noon.

Anyway, that’s how I end up at Shoreline a full 30 minutes before I’m supposed to start work.

“What are you doing here?” Oliver asks the second I walk through the door.

I shrug, trying to seem nonchalant, like I actually do have important things going on and just felt like coming in early. “Had a little extra time,” I say.

He looks like he’s going to question my motivations further, but he blinks away whatever quip he’d been preparing and nods instead. “Cool. Well, I’ll be back here,” he gestures toward the bargain bins at the rear of the store, “but come find me at noon, and I’ll give you something to do.”

“Okay,” I agree. I’d sort of been expecting him to ask me to immediately start scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, or sorting paperclips by size, or something. I don’t know why I’m surprised that he’s not making me violate labor law and work off the clock.

As he walks away, I’m momentarily distracted by his gray Henley and dark jeans, both of which are extremely flattering. For someone who seems to do nothing but log hours in this store, he certainly does know how to dress.

I decide to peruse the fiction section. Even without the free book from Maisie, I know my bank account can survive me splurging on a few novels. I’m definitely going to need something to keep this summer from dragging any more than it already is.

Shoreline has a great selection, but there’s a lot here that I’ve already read. I have a shocking amount of downtime at Farnsworth, so I always keep a paperback in my purse. It’s pretty easy to pop into my office and read 50 pages or so in between meetings.

And with the way my time freed up unexpectedly due to the loss of both my relationship and my social life, I found myself speeding through my to-be-read list faster than ever this past year.

I don’t really know what I’m looking for, walking up and down the rows of crisp paperbacks and proud hardcovers. I think I’m just waiting to be inspired. It occurs to me that this is true in more parts of my life than I’d care to admit at the moment.

A dark blue paperback, Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover, catches my eye. My heart suddenly feels like it’s twisting around in my chest, wringing the breath out of me like water from a sponge.

Kyle bought me that book for Christmas last year. He’d wrapped it in brown kraft paper, which he knew was my favorite. “You’re like a little Maria von Trapp,” he’d joked when I first told him. But there was just something so wholesome, so classic about a gift in brown paper. An unassuming statement—just, here is this gift—its contents matter far more than its presentation. The thought behind it is what matters. My love for you is what matters.

I guess I should have been put off by the title of the novel, since it was coming from Kyle, but I didn’t think anything of it. I’m always up for discovering new authors. “Thanks,” I’d said, giving him a peck on the cheek and handing him a similarly wrapped book on the history of the Olympics that I thought he’d like.

He hadn’t seemed as excited about it as I’d expected, which stung a bit. Little did I know, his affair with Melinda had already started. Maybe that’s why his smile looked so uncomfortable that day; a little bit guilty, even. I’d assumed it was because I also got him tickets to the NFC championship football game, plus a hotel room for the weekend, and the reservation alone almost certainly cost four times as much as the matching cashmere gloves and scarf he got me to go with my book.

But it was much worse than that.

In the end, we didn’t even end up going to the game. Kyle had gotten sick, and I gave the tickets and the reservation at a ritzy 4-star hotel in the city to Alex. Alex took some “incredibly hot” guy he’d met at a cooking class, but apparently it wasn’t enough to impress his love interest du jour. They broke up a few weeks later.

Standing here now, I’m struck by the realization that Kyle probably wasn’t even sick. Maybe he was with Melinda that weekend, curled up beside her in bed, watching the football game on TV. How have I never thought of this before?

God, I think I’m going to be sick.

Even though I want nothing more than to shift my focus, my mind races back over the day it all started. The day my world was shattered. I’d ignored signs that were perhaps overly obvious for far too long; Kyle kept gently laughing things off, telling me it was all in my head.

I honestly wish it had been.

It began one evening after work at McCreary’s, the bar all the teachers from Farnsworth frequented. Kyle saw his friend Zack, the boys’ track coach, come through the front door.

“I’m just going to go congratulate him on winning the meet last week,” he’d said, hopping off his stool.

Almost as soon as he’d gotten up, his phone lit up with a text. I glanced down instinctually and saw the words “come to your apartment” before I realized I shouldn’t be looking at his messages.

But who was coming to his apartment? Usually, we left the bar together and I spent the night with him, since his place was within walking distance.

I dared another quick peek and saw that the message was from Melinda, the nurse at our school. That’s odd, I’d thought. Why could she possibly need to come to his apartment?

Then I noticed the words “to blow you.”

I think my eyes just about bulged out of their sockets. What? My heart started skittering around my chest at the realization that Kyle was almost certainly cheating on me.

I pulled my eyes away from his phone and turned to see Kyle talking with Zack. Kyle’s blonde hair was perfectly combed, his eyes crinkling at the corners while he laughed at something Zack was saying. I took in his button-down, rolled up to the elbows, his jeans that perfectly accentuated his toned legs from exactly one hour in the gym each morning. All the things that usually made me swell with pride that this was my boyfriend of almost three years. I’d been head over heels for him for so long. But right then, I felt like I was going to vomit up my Manhattan.