Page 64 of Beautiful Place By the Sea

“Maybe.” Laurel shrugs.

I drag my fingers through the sand between our towels. Grains swirl around my pink manicured nails, slipping away before I can hope to grab them. “I really want to know what happened. Maybe I’ll ask Janie.”

Janie still lives at home with her husband, Peter, a few minutes away from my grandparents’ old house. She’s fairly sharp, especially for her 80s, and she might remember what precipitated my grandparents’ apparently abrupt nuptials.

Now Laurel sits up and looks right at me. “I don’t think you should do that.”

“Why not?”

She shakes her head once, twice, three times. “You’re always complaining about how grief-stricken your dad is. How do you think Janie is feeling?”

Her words cut like the dullest knife in the drawer. The pain lingers, slicing through me slowly and leaving plenty of jagged edges.

“I’m not ‘always complaining’ about my dad,” I retort, still reeling at the implication that I’ve been whining about my father. That his grief is somehow not real and it’s just something I’ve made up for attention.

She looks like maybe she’s going to apologize, but she just shakes her head again. “Please don’t bother Janie with this. Everybody is working hard to heal. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what happened. Grandma and Grandpa fell in love and had a wonderful life together. Who cares about that other guy?”

I stare at her for a beat. It had certainly seemed like she cared, not even two minutes ago, when she was wildly entertained by the idea of my grandmother having sex on a cliff with some guy she met at a club.

I consider telling her I’ll let it go. But deep down, I know I won’t. I can’t.

So I brush off my hands. “I’m going to head back and grab a shower. I’ll see you later.” I stab the shovel into the sand and walk away before she has a chance to respond.

sixteen

The work week flies by. Maisie is right—we are incredibly busy, both with customers and with preparations for the author event on Wednesday.

I’m a little nervous to see Oliver on Monday, given what happened at Harbor Lights. When I get to work, he’s carrying five folding chairs in each arm like it’s nothing to the children’s story area where the book reading is going to take place. “I left a list for you on the counter,” he says over his shoulder as he passes.

I stash my cardigan and a protein bar in the break room and go check out the tasks he’s scrawled on a Shoreline notecard next to the register. Set up display of signed books, stock cookies in the café, call Ruggerio’s to ensure delivery of footlong subs, and on and on and on. The list is long, but I’m comfortable tackling everything on it.

The work keeps me busy for most of the day. At 2:30, Oliver stops running around the store like a madman and swings past the register, where I’ve just finished checking out a very polite teenaged boy who was buying the entire Eragon series.

“How’s it going?” Oliver’s gaze is inscrutable beneath the dark fringe of his eyelashes.

I’m pretty sure mine is not. Now that he’s standing before me, I want nothing more than to rehash the events of the weekend, to try to fix the mess I’ve made of things. I’ve never had a very good poker face, but I try to mask my feelings as much as possible. “So far so good,” I muster. “Lots to do, but we’ll be fine.”

He nods. “Maisie should be in soon. She had to go to the doctor this morning about her knee.”

“Oh no! I’m worried about her.”

“Me too,” he agrees. “She needs to take it easy. That’s why I’m trying to get as much done as possible before she gets here.”

“Of course.” My eyes sweep over his face, desperate for some indication that he’s still remembering what it felt like to kiss me. Because ever since I saw him this morning, that’s basically all I can think about.

“I should get back to work,” he says quietly, dropping his gaze to my lips for just a fraction of a second.

But it’s long enough that I notice. Long enough that it sends a wave of warmth through my entire body. A wave of hope, and of something a lot like lust.

“Sounds good,” I murmur.

Tuesday’s much the same. I manage to have several amazing conversations with customers who are looking for very specific sorts of beach reads. It gives me no small amount of joy when they all tell me my suggestions are “just right.”

Maisie’s hobbling around Shoreline all day, her knee in a brace. Oliver and I try to shoo her away about three thousand times, but she insists on helping get everything ready for Wednesday. Oliver reminds her that scrubbing the windows and dusting the tops of the bookshelves won’t matter for the reading, but Maisie is committed to everything being absolutely perfect. He and I exchange a look, then we grab the rags and cleaning solutions from her and get to work on it ourselves.

“Can you hand me that bottle?” I ask, teetering on tiptoe atop a stepladder that’s just a bit too short for me to comfortably reach the top shelf of the New Release section.

“How about I just switch with you?”