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“Theo,” she said.
“He’s running off to get your spare key.” Clara made it sound like a scandalous thing to do.
“He said he works in the front office,” Kristen said, stepping past her. She couldn’t look at Reuben, so she focused on Scott and Lena. “Hello, my family. Sorry I locked us out.”
“The door is locked,” Lena said, her voice loud and blunt.
Kristen grinned at her. “Yes,” she said. “It sure is. Is that a new backpack?”
“Mom bought it for the plane.” Lena looked down at the bright purple straps. She adored anything with purple and glitter, and Kristen wished she hadn’t locked the sticker book she’d bought for her granddaughter in the condo.
“Are you dating him?” Clara demanded, to which Jean burst out laughing.
Kristen almost twisted her compromised ankle, but thankfully, it held her. She gave Clara the best withering look she could. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“Grandma,” Lena said, whose attention had wandered somewhere else. “Come look at this gray cat.”
Later that night,Kristen finally entered her bedroom, the light off. She didn’t reach to flip it on, because she needed the dark, quiet space. She closed the door behind her, glad everyone had found an acceptable place to sleep.
Scott had ended up going to the lighthouse with Reuben and Jean. They had an extra room on the second floor, and everyone could feel and see that Clara and Scott weren’t really getting along.
That wasn’t right. It wasn’t that they argued or fought. They simply didn’t speak to one another at all. Clara spokeaboutScott, never truly looking him in the eye. Scott would say, “Clara has all of our important documents,” and smile at her while she refused to look at him.
Kristen didn’t know all the details and having Reuben and Jean living in the cove had taught her a boundary she couldn’t cross when it came to her children’s relationships. Scott and Clara got to decide how things functioned inside their marriage, and Kristen wasn’t going to say anything about it.
Lena had taken the second bedroom, just on the other side of the wall from Kristen’s, and Clara was once again sleeping on an air mattress in the formal dining room. Kristen had commissioned a barn door to section that room off from the rest of the condo to give her daughter some privacy, and it would be here in a couple of days.
Clara said she didn’t mind. Kristen had seen so many changes in her already, and while she’d thoroughly enjoyed this evening, their dinner, the conversations, and presenting Lena with the sticker book, her emotions had been through a garbage disposal.
She sighed as she sank onto the bed and removed her shoes. Theo had been fairly quick in getting the spare key to her condo, and she’d thanked him. He’d left without another word about synchronizing their walking schedules, but the thought hadn’t left Kristen’s mind, not even for a minute.
Her phone lit up the room, and Kristen looked at it. She’d put it on silent a while ago, and she hadn’t bothered to check it. The only people who texted her were her Seafaring Girls—and any others they’d adopted into the group.
Jean was on the string, and Kristen had it on her list of things to do to ask the girls if she could add Clara. Her daughter would need the support this summer, and so many of Kristen’s girls had been through hard things in the past several years.
Marriages, babies, divorces, new relationships, children graduating. The list went on and on.
She found over one hundred messages in the group thread from her girls, and she sighed as she tapped to read them. The arrow shot her back up to the last unread message, and she sucked in a breath as the words entered her brain.
Kristen was seen flirting with a very handsome older man outside her condo.
“Jean,” Kristen murmured, stunned her daughter-in-law had tattled on her.
The thread had exploded from there, with everyone chiming in to know who it was, what was said, done, the whole nine yards.
“My goodness,” she said, reading something she wished she could scrub from her eyeballs. “Alice.”
Her thumbs started flying across her screen.None of this is true. Yes, a man helped me after I twisted my ankle on the beach. It was and remains nothing.
She sent the message and pressed her fingers against the corner of her phone to take off the case. There, a slip of paper fluttered to her thigh, and she shined her phone on it, the blue light illuminating the numbers there.
The name.
Theo.
She’d spoken true—she had twisted her ankle on the beach. A man had helped her. It was nothing, and it remained nothing.
At least until she got up the nerve to text him to let him know what time she liked to go walking on the beach.
