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To save my sanity, I decided not to dwell on the seaweed scent or the butterfly painting and to throw my energy into the task at hand instead. “All this is going to the storage unit?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll load up my truck and make as many trips as necessary. Maggie can join us when she gets here. Now, grab a box and let’s go.”
I picked up the box closest to me and headed for the door. Dez followed close behind. We were in the hallway when above our heads came a high-pitched honking noise, sharp and staccato. It was quickly followed by creaking. Then silence. Dez’s gaze shot upward. Mine, too.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Maggie would tell you it’s sparrows in the attic.”
“And you? What would you tell me?”
“It’s my little ghost, of course. Now, come along. We have much to do.”
The ghost. Of course.
Only… I didn’t think ghostswalked. They floated. Or at least that’s what movies had always led me to believe.
So I didn’t understand why the creaking sound in the attic sounded just like footsteps.
CHAPTER 9MAGGIE
By five thirty, my bed was strewn with clothes, tried on and then dismissed. Every time I questioned why I was having trouble picking out something to wear tonight, I could hear Donovan’s voice in my ear, sayingsomething more intimate. It was followed quickly by a rush of heat flooding my cheeks, my veins.
Unbidden, Delaney’s words from this morning came drifting back to me.
We all thought you were meant to be.
At one point, I had thought so, too. I believed my love for him was enough to stop him from enlisting in the Coast Guard right after he graduated high school, so impatient to get started that he hadn’t even considered applying for the Coast Guard Academy.
My love hadn’t been enough, though.
I recognized now it had been too much to ask of him. I’d been only sixteen at the time, too young to understand that sometimes love meant letting people go so they could follow their dreams. No matter how much those dreams terrified you.
In order to save what was left of my threadbare sanity, I told myself to stop thinking of tonight as a date and start thinking of it as dinner. Dinner with an old friend. That was it. That was all.
With that mindset, choosing an outfit was easy. I grabbed a pair of jeans off the pile on the bed and shimmied into them. Striding to the closet, I yanked a blouse off a hanger and pulled it on over my head. The shirt was loose and flowy and utterly feminine with its ruffled cap sleeves and delicate embroidered flowers. With a dressier pair of sandals, the outfit could work for both a casual restaurant, something a bit fancier, or even—I gulped—something intimate.
In the full-length mirror propped against my bedroom wall, I applied a thin coat of lip gloss. I’d gone simple with my makeup. Just mascara, the gloss, and some concealer to hide my exhaustion. My hair was down tonight, a rarity, and it fell to mid-back, the curls soft and shiny. I desperately needed a haircut but had been too busy to fit one into my schedule.
How had I allowed that to happen? Who’s too busy to get ahaircut? I sighed, feeling annoyed with myself all of a sudden. The headache I’d been dealing with had abated some, but I could still feel it pulsing gently, like a dormant volcano waiting to erupt.
As I turned away from the mirror, my gaze fell on the framed photos atop my dresser. I smiled at Noah’s graduation picture, at his toothy, droll grin. Oh, how I missed him. I had been so hyper-focused on raising him up right and good and fulfilled that it felt an awful lot like grief when he went off to college.
Because I’d hated coming home to a quiet house, I worked overtime at the coffee shop and stepped up my activity in various clubs and organizations around town, never turning down an opportunity to support my neighbors or this community. Doing so helped fill an ever-present emptiness within me—a chasm that had developed not long after my mama disappeared and deepened when Noah went away.
Being busy, super busy, was the only way I knew how to cope.
I let my attention linger on one of the few photos I had of my mother—all the others had been lost in the fury of Ivan. Mama sat on the beach, awash in a golden glow, her face turned toward the setting sun, her eyes closed, her expression utterly peaceful. I sat at her side, a plastic shovel in hand, my wild curls standing on end, despite the pink barrette in my hair that tried to hold them down. In the photo, I was watching her, my gaze adoring. With a deep ache in my chest, I looked away from her serene face and pulled open the bedroom door.
Ava was curled up in a corner of the couch, reading the Magpie’s employee manual. She glanced up when I walked into the kitchen. “Well, hello, pretty lady!”
I reached for a glass in the cabinet. “Thanks, Ava.”
As I took the water pitcher from the fridge, I noticed my hand trembling, a slight waver. Whether it was my blood pressure or nerves about tonight, I wasn’t sure. With the increase in headaches this past week, I needed to call my doctor for a medication adjustment. And start hauling myself more often over to Red’s to get in better shape.
“Do you know where Donovan is taking you?” Ava asked.
“Nope.”
