Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Then I pack my things, move them to my new place, and head out to the airfield, doing my best not to look at the café on my way through town.
She’s still there. Somehow, I just know it.
I can feel her, like a phantom limb my mind refuses to accept is gone for good.
Maybe she’s not. Maybe you can try to explain yourself again. Maybe if she knew why you were such a broken kid back then in the first place…
The thought makes my skin go cold and acid rise in my throat.
I can’t do that; I can’t share that part of my past.
There has to be another way.
But as I collect Hunter from the airport, talk business over dinner at a local bistro, and thankfully discover he’s the perfect mixture of clever and charming to win over my family, I can’t think of anything else that might help Sully understand.
That’s what I want most—for her to understand. Yes, forgiveness and a second chance would be a miracle I’d never take for granted, but if I can just make her understand, maybe she won’t hate me.
Or hate herself for falling for a bad man.
That’s what tore me apart the most, seeing the depth of her disappointment and knowing at least part of it was for herself. I was her first love, and in her eyes, I was a monster. It’s the kind of experience that makes it hard to trust yourself and even harder to fall in love again.
And I don’t want that for her. If she won’t let me love her, I want her to find happiness with someone else…as long as I never have to see them together.
Just thinking about it makes me want to jab out my own eyes.
Instead, once I’ve settled Hunter on the yacht, I return to my tiny cottage on the bluff and sit outside in the bitter wind, writing a letter I hope I’ll have the courage to send.
chapter 28
GERTIE
It’s been one hell of a week in Sea Breeze.
The drama is off-the-charts, even by our angsty, conflict-prone standards.
Weaver starts Monday off with a bang by attempting to sell Tripp Seafood to some corporate raider from New York, only for the deal to quickly go south once the dirty secrets behind their success come to light. At least, I’m guessing that’s what happened.
Weaver and I still aren’t talking, but it’s the most logical explanation for a quickly-executed reallocation of assets that effectively ends the Tripps’ fifty-year reign of terror overnight.
The Tripps who wanted to stay in the lobster business were able to buy their boats and go fully indie, but at least half the family chose to take the money and run.
Some of them, literally.
Mark disappeared overnight, along with several of his cousins. They’re allegedly going south to start a brewery in Massachusetts, but he didn’t share his plans with me. Mark clearly doesn’t care for me much anymore. Even when he showed up at Elaina’s Monday morning to give me the information on the crew he’d hired to work my boat until the end of December, he was curt and distant.
But then, I knew who was really responsible for hiring the workers and arranging to pay them from an account he’d set up in town.
It was Weaver, taking care of me even though we’re not even friends anymore.
When we pass each other in town, he doesn’t look at me, and I do my best not to look at him. But I fail. A lot.
He’s just so damned beautiful, and so…mine.
I tell myself he’ll stop feeling like mine with time, and that losing what we had will be easier once he leaves town, but I suspect I’m lying to myself. This will never be easy, but hopefully someday it will become bearable.
As it stands now, I’m barely surviving.
I sleep all the time, only emerging from my bed to visit Gramps and clean the house for his homecoming on Friday.
An in-home care nurse shows up at the door Thursday night to help with that, along with a hospital bed we set up on the ground floor by the fire for Gramps. I don’t even bother asking who sent her or who is paying her salary for the next month. I already know, and I’m grateful.
I’m also angry.
This has to end. How am I supposed to start getting over him when he won’t stop trying to take care of me?
In all the bustle of collecting Gramps from the hospital and getting him settled, Friday passes a bit more swiftly than the days before. We share a healthy meal of grilled chicken and roasted sweet potatoes with Mia, the nurse, and Gramps spends the entire meal flirting like his heart didn’t almost explode less than a week ago.
But Mia, an older woman with sparkling green eyes and a laugh that makes our drafty house feel warmer, doesn’t seem put off by it. If anything, she seems as taken with Gramps as he is with her, and I head back to my apartment suspecting I’m soon going to feel like a third wheel around here.