by Serena Bell
“So,” Auburn said, as she picked up their plates. “When will you two be back in Tierney Bay?”
She hadn’t made a general announcement to her guests about what was going to happen to Beachcrest. She’d wait until—well, until the documents were signed, she guessed.
Dewann and Rick exchanged glances. “Well, funny you should ask. We, er, bought a place.”
“You—”
“A little house. A shack, really. Out a ways, just off 101. So we won’t be coming to Beachcrest anymore. Because, well, we’ll live here.”
“Together,” Rick said.
Auburn didn’t let her surprise or pleasure show. If she made a big fuss, she’d embarrass them both. She just said, “Well, congratulations, then.”
She was about to say, Would you still come have breakfast for old time’s sakes? And then she remembered. It kept slipping away and surging back, the realization that it was all ending, that there would be no more Beachcrest breakfasts, or anything else. No old time’s sakes. No memories to revisit, no people coming back to hold weddings after they’d met here, or to commemorate anniversaries after they’d married here. No one renewing vows for 60ths after celebrating 10ths.
Not ever.
And the weight of it threatened for a moment to crush her.
Then she saw the way Dewann was looking at Rick, and Rick was looking back at Dewann. It was pure joy and devotion in their eyes—a kind of peace and acceptance and freedom that she hadn’t seen very many times on their faces.
And everything shifted, like a spell had been lifted.
Or cast, maybe. Like some magic had been done.
She took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in days.
“It’s not just about me, is it?”
“What isn’t?” Rick asked, understandably confused.
“Beachcrest. Keeping it. Selling it.”
Dewann tilted his head, listening patiently.
“It’s about you guys. And Carl. And Deja and the others … Priya saying this was the best place to have a writing retreat.”
And Trey, she thought, but didn’t say it aloud. She wasn’t even a hundred percent sure what she meant by including him. Only that—well, if there had ever been a person who needed Beachcrest, it was Trey Xavier. She hoped—
She hoped that he would still laugh sometimes and eat the occasional biscuit or hot dog. And maybe he would think about her when he did.
Even though she was still angry at him and hurt. For being so stubborn and not having faith that she could take care of herself and know what she wanted …
And for ruining what they had.
She was so, so angry at him for that.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was—
The point was that she couldn’t just give up. She’d thought she could, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t because Beachcrest belonged to her, and to Dewann and to Rick and to Carl and to Deja and Aria and Priya and Lindsey and to everyone who had ever come to stay there. To Trey. So even if it looked impossible, even if time had run out and Trey and Doug and everyone else had given up, she had to try to save it.
For them.
She took a deep breath.
“I have an idea.”
40
“You okay, man?”
It was Monday, the Monday, early afternoon, and the voice was Doug’s. Trey lifted his head from where it rested in his hands, his elbows on the wide oak of his ridiculously over-the-top desk, and looked into the eyes of his chief operating officer.
“Sure,” Trey lied.
It had been jarring, the switch back to his own life.
Sitting in traffic on the way from the airport to Home Base’s offices, his phone in his hand, he was aware of the last of the languor slipping from his limbs. At some point, without his noticing, the freeways and roads of San Francisco had become crowded and hostile, Uber drivers darting into and out of traffic, his own driver cursing grumpily. Every email bumping his adrenaline up. His brain didn’t want to do it; didn’t want to shift from one mode—the warmth and generosity of Auburn’s existence—to another—his, amped up and barren.
He’d been sitting at his desk all morning, waiting to feel like his work mattered, but mostly he’d thought about how it felt to have sand between his toes, the heat of a beach fire on his face, Auburn’s body wrapped around his in all the possible ways, losing himself completely in the sensation of it.
“I’ve got the purchase and sale for you to sign,” Doug said.
Although he’d been waiting all day for this moment—the moment that had been approaching with the inevitability of a head-on collision, for hours—he still felt the painful drop of lead in his gut.
Doug laid the document—a sheaf of white decorated with fluorescent sticky-note flags—on the desk in front of Trey.
He leafed through it, but the words blurred and wriggled. He was just turning pages, not making any sense out of what he saw. “You looked at it? Legal looked at it? It’s in order?”
Doug nodded. “They’ve signed. Carl’s signed. All you need to do is sign where it’s flagged.”
“And then it’s done. Beachcrest is gone, Home Base is saved.”
“Then it’s done.”
He found the first line awaiting his signature. Opened his pen, set the tip of the pen to the page. Signed.
But when he came to the second, he set the pen back down on the desk, closed his eyes, and rested his head in his hands again.
“You want to tell me about her?” Doug asked quietly.
“Who?” Trey looked up.
“Who do you think, Xavier? The woman who’s making you consider throwing all this away.” Doug gestured around them, and Trey obediently looked, but couldn’t make sense of ‘all this.’ All what? The posturing furniture? The money whose purpose was to mint more money? Building and building and building, one block on another—for what? Like a kid who tried to build a tower to reach the moon? “She must be something.”
“She—”
He could still see her face, so angry, so hurt.
“I ruined her life.”
“If her personal happiness hinged on a hotel that didn’t belong to her, she sort of had it coming.”
Anger rose up in him, hot and fierce. “She didn’t deserve any of this. Not one little bit. She’s too good for this kind of bullshit. And I could have been honest with her from the beginning, I could have told her there was no way this could work out—instead I played a game with her—to get what I wanted. To keep from losing money so I could make more money.”
“That’s what you do, Trey. You make money. And then you make more money. For your stakeholders. For your investors. For your employees. That’s your job. And speaking of your job, once you get this thing signed, let’s talk about what we’re going to do next. I want in, whatever it is.”
“Even though I almost blew this.”
“You always had it in hand.”
It was the exact opposite of the truth. From the moment he’d seen Auburn Campbell in Bob’s Tavern, he’d never had it in hand. It had been completely and totally out of his control and he’d been profoundly and thoroughly out of his depth—
Yet it had been, quite possibly, the best week of his life.
“Yes. I want to work with you on whatever you do next. I’m thinking something else in the same space. More real estate tech. Or health care tech, although I feel like that’s more tapped out. Or—I’m willing to look at block chain if you are. This time I want in, though, from the ground floor.”
“You can be in for whatever you’ve got,” Trey said.
“Excellent. So. Sign this fucker and we’ll get on with it. Make you a billionaire next time, right? Unicorn status. Put you on the map. Get your name in those ‘biggest deals of’ or ‘highest valuation’ lists. Just pick up the goddamn pen, man. Pull yourself together and pick up the goddamn pen.”
He did. He opened it. Set the tip on the page and signed again.
“
Two down. Forty-seven more to go,” Doug said.
“Are there really that many signatures?”
“No. Keep fucking signing.”
On the desk, Trey’s phone began to buzz. Instinctively, he reached for it.
The number was unfamiliar but the name he’d attached it to made his whole body buzz at the same frequency as the device.
Auburn.
“Don’t get that,” Doug said. “Finish signing.”
He almost obeyed. Because there was no point, because this was where they were now. This was what had to be done, and anything that chipped away at his resolve would only make life more difficult for all of them.
It quit ringing, and he exhaled and signed the third line.
And then it started again.
Auburn.
He picked it up and answered. “Xavier speaking.”
He heard her intake of breath and then she said, “I want to make an offer for Beachcrest.”
41
She’d handed the phone off to her lawyer, right away, even though he’d said, “Wait—”
The lawyer named the number, then began making a case for why Trey should accept the offer, but Trey cut him off.
“I accept.”
“You accept what?” Doug demanded.
“Auburn’s buying Beachcrest.”
“No,” Doug said. “Royal Life is going to fucking kill me. They’re never going to do business with us again.”
“I don’t care,” Trey said.
“Excuse me?” the lawyer asked.
“Sorry,” Trey said.
“You need to think about this for a minute,” Doug said.
“I don’t,” Trey said, and then, “Sorry,” again, to the lawyer. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where she got the money for the down payment—”
The lawyer made a sharp noise of disgust.
“No, I suppose you really can’t,” Trey concluded for himself.
He didn’t care. He shouldn’t care. Even if it was Patrick who’d given her the money, he had no right to care.
He told the lawyer to fax over the P&S. He talked Doug off the ledge, and got him, still miffed but understanding that there was zero chance he’d change Trey’s mind, out of his office. And then he was on Beachcrest’s Facebook page, digging for a post, any post, that would fill in the missing pieces.
How the hell had she come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars over the weekend?
He found the digital trail without too much trouble. And the whole idea was sheer brilliance. Of course it was. Of course she’d figured it out. He couldn’t believe he’d ever doubted her.
In the end, she’d done it as a Bootstrapper campaign, after all. A series of incentives, the granddaddy of which was an all-expenses paid weekend-long “experience weekend” with the romance writers. Romance campfires, beach bike rides, cookies and tea, signed books, goody baskets full of swag, writing lessons and workshops. And he could see from the trail of shares leading in both directions that Deja, Aria, Lindsey, and Priya had each placed several Facebook ads and pimped the getaway to all their readers, that it had gone viral in the romance community. There were thousands of comments on the Facebook posts, and nearly that many contributions on the Bootstrapper page. She had enough for a down payment and she’d be able to do a kitchen renovation.
He hadn’t ruined everything. Something good had come out of her association with him, after all. She’d been able to turn their week together into the thing that had saved Beachcrest for her. And—more to the point—on her own terms. All he was going to do, in the end, was sign the closing documents with (a very willing) Carl.
Technically he didn’t have to go back to Tierney Bay to do that. He could sign the deal from San Fran. But Brynn’s garage door was acting up, and Carl was still not supposed to lift anything heavy, so on Tuesday he flew back to Tierney Bay and helped Brynn replace one of the big springs in the garage door mechanism, trying not to injure either himself or his curious nephews in the process.
Brynn, of course, only wanted to talk about Beachcrest and Auburn.
“It was really clever, what she did, wasn’t it?”
Genius, really, but he just grunted a yes, his attention focused on the spring.
“You can pretend you don’t care, but I know you do,” Brynn said.
At that, he put his tools down and turned to her. On her, really. “What do you want from me?”
Like a chain reaction, Brynn rounded on her boys, who were listening to the adult conversation with the rapt attention of small people who have no idea what’s being said, only that it might contain a germ of scandal. “Go. Go—have some screen time.”
Their eyes got enormous at the sudden boon.
“Quick! Before I change my mind!”
They ran.
Trey felt twice as exposed with them gone. Like they’d been the only thing protecting him from his sister’s wrath.
Or maybe the truth.
Brynn pushed a finger toward his chest. “I want you to admit that you care for her. That you love her. No,” she said. “I want you to tell her that you love her. That you’re miserable without her. That you want her back.”
“She’s better off without me. And I’m better off without her.”
“Neither of those things is true. I saw you guys together. I saw how you were with her. You’re both better together.”
He shrugged, because it made his chest hurt less. “She definitely didn’t think so. She called me an asshole and a control freak and told me to go away and not come back. And she has a point. What makes me better than her ex?”
“The fact that you love her and want to do right by her?”
“Don’t you think he thought he did?”
“Trey,” Brynn said quietly.
“Don’t. Please, don’t.”
“Someone needs to, dude. Someone needs to tell you you’re being—”
She hesitated.
“An idiot?” he suggested, since that was what her expression seemed to be saying.
She shook her head, and the scorn softened into something much more like pity. He wasn’t sure he liked it better. “More like a wounded bear.”
“A wounded bear,” he repeated.
“Not to point out the obvious, dude, but Mom’s death did a number on you. It wasn’t your fault, you know.”
What? “I never said it was.”
Her gaze softened further. “No. But you’ve always thought it.”
He was shaking his head, but the world was already tilting on its axis.
“You always make it about Dad. Dad not taking care of her, Dad not pulling his weight. But I saw you, Trey. I saw you trying to pick up the slack. Doing all the work in the yard. Around the house. Repairing, cleaning, trimming, tidying—fixing. Fixing fucking everything like if you just worked hard enough, you could be dad and take the weight off her.”
It was a sneaker wave, what she’d said, the kind that crawled up the beach and snatched your feet out from under you. The kind that dragged you into a riptide.
He was still shaking his head.
“Trey. I saw. And then you did it again. To Karina. If you worked hard enough, if you built an empire that couldn’t be touched, if you poured enough money into the life you were leading with her, nothing bad could ever happen to her.”
“Except me,” he said. “I happened to her.”
Brynn glared at him.
“Mom loved Dad, you know. I mean, there’s no accounting for taste, but she did. And the fact that he never had any money didn’t bother her in the slightest. The thing that bothered her was the fact that he was so busy with all his scheming and risk-taking that he wasn’t there. She just wanted him to be more present. And maybe if he had been—if he hadn’t been so busy trying to fix everything—then he would have been able to really, well, fix everything.
“The only thing bad about you, Trey,” Brynn said, tears filling her eyes, “is that you think we want what you can give us. Yo
u don’t understand that what we want is you.”
“But she doesn’t,” he insisted wildly, because his own eyes were filling with tears and he couldn’t, couldn’t cry—hadn’t, not even when his mother had died. “She can’t. Not after what I did. I almost took everything away from her.”
Brynn sighed deeply. She brushed a hand over her eyes. “When she was yelling at you. Why do you think that was? Was it because she thought you were taking everything away from her?”
Was it? He heard the echo of Auburn’s words, suddenly: Oh, my God, is that really how you see this? That this is all about you and what you did? Do you have any idea what an asshole that makes you?
He was starting to get the idea.
“You know what?” Brynn said. “Don’t answer that. I know the answer. You know the answer. I don’t want to play Socrates. Just—man the fuck up and figure it out.”
A faint thread of hope, like the first strand in a new web, strung itself through him.
“How do I—how do I fix it?”
“Oh, God, Trey, you’re hopeless.”
Which was funny because that little thread of hope was growing stronger every minute. Something he could hang onto.
Brynn shrugged. “If you were anyone else trying to win your woman back, I’d say you needed to make a grand gesture. Fly her to Paris, buy her a rock and get down on one knee. But in your case, you’ve got to quit showing love with money. You need to do something else. Something that speaks her language.”
“So you’re saying … you’re saying I need the opposite of a grand gesture. I need …”
I deserve someone who treats me like a human being with free will—
He thought about it a moment, and then he knew. Not exactly what he was going to do, but the spirit he had to do it in. She’d showed him, after all, over and over again. She’d thought she was convincing him to love an inn, but in truth, she’d taught him much more than that. How a simple faith in community and friendship and family could buoy people up. How a little bit of space to breathe could make it so much easier to be human.
How small—sometimes tiny—acts of kindness and love made people’s days or changed their lives.
