The Sea Glass Cottage

by RaeAnne Thayne

  They didn’t just drop off the blankets and leave, as she had expected might happen. The other youth seemed familiar enough with the residents of the group home that soon they were laughing and talking together. Caitlin made friends with a woman in a wheelchair, whose speech she didn’t quite understand but who beamed and cuddled the flower blanket. Jake, she noticed, was soon deep in conversation with the man who had Down syndrome.

  All in all, Caitlin enjoyed herself far more than she had expected. Mimi was always doing nice things for other people and enlisting Caitlin’s help, and this gave her the same kind of warm glow.

  If all their activities were like this one, she might even consider coming again, even if the DNA test wasn’t a match to Pastor Jeff.

  After about forty-five minutes, Pastor Jeff started gesturing to the door to let the youth group know it was time to go. After goodbyes and more hugs, they all started walking back toward the church.

  “So. What did you think of your first meeting?” Pastor Jeff joined up to walk beside her.

  She couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to him, though she wished Jake were closer to be her backup. He had struck up a conversation with another guy who had band with them and they had fallen slightly behind.

  “It was fun. Thanks for letting us come along.”

  “You’re welcome anytime. We meet twice a month, the first and third Thursday nights.”

  “Thanks.” She paused, then knew she had to take a chance. She might not get a better opportunity. “So, Pastor Jeff. I think you knew my mom when you were younger.”

  In the fading light, she thought she saw a wary expression in his eyes. He looked a little trapped, kind of like Jake did whenever she asked him who his latest crush was.

  “I might have. I knew a lot of people back then. It’s no secret among the youth I work with that I was in and out of trouble a lot when I was your age and into my early twenties. I guess you could say I had kind of a misspent youth. But we’re all works in progress, right? God loves us, no matter what we’ve done.”

  She agreed about the works in progress, at least.

  “I guess.”

  “Who is your mom?”

  “Was. Natalie Harper.”

  They passed under a bright streetlight and she thought she saw sadness and something else, something like guilt, in his expression. “I thought so, when I saw you walk in. You are the spitting image.”

  “That’s what people tell me.”

  He shook his head, giving her a closer look. “I saw you a time or two when you were just a baby. I can’t believe so much time has passed.”

  He knew her when she was a baby. Her heartbeat accelerated. Did that mean he was her father?

  But wouldn’t someone who professed to be a man of God have stepped up to take care of his personal responsibilities, if he knew he had a child? Yeah, she’d only spent a few hours in his presence, but it was clear everyone in the youth group adored him. Would that kind of guy really have walked away from his daughter?

  “Do you...remember much about my mom?”

  They were almost back at the youth center and she was wishing she had waited until after everyone else left to ask questions about Natalie, especially when she saw sadness cross his features again.

  “Your mom. She was a bright star. Sweet. Too sweet for the road she chose to walk, you know?”

  Why had she? What had made a young woman from a loving home start using drugs and eventually throw everything away for them? That was the mystery that haunted her.

  “I grieved when she died,” Pastor Jeff said quietly. “I grieved hard. But in the end, her death saved me, I guess you could say. It made me see that I was headed for the same fate if I didn’t do something fast.”

  “You were her pot dealer.”

  He made a small sound, like an animal caught in a corner. “How do you know that?”

  “She left a diary,” Caitlin confessed.

  He was quiet for a long time. By now, they had reached the church and Pastor Jeff stood by the door while the other young people went inside. “I can’t deny it. I told you I had a misspent youth. I hurt people. People I cared about. You should know, I was your mother’s friend, too. I could justify and say it was only pot and I never supplied the hard stuff she eventually started using. I could also tell you I stopped dealing to her the first time she went into rehab, but by then she had found another source. She tried to get clean so many times. She wanted that for her and for you. You should know that.”

  Caitlin felt the familiar knot in her stomach whenever she thought about her mom, who had given up custody of her to Mimi and had died of an overdose just hours after being released from jail, which Caitlin had learned wasn’t uncommon for addicts who had been clean for a while, then abruptly returned to their old ways.

  “You were her pot dealer. Any chance you’re also my dad?”

  “What? No!” Pastor Jeff looked shocked and so completely horrified at the possibility, she wished she had never said anything.

  It was too late to back down now, though. “My mom left no information about my father and she never told anyone who he was, either. I’ve gone through her journals and other information I can find from that time and I’ve been trying to track down all the men she mentioned. That’s the real reason I came tonight.”

  “Ah.” He didn’t seem offended by her honesty.

  “You’re sure there’s no chance?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Caitlin. There was never anything like that between your mom and me. We had a friendship and, for want of a better word, for a time we had a business relationship. That was all.”

  She was more disappointed than she had expected to be by this development. “All right. Thanks for answering my questions and for letting my friend and I tag along tonight.”

  “You are still welcome anytime you want to come back. We would love to have you.” He was quiet and then gave her a piercing look that seemed to see deep inside her. “For the record, I would have been delighted to find out I was your father.”

  His voice was so kind and honest that she couldn’t help smiling back, even though her heart ached a little.

  He pointed to his collar. “And forgive me for being a little preachy for a minute. Even if you never find out who your earthly father is, don’t forget that you have Someone else who loves you and will never let you down.”

  “You have to say that. You’re a pastor.”

  “As a man who received a second chance I still don’t feel like I deserve, I would say it anyway,” he said quietly, then headed inside, where the rest of the youth group was probably wondering what was taking them so long.

  Caitlin lingered outside, listening to the sound of the sea and looking at the few stars she could see peppering the sky and, okay, feeling a little sad, until Jake came out.

  “No luck?” Jake asked as they both unlocked their bikes from the rack and started walking them back toward Harper Hill.

  “No. He seems like a really nice guy, but he said there’s no chance at all he’s my dad. Just like you suspected.”

  Jake wasn’t enthusiastic about any of the names on her potential dad list, but he must have heard the disappointment in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

  For some silly reason, she suddenly felt like crying. Instead, she shrugged. “At least it narrows the field a little.”

  “True. One more down. And tonight was actually pretty fun.”

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she said. “You’re the best BFF a girl could ever want.”

  Jake looked as if he wanted to say something, but she tripped over a bump in the sidewalk and stumbled. He reached to steady her, and by the time she found her balance again, the moment was gone.

  19

  OLIVIA

  She was so exhausted, she just wanted to put her head down on the kitc
hen table and take a nap before finishing her work with Harper Media.

  Just a few hours. Was that too much to ask?

  Olivia sighed. She didn’t have tons to do. She only had to power through for another hour or so. Then she could finally sleep.

  Running the garden center during the busy springtime and juggling responsibilities she couldn’t hand off to others for her own business, plus managing Juliet’s care, was turning her narcoleptic. She found herself falling asleep at odd moments of the day—including at 9:00 p.m., when she ought to have at least a few more good hours in her.

  She didn’t dare take any more caffeine or else she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, once she eventually found her way there. Using a trick she had stumbled onto in college, she stood up, set a timer on her phone for two minutes, and started doing jumping jacks to get her circulation flowing and wake up her brain.

  She had just started up when the back door opened and Caitlin walked inside.

  Her niece stopped and stared at Olivia, midjack, with her arms above her head.

  “Obviously I’m interrupting something.”

  Olivia lowered her arms. “No. I’m trying to stay awake so I can finish some work.”

  “Okay.” Caitlin looked at her like she was a few cans shy of a six-pack.

  Olivia sighed. Her niece’s attitude was really beginning to wear thin.

  “How was your evening?” she asked, her voice determinedly cheerful. “Did you enjoy the youth group?”

  “It was fine.” Caitlin walked across to the refrigerator and reached inside for a yogurt.

  She grabbed one of the spendy French kind in the cute jar that Olivia had bought for her own breakfast the next day, but she decided not to quibble.

  “Were a lot of your friends there?”

  “A few.”

  “And Jake Cragun went with you, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He seems like a nice kid,” Olivia said, undeterred by the monosyllables. “Are you two friends or are you a thing?”

  “First of all, I don’t know what being a thing means. We’re friends. That’s all. Second of all, mind your own freaking business.”

  Serves her right for trying to make conversation. “You’re right. It’s not my business. But you don’t have to snap at me. It was a simple question. That’s what humans do with each other. They interact. They ask questions. They show they care about each other’s lives.”

  Caitlin scoffed. “Except you don’t care. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  “You know that’s not true,” she said, fighting for calm. “Until a few months ago, everything was fine between us. I have no idea what I did to piss you off, but here’s another little communication tip. I can’t fix it if you won’t tell me.”

  She thought Caitlin might finally break her silence and reveal just why she seemed so filled with resentment, but she turned away.

  “Just because we’re related by blood doesn’t mean we have to be best friends.”

  Olivia frowned as the words struck a chord deep in her memory. She remembered Natalie saying something very much like that to her after their dad died, when Olivia had tried to reach out to her sister.

  She desperately had wanted to turn to Nat, the only one who might be able to truly understand the pain in her heart. Natalie had not been at all interested. She had addressed her own pain by spending more time with her friends, by staying out late, by drowning her sadness with first booze and then pot and then harder drugs.

  The memory hurt, especially knowing she would never be able to heal that rift with her sister that had grown between them before Nat died.

  Was she subconsciously trying to do that through Caitlin? Were her efforts to make everything right between her and her niece another way to keep a piece of her sister close?

  She was way too tired to figure this out tonight.

  “Is Mimi sleeping?” Caitlin asked stiffly. “I told her I would let her know how youth group went, but I don’t want to bug her if she’s already down for the night.”

  “I think so. Her light has been out for a few hours. She went for a drive today with Jake’s dad. I think it kind of wore her out.”

  She decided to try one more time to find common ground with Caitlin, or at least a topic they could discuss without sniping at each other.

  “While we’re talking about people who may or may not be a thing, do you think there’s any chance Juliet and Henry might be...involved?”

  Caitlin stared at her as if she had just pulled a chipmunk out of her ear. “Involved how?”

  “Are they dating?”

  “Ew! No!”

  “Why does that warrant an ew? Juliet is not exactly an old lady. She’s only in her fifties, which is the new thirty these days.”

  “Hate to break it to you, but thirty is old, too.”

  Olivia, who would be thirty in only a few months, decided not to be offended. She did feel old sometimes, as if life were passing her by.

  “Why do you care whether people are seeing each other? Maybe you need to focus on your own love life and stop worrying about everyone else.”

  “I don’t have a love life. Why else would I be so interested?” Sadly, there was more truth to that than she wanted to admit. That kiss she had shared with Cooper, the one she couldn’t get out of her head, was the most excitement she’d had in months. Much longer, actually, which was one of the main reasons she had broken off her engagement to Grant.

  “Mimi and Henry are not dating. I’m sure of it. Lilianne, that’s Jake’s mom and Henry’s wife, was one of Mimi’s best friends.”

  Olivia did not see that Lilianne had anything to do with the situation, considering the other woman had been gone for years, but since Caitlin was talking to her without yelling, she decided not to argue with her.

  “I knew her. Henry’s wife, I mean. I always liked her.”

  A massage therapist, Lilianne had been one of those New Age, bean sprout types who would have fit in well in Seattle, she remembered. She had always been kind to Olivia when she would babysit for Jake.

  “She was super nice. Everyone was really sad when she died. Jake still misses her a lot, though he doesn’t talk about it much.”

  “It’s tough to lose a parent at his age,” she said. “I still miss my dad, your grandpa Steve, all the time and he died right before my thirteenth birthday.”

  “I don’t miss my mom,” Caitlin said, her voice hardening. “I barely even remember her.”

  Before Olivia could confess she missed Natalie as much as she missed Steve, Caitlin stood up abruptly. “I’m going to bed,” she said, tossing the yogurt container in the bin.

  She turned to go, but as she did, her backpack fell on the floor and the contents spilled out.

  Caitlin swore an oath that Olivia had a feeling she would never have said if Juliet were there, then bent down to pick them up. Olivia knelt to help. They appeared to be schoolbooks and folders, except for one pink-covered book with a gold spine.

  “What’s this?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  But it was too late. Olivia recognized it. Every year for Christmas, Juliet would give both her and Natalie identical new journals for the year. She remembered this one from the year her father died, when she had poured out all her sadness and grief, her feelings of being abandoned by Juliet, too.

  “Is this my journal?”

  “It’s my mom’s,” Caitlin said, snatching it away from her.

  “Where did you get it? Did my mom give it to you?”

  Caitlin said nothing, which made Olivia suspect the girl had found it on her own. She wasn’t sure Juliet would have wanted Caitlin reading her mother’s thoughts and emotions around that time. Natalie had been wild before Steve’s death, but she seemed to have lost all restraint afterward, staying out for
days at a time and coming home drunk or stoned.

  She’d become pregnant with Caitlin sometime in the next five or six months and had given birth the following year.

  Would Nat have written any of that in her journal? If so, Olivia wasn’t sure it was appropriate reading material for a fifteen-year-old girl. She didn’t quite know how to navigate these treacherous waters. Not when she and Caitlin were barely on speaking terms.

  “You know,” she said carefully, “if you want to know about your mother, you can ask me or Mimi. I said that before to you and I meant it. We could tell you more than you will read in her journal. Those are her thoughts, maybe. Her perspective. And that’s great. But you could also ask others who loved her.”

  “You didn’t love her,” Caitlin snapped. “You hated her. That’s what she said in her journal. You told her you didn’t want to be her sister anymore.”

  The accusation sliced through her, sharp and vicious. She could remember that very conversation, right here in this kitchen, those ugly words spilling out between them.

  She closed her eyes, guilt and sorrow a tangled mess in her heart. “I did say that. I said a lot of things in anger that year. I would say I had reasons but none of that matters now. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t true when I said it and it’s not true now. I adored Natalie. She was my only sister, and for a long time, I wanted to be just like her.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t have bothered to tell her that when she was alive. When it might have made a difference,” Caitlin snapped, then scooped up her bag along with the journal and rushed out of the kitchen.

  As soon as she left, Olivia closed her laptop, knowing she wouldn’t get any work done now, when her heart was aching with memories of the sister she had loved and how everything had changed after their father died.

  20

  OLIVIA

  She was a freaking genius.

  To be fair, Cooper had actually been the one to suggest she hire his sister to help out at the garden center, but Olivia had been the one who had instantly known it would be a fantastic idea.

  She had only been on the job a few days, but it was already clear Melody was a natural and Juliet should have hired her years ago.