“I understand,” Julia said.
“After the first twelve months, there is no contract in place holding you here. We simply ask for the long notice at that point.” She passed Julia the pen. “You’ve had a chance to read over it?”
“Yes,” Julia said, though she hadn’t paid much attention the contract Vivian had sent earlier that week. She wasn’t going to back out of this now. She didn’t have anything left in Manhattan, and that chilling thought ran through her as she signed her name on the lines Vivian indicated.
The blonde woman scooped up the papers the moment Julia finished and tucked them neatly into a folder. Her smile seemed more relaxed now, and Julia looked between it and the woman’s name tag, pinned neatly to her red blazer.
She worked for the Historical Society, and she was the contact should Julia and her partner need anything at The Lighthouse Inn.
“All right.” Another sigh leaked from between her lips as she stood. “You’re in. Done. I’ve put hard copies of the guest guide, policies, and anything else you need in your room. You’ve got the digital copies. I’ll let you get moved in and settled. You and Maddie will be able to sit down and meet at your earliest convenience, and I trust that when I see you both again, you’ll have a plan for the restoration and clean up that will get us open by November first.”
“Yes,” Julia said, standing too. “Thank you.”
Vivian looked past Julia’s outstretched hand, her smile widening and relaxing. She clearly saw someone she liked much more than Julia. “Oh, here’s Maddie now.”
With one painful thump of her heart, Julia turned toward the doorway. She took in the elegant, beautiful woman standing there, and her mind whirred as she placed once-familiar features.
Those eyes…so bright and so blue.
That heart-shaped face…could wear such a look of disgust and disdain, Julia remembered.
The blonde hair that held more gray than it once had…but still looked perfectly styled and sophisticated.
“Maddie, this is your partner,” Vivian said, her voice warbling like a doorbell that needed a new battery. It had high tones and low tones in Julia’s mind as a wail started somewhere inside her brain.
Vivian made it to a spot between the two women, which put the unsuspecting woman in a precarious position. She didn’t even know it, if her smile was any indication.
But Julia had placed the identity of the woman in front of her, and she literally could not think of anyone worse.
Madelynne Lancaster.
She obviously recognized Julia too, because she cocked her forty-nine-year-old hip and folded her arms, as if the two of them had been transported thirty-five years into the past.
Maddie scanned Julia from the top of her head to the high heels, and just like she’d always been dismissed as insignificant, Julia could see the scoff forming in Maddie’s mouth before it even came out.
Vivian didn’t seem to notice, because she simply said, “This is Julia Harper.” She looked at Julia, her smile almost blinding—if Julia could look at anyone but the woman who’d made her teenage life a living nightmare.
“Julia, this is Madelynne Lancaster. You two are going to be co-caretakers of The Lighthouse Inn.”
Madelynne Lancaster. The woman whose boyfriend Julia had stolen and then made her husband. At the time, she’d felt nothing but vindicated. She’d gotten the last laugh. After a long string of losses, she’d finally won.
There was no way she could live with and work with Maddie for the next twelve months. Absolutely no way.
The silence stretching between the two women held a charge that could’ve called lightning from the sky, and it only increased with every passing second while each woman waited for the other to break and say hello first.
Sneak Peek! THE LIGHTHOUSE INN Chapter Two
Madelynne Lancaster adjusted the designer purse on her arm, almost arranging it as if she could so easily order all the things in her life that had gone askew. At least she’d gotten to keep the bag in the divorce.
Disgust made her upper lip curl, though it wasn’t for the woman in front of her. Julia Harper. Once, Julia Brunner, as that had been Alan’s last name. She wondered why Julia had given up the name she’d fought so hard to get.
Maddy had often thought about what her life would be like had she managed to hold onto Alan, and it had never ended up like this. She blinked, and the past twenty-five years vanished into dust—the kind that made her throat stiffen and narrow until she began to cough.
“Hello, Julia,” she said at the tail end of the noise, almost like she was trying to disguise the words into something else.
Julia visibly flinched, as if Maddy had flicked ice water in those milk chocolate eyes. Maddy knew the color well, for she’d made white milk into brown with chocolate syrup hundreds of times. Her son and daughter knew how to wheedle her to get what they wanted, and she automatically raised her chin as if she needed to defy them in this moment.
“Maddy.” Julia blinked so furiously that Maddy wondered if she had an eye condition. She flicked a glance at Vivian, the woman she’d interviewed with. Tension rode in her face as an unwanted passenger, but she smoothed it away easily.
She reached up to touch the black glasses that gave her face some personality. “We’re all ready for Julia here to move in.” She spoke with the radiance of the sun, as if moving into a tiny, hundred-square-foot room should be the stuff middle aged women should dream of.
Vivian half-turned toward Julia. “We’ll help you get that done, and then I’m sure you and Maddy will need to get some groceries. You both have the checklist, and I’ll leave you two to get to work.”
“Are we to begin today?” Julia asked, getting to her feet. She wore a darling blouse the color of vanilla bean ice cream, complete with the dark specks of real vanilla bean. A black pencil skirt. The perfect heels in a hue of white that Maddy could only label as freshly churned butter. The kind one might find at a posh farmer’s market here on the island, perhaps over on the Wainscott side, where the filthy rich lived.
Maddy worked hard not to curl her lip now. She’d just returned from that wealthy strip of Nantucket, because her father lived there. She’d borrowed his car to return to The Lighthouse Inn, but she kept her mouth buttoned about it right now. She couldn’t fathom a situation where she’d willingly get in a vehicle with Julia Harper. To have to sit so close—almost shoulder-to-shoulder—argue about the radio station, and…talk.
No, no. She did not want to talk to Julia. Not about anything of consequence, at least.
Julia also reached for a bag that had cost near four-digits, and she too looped hers over her forearm. Another blink, and Maddy saw that her life with Alan wouldn’t have been any different than the one she’d shared with Christopher Lancaster for so long.
Twenty-four years long. More than half of her years on this planet had been dedicated to that man.
Familiar bitterness coated her tongue and seeped down her throat. She would not attempt to clear it away, for she’d done that in the past, and it hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked.
“Your official start date is Tuesday, as agreed,” Vivian said, tugging at her crimson blazer. “Maddy took the blue room. That puts you in the garden room, Julia. It’s this way.” She went around the check-in desk, and Maddy tried very hard not to notice the stacks of folders there—what were in those?—or get too close to Julia.
The scent of the other woman’s perfume lingered in the air behind her, and it smelled like roses, fresh air, and money.
Maddy frowned, feeling all the lines in her face she didn’t like deepen and groove through her skin. By the time the trio of women had reached the bottom of the stairs the led down from the lobby area of the inn, she’d smoothed the wrinkles away as much as possible. Her bedroom sat down the hall and around the corner to the left. She’d chosen it, because Vivian had told her she could have either of the rooms down here, and the door to the blue room couldn’t be seen from this vantage point.<
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To her right, however, the door to the garden room stood in plain sight. For some reason, she hadn’t liked that. In her mind, if a guest came looking for one of the caretakers, they’d go to the first door they saw—and that was now Julia’s room.
The blue room wasn’t nearly as cobalt as the name made it sound. A pair of frilly curtains Maddy had already removed and a lot of paint she would soon had given the room its name. She’d inspected the garden room too, and it actually had a great window she’d been hesitant to give up.
Vivian moved to the right seamlessly, and she already had the door open by the time Maddy realized she’d fallen behind. Both she and Julia watched her take the five strides from the bottom of the steps to the now-gaping door, and heat crept into Maddy’s face for some reason. She was dressed far more casually than Julia, and the other woman’s eyes scanned down to her sandals and back to her scalp as quickly as a price-reader at the market.
Maddy wasn’t sure if she was the one out of place, or if Julia was. Vivian also wore a skirt, and that made Maddy’s navy cotton shorts seem downright criminal.
“We think you two are the perfect pair,” Vivian said, her tone bordering on gushing now. “Maddy has experience in the kitchen, but so does Julia. The two of you can work out the responsibilities however you’d like. Of course, only Maddy will be able to operate any sea vessels, and it’s obvious that Julia will do the marine life classes. But the budgeting, the food, the day-to-day scheduling, you two can work those things out among yourselves.”
She beamed at Julia, the brightness of it bouncing all around the garden room. The walls here boasted flowery wallpaper in a shade of pink that hadn’t been used in thirty years. Perhaps longer. It also looked like it had once been white behind those blooms but had seen so much in the past several decades that it simply couldn’t hold onto the innocence of that color.
The same blond wood as in the blue room stared up from the floor, and Julia got a billowing, gauzy set of curtains covering the window that was twice as big as the one in Maddy’s room.
A single door led into the bedroom, and a single door stood open to reveal the tiny closet where Julia would have to make her clothes fit. Another door right next to that one led into the bathroom, and again, Julia had gotten the better of the two rooms.
Maddy had paid a lot to have a door that wasn’t visible from the bottom of the steps, and she wondered if she’d made the right choice. She’d been doing that a lot lately—constantly going over and over the decisions she made. Were they right? How could she know? Why couldn’t someone see into the future and let her know the outcome of each step she chose?
Julia said something that didn’t make it through the shouting in Maddy’s head, and she turned to leave the small bedroom. She couldn’t breathe in here, and she once again thought she’d chosen a terrible first job for herself post-divorce. Every room in the lighthouse was tiny. All the walls crowded close. None of the windows were big enough, and she’d had to brush her hips against the walls as she climbed through the narrow passageway to get to the upper deck of the inn. If it were up to her, she’d close that off and not allow guests up there. The last thing she needed to deal with was an elderly man or woman breaking their hip coming down those steps.
Her father’s face flashed through her mind, and she shoved against it.
You’re going to end up like him.
Alone. Old. Forgotten.
No, Maddy wasn’t going to be like him. She wasn’t.
You are, the sinister voice in her head whispered. You’re already alone and forgotten.
“Maddy?”
She turned toward Vivian’s voice, not truly seeing the woman. “Yes,” she said, not phrasing it as a question though she had no idea what the woman had said.
“Wonderful.” Vivian smiled again, this one only rivaling the brightness of the moon. Perhaps just a star. She must be ready to bolt from this place too. “I’ll leave you two to it then.” Her footsteps went crisply up the steps, leaving Maddy and Julia in the narrow hallway on the basement level.
Maddy didn’t even look at Julia. She simply hitched her purse higher onto her arm and marched toward the blue room. Once around the corner and out of sight, relief rammed into her with the strength of a charging rhinoceros. A sigh spilled from her lips as she fitted her key into the doorknob, and satisfaction buoyed her up as she entered her living quarters. Nothing had ever sounded as safe and as wonderful as the clicking of the lock on the door, effectively sealing everyone out and Maddy inside the room.
Only then did she allow her purse to drop to the floor and the tension in her shoulders to release its great hold on her. She sagged onto the tiny couch beside the door, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.
Her breathing into the silence seemed to penetrate the walls of The Lighthouse Inn, until the building itself was slowing inhaling, pausing for a moment, and then letting the air out of its ducts and vents.
She wouldn’t be able to avoid her responsibilities for much longer. She had to call her sister and give a report on their father’s health. She needed to logon to her bank and make sure Chris had made his monthly deposit. She’d have to talk to Julia and make a plan for how they could survive the next twelve months together.
Deep down, she had the naughty idea that she could quit this job this afternoon. She didn’t need the money; she only needed purpose in her life. Perhaps taking care of her father would fill that well.
Maddy wasn’t a quitter though. She’d only conceded on one thing in her life, and that had been Alan Brunner. She’d only done that because he’d asked her to. She wondered if Julia knew about that visit, the last time she’d seen Alan, all those years ago. Maddy could still remember it as if he’d shown up on her doorstep yesterday.
She’d fought for her marriage with Chris, but in the end, it took two to make a marriage work, and Chris had decided she wasn’t worth working for. Tears pressed against her closed eyelids, and she didn’t fight them. Sometimes, she just needed to let them come, and they’d disappear faster than when she caged them, held them in, and then finally relinquished control to them.
She’d fought for her children, but Kyle and Chelsea had chosen their father. The sting in her chest felt like the scorpion kind, with poison rushing through her bloodstream and staining every part of her.
She’d fought for the right to be the one of her siblings that came to take care of their father. Brittany, her younger sister, had volunteered since Maddy “was going through so much,” but Maddy had refused to let her sister get her way. She did so often, in so many other things, and Maddy had claimed the sea air would be good for her and the constant needs of her father would give her something to focus on besides herself. They had done that this summer, but she wasn’t sure how she’d balance her new workload at the inn with the needs of her dad.
No matter what, she wasn’t going to call Brittany for help. Not again.
She opened her eyes, the sight of that navy ceiling nearly ripping a scream from her throat. That definitely had to go. After getting to her feet, she moved over to the bed—a feat that only took two steps—and began unpacking the box there. Yes, all of her boxes were inside the inn, but that didn’t mean she’d put everything away.
This one held clothes, and Maddy reached for her purse, where she’d stowed the plastic hangers she’d bought on the way back to the inn that morning. She’d only inspected the closet with a cursory glance before choosing this room, and she had never stayed here overnight. She would tonight, and she needed to clear the bed so she could sleep in it.
The door on the closet opened without a sound, and the blue paint extended inside the small space. Another sigh slipped from Maddy, but it sounded like a groan more than anything else.
She hung the T-shirts and blouses in the closet, broke down the box, and opened another one. Jeans, shorts, and socks. Maddy pulled them out and moved back to the closet. The room wasn’t large enough for a dresser, but the closet had two shelves.
She filled them with her clothes and shoes, getting nearly everything unpacked in under a half-hour. The last box contained three photo albums Maddy hadn’t been able to part with, and as she held the leather-bound volumes in her hands, she had the distinct thought that they represented the past three decades of her life. She could easily put a match to one of them and watch all that time, all those memories, everything she’d once thought was so important, turn to smoke, ash, and flame.
Matter moving from one state to another. It would be so easy.
Instead, she returned to the closet and stepped up onto the little stool she’d found folded against the inside wall. She stood the photo albums up and pushed them to the right, intending to stash them out of sight, out of the way.
They didn’t go far enough, and she frowned as she leaned further into the closet to see what had obstructed them. A box sat there—stashed out of sight, out of the way.
Maddy let the photo albums fall to the left as she reached for the box on the right. It wasn’t heavy, and it wasn’t marked. Perhaps the last person to use this room hadn’t seen it and left it behind accidentally. As far as she knew, the previous caretakers of The Lighthouse Inn had been a married couple, and they’d used the garden room because of its slightly bigger size, better bathroom, and more attractive window. Vivian had mentioned how the blue room had often been used as a guest room during busy months, and an office or storage room for the caretakers during the slow season.
She took the box to the couch and sat down with it, something rattling inside as she moved. For some reason, Maddy paused, the leaping of her heart akin to when Chris had proposed to her. They weren’t the same situation at all, but her nerves didn’t seem to be able to categorize the two events differently.
The flaps on the box lifted easily, as if they’d been worn down over time from frequent opening and closing. They were soft, pliable, and Maddy peered past them and into the box to find another box sitting there. Beside it, a cup of pens had toppled over, and the writing utensils had been making the rattling sounds.
The Cottage on Nantucket Page 33
