by Grace Palmer
Before he could even finish, Leslie launched herself out the door and at Shane. The box fell out of his hands, landing with a thud on the porch, but Leslie didn’t care.
The chocolates didn’t mean anything. They never really had. It was always the man holding them that meant something to Leslie. He was always the one who made her feel better.
And right now, he was what she needed.
Shane hesitated for a moment, out of shock more than anything, and then wrapped his arms around Leslie. He pulled her close and smoothed a large hand down her spine, his other hand cupping the back of her neck.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, his breath warm against her hair. “It will all be okay.”
Leslie didn’t know if that was true. But in his arms, she believed it.
A Secluded Beach
Shane led Leslie down the porch and into the pickup truck he drove whenever he was off-duty. It was an old red beater, the inside equal parts grease stains and sun-soaked upholstery. But Leslie didn’t mind. It smelled like him.
She sunk into the passenger seat and let Shane drive, not bothering to ask where he was going.
He’d sat the chocolates on the bench seat between them, and after a few minutes of driving, Leslie had calmed down enough that she was actually hungry. She gently lifted the lid and pulled out a square-shaped chocolate with a caramelized peanut set into the center.
When she took a bite, she groaned. “Caramel. My favorite,” she said.
“I know. That’s why they’re all caramel.”
Leslie turned to him. “You knew that?”
He smiled, keeping his eyes on the road. “Of course I knew that, Les. I figured you could use it.”
Tears threatened once again, but she’d cried enough for one day. Shane was already sporting a tear stain on his shoulder thanks to her and they’d barely said two words to one another.
She reached for another chocolate. This one was dark chocolate with a caramel drizzle over the top. “Thank you.”
Shane didn’t respond. He just grinned that lopsided grin of his, quiet and warm.
Leslie thought he might be taking her back to the old farmhouse, but he took an unexpected right turn and started driving towards the shore. A few minutes later, he pulled his truck into a mostly empty gravel lot.
It was close enough to summer that beaches were starting to fill up, but as the day had worn on, the mild weather of the morning had shifted into afternoon gray skies and turbulent winds. When Leslie stepped out of the truck, her blonde hair whipped around her head in a frenzy. She had to hold down the hem of her shirt to keep it from flying up.
“A bad day for a beach walk, I guess,” Shane said with a frown. “We can go somewhere else. Or I can take you back to the inn. I just thought—”
Leslie reached out and grabbed his hand. “This is perfect. Let’s go.”
She hadn’t intended to hold his hand, but Shane’s grip around hers was firm now. Leslie liked the reassuring warmth of him.
The beach was mostly rocks and gravel that made walking a little unsteady. Especially since Leslie was still in her tan flats from the event. Not exactly walking shoes.
Without her needed to say anything, Shane led them towards a cluster of rocks grouped together like a natural wall. Leslie jumped up and set herself down on the ledge. Shane sat next to her.
“I’m surprised the beach is so empty.” The dark clouds made it impossible to enjoy the sunset that beaches on the west side of the island were known for, but still, Leslie had expected to see more tourists doing their best to enjoy the water despite the weather. Or, at the very least, lingering to watch the sailboats dotting the horizon.
“It’s dinner time,” Shane reasoned. “And cold. And windy. And overcast.”
“You make it sound miserable,” Leslie chuckled. “I’m quite enjoying myself.”
“You are?”
She nodded. “It’s cliché, but the water has always soothed me.”
Shane made a disapproving hum deep in his throat. “Nothing about you is cliché, Leslie Townsend.”
His fingers shifted over hers and Leslie realized all at once they were still holding hands.
For some reason, that realization sent a nervous flutter down Leslie’s spine. She sat up straighter and cleared her throat. “Are you hungry? We don’t have to stay here. We could go grab something or I could make—”
“I’m fine.” He looked right at her. “I like being here with you.”
“I like being here with you, too,” she whispered. “And I don’t think I ever said how grateful I am for all your help. With the remodel and everything.”
“No problem.”
“I doubt that,” she said. “I really put you to work. I’m sure you started to regret your open-ended offer to help out.”
Shane shook his head with the utmost seriousness. “I’d never regret it. I meant it. Really. Anything you need, I’ll always be here for you.”
I’ll always be here for you.
No point in reading into that, right? It could mean a lot of different things. He could mean he’d be emotionally there for her. Like, I’m only a phone call away.
Or physically there for her, when mermaid sinks needed moving or flat tires needed replacing.
Or maybe he’d only be there for her when things were going horribly. When everything had fallen apart and she needed a lift in the cruiser, a box of chocolates, a hand to hold.
“I appreciate that,” Leslie said. “But you’ve done more than enough. I couldn’t ask anything else of you. Plus, I’m sure you’re busy. The island can get wild and someone has to maintain a sense of law and order around here.”
She smiled weakly, but when she looked over, Shane’s sea blue eyes were boring into her. No laughter in them at all. Almost like he was trying to see through her skull to the thoughts beneath.
“Leslie, don’t you get it?” he finally asked. “It will never be enough. Ever.”
Was her heart supposed to be beating this fast? Leslie didn’t think so. She took a deep breath, trying to settle it down. It was no use.
“I regretted leaving you every day from the first day after I left. I wrote so many letters I never had the courage to send. And I kept tabs on you for a while. Checking to see if you were with anyone. If you were happy.” His fingers tightened around hers until it almost hurt. “But then I started to worry about what I’d find. What would I do if you were happy? If you were with someone? So I stopped checking in. But I never stopped thinking about you.”
All Leslie could do was breathe and blink. Anything else felt out of reach. Her mind was reeling, playing back the years without Shane. The years with him, too.
“When I moved back to Martha’s Vineyard, I looked for you around every corner for a year. The amount of petite, blonde women I followed down the street thinking they were you should have me on a watch list somewhere.”
Leslie choked out a laugh. Shane’s mouth tilted into a smirk.
“Then, finally, there you were.”
“There you were,” Leslie corrected. “Giving me a ticket.”
He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “Sorry about that. But also, not sorry at all. Because it brought us together. And when you quite literally fell into my lap, I just… I told myself I wouldn’t let you go so easily this time around.”
Leslie wanted to launch herself at him. She wanted to close the distance between them and whisper a lifetime of promises.
Because it had always, always been Shane Murphy for her. No one else. Just him.
But today…
“What you’re saying is beautiful. Really. And I want to try and find the right words to tell you how I feel. How I’ve always felt. But I’m not in a good headspace today. I have a history of running away when things get hard and I don’t want you to be the person I hide in. Does that make sense?”
Leslie didn’t even know if she could understand the words herself. It was a hard thing to express.
“It
makes sense, but I think you’re wrong,” Shane said simply. “That’s exactly what love is. A safe place to hide when life gets hard. I want to be that person for you, Les.”
Love. Hearing that word from Shane’s lips made Leslie feel like she was a teenager again. The decades fell away and they were just two kids, trying to make sense of it all.
Shane leaned forward. “And I know you’re upset about the inn today, but I still believe there is hope. I have to believe in hope. For a long time, it’s all I had. It worked out for me. Or at least, it’s working out.”
“You were always the more optimistic one out of the two of us,” Leslie admitted with a small smile.
Shane laughed. “Then let me be optimistic for the both of us. I think you’re going to run the Wayfarer Inn for many more years to come.”
“But what if—”
“And if you don’t,” he said, holding up a finger to stop her, “I know you’ll find a path forward. I don’t need hope to be sure about that. In my experience, Leslie Townsend always lands on her feet.”
The whirlpool of emotions in Leslie’s chest was still raging. She still didn’t know what was going to happen with the inn or with her sisters. She didn’t know where she would live or where she would go.
But looking over at Shane Murphy sitting next to her, Leslie knew who she wanted to be with.
That much was set in stone.
So Leslie leaned over and kissed him.
29
Michelle
Evening At The Wayfarer Inn
Michelle told her sisters she was going to take a nap, but she knew she’d never be able to sleep.
Instead, she paced around her small childhood bedroom, taking inventory of the few things she’d brought with her from San Francisco. Looking for things she could sell to try and make up the eleven thousand dollars they needed.
Tony would hate to know she’d already pawned the lavish wedding ring he’d given her only a few years earlier. The original one—the simple band with the small diamond—was still in her jewelry box at their house in California. It wouldn’t fetch much money at all, if any. And Michelle didn’t want to give it up, anyway.
Was that silly? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. She hadn’t heard from Tony in weeks.
But she wasn’t ready to throw every bit of Tony out of her life. After all, they’d been together for decades. They’d raised two beautiful children together. He couldn’t be one hundred percent bad.
Even if every new headline about his case looked worse and worse.
Michelle flopped down on the edge of her bed, exhaustion finally starting to creep into her bones. Her blinds were closed, but the sunlight slanting through the window had faded to nothing. She could hear night bugs playing their music from the bushes that lined the back porch.
It was late. Maybe she should just go to sleep and—
Her phone buzzed. Michelle snatched it off the nightstand. Isaac Hubbard’s face appeared in her mind, entirely unbidden.
But it wasn’t his name lightning up the screen.
It was Tony Evans.
It took Michelle a second to realize Tony wasn’t calling from jail. He was texting. From his own phone.
Her heart stuttered in her chest nervously as she opened the message, expecting… well, she didn’t know what she expected. But it wasn’t what she found.
Come outside.
Michelle didn’t know how long she stared at the message, but it felt like a long time. Finally, she lifted herself onto shaky legs and walked through the house. Through the familiar kitchen where she’d burned Christmas dinner during a visit home the first year after she and Tony were married. Through the swinging door Kat and Beth used to charge through when they were playing tag as little ones.
Finally, Michelle opened the front door. Despite the text message, she was still surprised to see Tony standing on the porch.
His face was hidden behind a massive bouquet of flowers—roses and peonies were stuffed into the center with greenery and white petals exploding out the sides like a floral bomb had gone off.
He shifted it to the side and grinned at Michelle. As though everything was perfectly normal.
“Hi there, Meesh.”
Michelle stepped out onto the porch. Her bare feet were cold against the wood. “What are you doing here?”
“Is that how you greet your husband after all this time?” He wiggled the bouquet at her, like she could have somehow missed it. “These are for you.”
“What are you doing here, Tony?”
Shock. This was shock. It had to be. She couldn’t feel her body. Couldn’t feel anything. She’d gone entirely numb.
Tony tilted his head to the side in confusion. “I’m here to see you, obviously.”
She hated that he looked handsome. His jaw was sharper, his face thinner, his arms more muscular. More of his grays were peeking out than usual, but still—he wore them well. Some part of her wanted to walk towards him, to hug him close and run her fingers through his hair.
But that would be going back to living in the lie. And Michelle didn’t want to do that. Not anymore.
“But how are you here?”
“Mike made bail and bailed me out, too,” he said. “It was pricey, but that doesn’t matter.”
He started to move towards her. Michelle held out a hand, stopping him. “Of course it matters. Can you even be here right now? Legally?”
“I can go wherever I want,” he snorted. “I’m not a criminal just because some lazy detectives charged me with some garbage. And I’ve been saying for years that nonviolent offenses shouldn’t get jail time anyway. This crap deserved a fine. Nothing more. No one’s dead, no one’s hurt, it’s just some zeroes getting shifted around…”
He was rambling. He always talked a lot when he was nervous. On some level, Michelle was happy to know she wasn’t alone.
“It’s hard to pay a fine when all of our accounts are frozen,” she pointed out.
Because all the money in them was stolen.
Tony smirked. “Not all of them.”
“Huh?” Michelle was confused. She also did not like the smug smirk on Tony’s face.
“I put away some money a few years ago,” he said. “It’s in an offshore account. As of this morning, the money was still there. All of it.”
Finances had never been Michelle’s strong suit, but she’d never heard offshore accounts mentioned in a positive light. This couldn’t be good.
“And whose money is it?” she asked.
For the first time, Tony’s casual, smirking façade cracked. His nostrils flared. “It’s mine. My clients knew the risks they were taking. Why should I be held accountable for their losses? And why does my own wife insist on assuming I’m guilty until proven innocent?”
“Because I have a track record of believing your lies,” Michelle snapped back. “Forgive me for trying to be better.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t want to talk about Leslie right now. Didn’t want or need to confirm her side of the story from that night five years ago. Michelle knew Leslie was telling the truth. And this wasn’t about that, anyway.
“You said you’re here to see me,” Michelle said. “Well, here I am. What do you want?”
The porch light was on above his head, casting his face in harsh shadows. But Michelle could see his eyes narrow. “I’m here to take you with me.”
At that, Michelle actually snorted. “Excuse me? Where do you think we’re going?”
He dropped his voice to a low whisper. “I’ve already hired someone to get us away. We take a little fishing boat from here and meet up with another one further out to sea. From there, we leave the country. Like I said, I have the money. We can start over. Be whoever we want.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. “You want to run?”
“I’m not running. I’m starting fresh.”
“I think the law would disagree,” she said. “Honestly, what part of that s
ounds smart to you? Why would I want to be on the run for the rest of my life?”
His top lip curled up. With every passing second, he was looking more deranged. It felt as though Michelle was finally peeling back his layers, revealing what had always lurked beneath.
“Because you’re back to living at home,” he sneered. “It’s pathetic.”
Michelle leaned back until she could feel the solid front door against her spine. “Yeah, I am at home. With my sisters. And I don’t plan to leave them.”
If Tony noticed her use of the plural, he breezed past it. “Have you and Leslie patched things up then? What happy news. I’m so glad your loser sister could rope you into the family business I saved you from. How freaking wonderful.”
“You think you saved—?” Michelle waved her hands, dismissing the question before she could even finish it.
Of course Tony believed he had saved her. That’s who he was. Money and success meant everything to him. That was why he’d spent holidays at his desk. That was why he sacrificed time with his wife and daughters for meetings and business trips that lasted weeks on end.
Because to him, so long as he was giving Michelle and the girls money, he was giving them everything they needed.
Now, Michelle could see the truth.
She opened her mouth to say as much when she caught a shadow out of the corner of her eye. Two familiar shapes stood in the window just to the right of the door, looking out at them.
Kat and Beth were silhouetted, but Michelle knew it was her daughters. She knew they were watching.
At one point, Michelle would have forgiven Tony—for their sakes. To keep the family together. So she could give Kat and Beth two happy parents and a happy home to come back to whenever they needed.
But now, she knew that none of that really mattered. You couldn’t have a happy home built on a lie.
She turned back to Tony. “You didn’t save me, Tony. My sisters saved me. The girls saved me.” She jammed a finger into her own chest. “I saved me.”
He snorted. “You say that, but as soon as you need money, you’ll—”
