Back to Shore
The Meade Lake Series, Book One
Copyright © 2020 Taylor Danae Colbert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, numerous places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. This book may not be resold or given away in any manner.
Published: Taylor Danae Colbert 2020
www.taylordanaecolbert.com
Cover Design: Taylor Danae Colbert
Editing: Jenn Lockwood Editing
ISBN: 978-1-7352169-1-1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
8. Then, Summer Before Junior Year
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
11. Then, Summer Before Junior Year
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
14. Then, Summer Before Junior Year
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
18. Then, Junior Year
Chapter 19
20. Then, Summer Before Senior Year
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
29. Six Months Later
PROLOGUE
COMING SOON - THE MEADE LAKE SERIES
Acknowledgments
About Taylor
Other Books by Taylor:
Note from the Author
For you, Dust. My first friend, and one of the ones who makes me laugh the most.
1
T-minus one hour until I’m officially a divorcee.
My husband’s leaving me today.
Well, technically, I’m the one doing the leaving.
I’ve got my bags, my belongings, my everything loaded up in my Focus, and I’m leaving. I’m sitting across from him in the courthouse right now, desperately trying not to make eye contact with him. A few more hours, and this will all be over.
“Mrs. Boughman, did you hear that?” the mediator asks me, and I nod my head.
“Yes, yes I did,” I say. “Continue.”
I’m moving through this like a speed racer, hyped up on adrenaline from years of letting my life crash and burn. I’m not emotional; I’m just trucking through. Luke, on the other hand, is solemn, quiet, slow-moving.
“So,” the mediator goes on, “Mr. Boughman has offered to pay alimony until you have another source of income.” I look up at him, forgetting my promise to myself not to make eye contact. And when our eyes finally meet, I see that his are glassy. Damnit. Never look him in the eye.
“You can’t do that, Luke,” I tell him. Damn him. This was supposed to be paperwork, the final details. Quick and painless. But there he goes, adding in the pain.
“I want to make sure you’re okay, Mila,” he says. I swallow. Technically, I am without a job right now. Technically, once this is over today, I’ll be heading home to my parents, moving back into my childhood bedroom, starting over again at the ripe age of twenty-nine. I nod my head slowly, and the rest of the appointment seems to flash by.
We stand up, our lawyers shake hands, and then Luke looks to me, his big blue eyes pleading. He really is gorgeous. He’s tall and slim with sandy hair that is always trimmed perfectly. And those big, beautiful, soul-sucking blue eyes. Ugh. I look down, gather my stuff, and head for the door.
“Mila,” I hear his smooth, sweet voice say once we’re in the parking lot. I freeze and turn to him slowly. He’s looking down, like he’s gathering his thoughts. Finally, he speaks.
“I have felt a lot of things over these last five years with you,” he says, still looking down at his feet. “But I need you to know that one thing I never felt was disappointment.” I scoff. Yeah, right. If marriages had titles, that would be the title of ours.
But he’s serious.
“Mila, you were everything. I have a feeling you will be for a while. And I’m so sorry that things didn’t work out like we planned and that I couldn’t give you what you needed. But despite all the regret you have concocted in your head, the only thing I will regret about our marriage is letting things get to this point.”
He takes my hand, and I go numb. He brings it to his lips and presses them against it gently, his eyes closed.
And then my ex-husband drives away, without me, back to the home we made together.
And there goes my marriage, a fiery crash and burn.
I’m lying on my parents’ couch in their massive house, flicking through the channels on my dad’s pride and joy: his 70-inch flat screen. At my feet sits the empty gallon of coffee-flavored ice cream that I’ve destroyed. In my hand sits a half-empty bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips, and on the coffee table sits a bottle of wine that I have sucked every last drop from.
I look around.
Honestly, it’s not such a bad setup here. My parents live in the same house I grew up in—the four-bedroom Victorian house that sits on a hill at the top of our neighborhood. They still live in Kelford, the tiny little Pennsylvania town I grew up in, and when I come back here, I realize how little has changed.
Dad’s retired now, although you wouldn’t know it by the locals who still address him as “mayor” when he walks by.
My mom is retired from teaching but still subs on occasion when she feels she has too much time on her hands.
If it wasn’t totally depressing to be mooching off my parents at this age, it would be quite the sweet life.
But I need to get my shit together. Again.
I should really be job searching. I need to get back on my feet. But I just don’t have the umph. I’m tired. Physically. Emotionally. In every way possible.
I roll off the couch at the next commercial break, gather my collection of snacks, and trudge my way up the giant staircase to my old room.
But as I reach the door, I freeze. Because next door to my room is his room. The mahogany door is closed, as it has been since the day he died. I feel that familiar pang in my chest, then my heart starts beating a hundred miles an hour. My palms start to sweat, and I push my way into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I back up against it, leaning my head back.
I’m amazed at the memory of my own anxiety; I’m almost impressed by the way it can just pick right back up where it left off all those years ago. I’ve avoided spending a lot of time at my parents’ house since I moved out—for this exact reason.
Inside my room, I smile at the way nothing has changed since I moved out when Luke and I got engaged. My mom left it all exactly the same. I fall onto my bed and into the sea of white pillows and blankets. This really was the bedroom of a teenage girl’s dreams.
For starters, it’s huge. Bigger than the master in Luke’s and my townhouse. It has built-in bookshelves on the side wall, a beautiful desk in the corner, and my favorite part: a bay window with a bench.
I get up from my bed and walk over to it, sitting down in it and looking out the window. My parents have a beautiful view of the rest of the neighborhood from way up here on this hill. But from my window, I have this serene view of the woods, and in the fall and winter, you can see the creek that runs through it when the leaves are gone. It’s so private, so quiet from my window. It was the perfect window for him to throw ro
cks at every now and then…and then he stopped.
I shake my head. I lie back against the pillow and close my eyes.
For the next week, my life looks shockingly the same as the first day I got here. I’m binge-eating every ounce of junk food in the house. I’m watching countless hours of crummy reruns and making no effort whatsoever to keep up with my personal hygiene.
On the seventh night of my depress-fest, I wake to someone shaking me.
“Oh, hey, Mom,” I say, rubbing my eyes and pushing myself up from the window seat.
“Hey, yourself,” she says, sitting down next to me.
“What time is it?” I ask. It’s got to be past midnight.
“It’s eight o’clock. I have dinner for you downstairs,” Mom says. I walk across the room.
“Oh, great, thanks,” I say, but just as I reach the door, she kicks it shut, making it slam and shake the whole house. I stare at her, wide-eyed.
“Hang on there, kid,” she says, nodding back to the window seat. I swallow and trudge back over, hesitantly taking a seat. This is never good. This is the “we need to talk” thing.
“We need to talk,” she says, sitting down next to me and crossing both her arms and her legs. I shimmy back against the glass, sitting cross-legged, waiting for her to start. It doesn’t matter that I’m almost thirty. A talk from my mother still gets my nerves to stand up on their end. Especially at this point in my life, when I’ve done so many things wrong, made so many poor choices, that I’m not even sure what she’s about to bring up. I swallow again and look up at her slowly.
“So,” she says, “what now?”
I look at her, raising an eyebrow in confusion.
“What...what do you mean, ‘what now?’” I ask.
“You’re divorced,” she says. Yes, thank you.
“You’re unemployed,” she happily goes on. Yes, thanks again. “So, what now?”
It’s not that I didn’t expect this conversation in the near future; it’s just that I didn’t expect it the week of my divorce. I didn’t expect it mere days after my marriage died.
“I…I don’t know yet, Ma, jeez,” I say, reaching up to grab a piece of my hair between my fingers and twirl it.
“Well, it’s time to know,” she says. My mom is a little human. She’s no more than 5’2’’ and weighs less than I do. She’s always been this way. But her size has nothing to do with the power she carries in every step, every move she makes. “I’m serious, Mila. My daughter, I love you. You have been through an awful lot in your short twenty-nine years; no one can deny that. But through all your pain, you’ve forgotten that you still have your own life to live. You can still make it what you want.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just make this weird humph noise. She swivels around so that she’s facing me dead-on.
“Ma, Luke and I, we just didn’t work out, okay? We weren’t happy anymore,” I say, shrugging off my marriage like it was a nail polish color that I didn’t like. This answer clearly does not satisfy the wrath of Carla Walton.
“Oh, Mila, that’s such bullshit,” she says. My eyes widen again. My mother is hard and crass, but I’m pretty sure no one has ever loved me like she has. My dad grew up an only child, my grandfather was a lawyer, and my dad went to all the good schools and got all the best jobs. My mom grew up in a house full of nine kids and worked her ass off to get her teaching degree. She might have the sweet life as the former mayor’s wife now, but she hasn’t forgotten what it means to fight for things. Her no-bullshit attitude was the nightmare of my teenage self for years, but as I’ve aged, I now realize that it’s the one thing I really should have learned from her.
“I am a firm believer that happiness is created. If you haven’t been able to find happiness all these years, it’s because you’re keeping it at bay. You’re not letting it come in. Luke…he loved you so much. And I know you loved him. But that man…he could have bought you every flower, spent every night with you, done anything you wanted, and you would still never have been happy. I know why. Do you?”
I look up at her, pleading with my eyes for her not to answer her own question.
But it’s too late.
“Ryder Casey,” she says.
Instinctively, anytime I have heard his name over the last decade, I roll my eyes, which is exactly what I do in this moment. His name sets off this fire in me. I push myself off the window seat and begin pacing my room, crossing my arms over my chest in defense.
“Oh, Ma, please let it go,” I say. She scoffs.
“Let it go?” she asks, and I almost cringe at the sound of her voice. I see, out of the corner of my eye, that she’s standing now, too. “Oh, honey, don’t lecture me about letting things go. Your father and I forgave Ryder ten years ago.” She makes her way to me and puts her hands on either of my shoulders.
“Honey, it’s been twelve years. It’s not healthy. The worst, most bitter kind of hate is the hate that started as love.” I look up at her. “You’ve got to let that hate go. You’ve got to let Ryder go. You’ve got to forgive him.”
She walks out of my room as swiftly as she came in, and I’m left with nothing but the stench of his name hanging in the air. I walk to my bed and sink to the floor next to it. I take a few deep breaths as if the reality of my train wreck of a life is finally hitting me.
I reach over on the floor into my duffel bag and pull out the small black journal I’ve carried with me for over a decade. I take a deep breath, and the first tears start to flow.
I open the journal to the middle, where I know I started the first of the letters I wrote.
Ryder,
I don’t know why I’m writing you this. I know you’ll never see it, but I need to get this out. Also, just so we’re clear, I’ll never start one of these letters with “dear.” Ever.
I wish that when you started to hate someone, it meant that you could stop loving them instantly. But apparently, that’s not how it works. And I hate that. Because I want to hate you. I wish you could take his place.
I wish it were you.
But in the same breath, I still love you. And I fucking hate that.
Mila
Yeah, okay.
I might need some help letting go.
2
I wake up the next morning with pain in my back and shoulder, and I realize quickly that it’s because I fell asleep on the hardwood of my bedroom floor. Damn, I can remember a time when I could practically sleep standing up as a teenager. Now, one night without my memory-foam pillow and I may as well be an invalid.
I make my way down the huge staircase, stopping on my way to look out the stained-glass window that’s halfway down the flight. I love this house. Well, I loved this house. Now it’s full of memories that have no potential for recreation.
When I get to the kitchen, my dad is sipping his coffee at the island while my mom is finishing making eggs at the stove.
“Morning, angel,” he says without looking over to me. Instead, he’s engrossed in what Hoda is talking about this morning.
“Morning,” I say, reaching into the cabinet for a mug.
My mom makes eyes at me but doesn’t say anything. I know she can tell I had a rough night after our heart-to-heart, and I also know that she won’t ask about it unless she knows I want her to.
But I decide to take the first hit.
“I’m going to find him,” I say, and she almost drops her omelet on the floor. That even gets my dad’s attention.
He doesn’t ask who I’m talking about, which is how I know that he’s in on this with my mom. Growing up, she often delivered the speeches, but I always knew that he had participated on some level.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Mom says, trying hard not to smile. I’m confused. I don’t know what she wants out of this. I don’t know why it makes her happy that I’m going to find the person who made me totally lose control of who I am. Maybe on some level, she really does think it will help.
I just think she’s cra
zy.
“Do you think he’s still—” Dad starts to say.
“Yeah. He’s still there,” I cut him off. Unfortunately, over a decade of separation doesn’t necessarily mean that you forget everything.
“You’re sure?” Mom asks. “Have you…have you been in touch with him?”
I immediately give her a look.
“Of course not,” I say. “I just know he’d never leave that place—even after everything.” She raises her eyebrows.
“The lake?” she asks. I nod slowly, looking down at the ground.
“The lake,” I say.
Dad gets up from the island and makes his way toward us, throwing one arm around Mom and his other hand on my shoulder.
“Well, baby, go find him, then,” he says. He walks toward a cigar box that sits on top of a desk in the corner of the sunroom. He opens and closes it and comes back with a key in his hand. He places it in my palm and wraps my fingers around it. “Do what you need to do,” he says.
I nod, and after taking a sip of my coffee, I make my way back up to my room to pack a few essentials in my bag, making extra certain I have my journal with me.
This feels so silly. This feels like some sort of idiotic quest that’s sure to end in nothing but more devastation and depression—two things I have had plenty of in my lifetime. But I guess I’m going because I don’t really know what else I should be doing with my time…or my life. I guess I’m going because there’s a chance—no matter how incredibly miniscule—that my parents might be right. That forgiving Ryder Casey, after everything that’s happened, after all this time, might help me figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life.
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