“Anna?” Margo asked, though she clearly knew the answer.
Meg nodded. “She’ll call you later. For your birthday, even though it’s late. She apologized, and says she loves you.”
“Good.” Margo’s hands moved with practiced efficiency, stripping rosemary from its stem. “You two sounded—better.”
“Better than what?”
Margo gave her a knowing look. “Better than the last time you were both here. Tyler’s graduation, wasn’t it? You barely spoke three words to each other.”
Meg winced, remembering the tension of that visit—Anna resentful of Meg’s brief appearance, Meg impatient with Anna’s artistic “impracticality.” How quickly they’d fallen into childhood patterns of competition for approval.
“We’re working on it,” Meg said, reaching for her apron—her mother’s apron, she reminded herself.
Margo nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Good. Life’s too short for sisters to waste time misunderstanding each other.”
“When did you get so wise?” Meg asked lightly, trying to mask the emotion in her voice.
Margo smiled, the morning light catching the silver in her hair. “Around the same time I got so old.”
They worked side by side preparing for the day,moving with an ease that surprised Meg. She’d expected awkwardness, the discomfort of unfamiliarity. Instead, she fell into a rhythm with her grandmother—Margo doing things exactly as she always had, Meg adapting more quickly than she’d imagined possible.
At one point, reaching for a cutting board, Meg noticed a small sketch tucked between cookbooks on the shelf—a quick rendering of the beach at sunset, the lines confident and expressive. She pulled it out carefully.
“Did Anna draw this?” she asked, admiring the way the artist had captured light on water with just a few strokes.
Margo glanced over, something flashing briefly across her face—surprise? Concern?
“Just an old drawing,” she said, taking it gently from Meg’s hands and slipping it back between the books. “We should finish setting up. Joey will be here soon.”
Meg glanced toward the storage closet where she'd noticed a step ladder yesterday. The thought of Margo climbing up there alone, especially with these balance issues, made her stomach tighten. She'd have to keep an eye on that.
“And Lisa,” Meg remembered, checking the schedule posted by the register. “She handles the register during lunch rush, right?”
“Lisa on register, Joey on tables, Dante helps in the kitchen twice a week,” Margo confirmed. “Small crew,but they’re good kids. Most are students at Laguna College of Art.”
Meg wanted to ask more—whose drawing was it if not Anna’s?—but something in her grandmother’s manner suggested the subject was closed.
Her phone buzzed with a text from Brad—a reminder about the client presentation she needed to review before noon—and Meg felt the familiar tug between worlds. But this time, as she typed a quick reply, she was less consumed by the corporate urgency than she might have been days ago.
The shell ceiling gleamed in the morning light, patterns emerging and receding depending on where she stood.
CHAPTER TEN
The Beach Shack was even more comforting in the quiet of evening. Margo Turner moved through the familiar space, turning lights off as she went, listening to the building settle around her—the gentle creak of weathered wood, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant rhythm of waves that had been the soundtrack to her life for fifty years.
Now, with closing tasks complete, Margo retrieved the small wooden step ladder from the storage closet and positioned it carefully beneath a particular section of ceiling near the counter. From her apron pocket, she withdrew the shell that Eleanor had given her last night—iridescent white with hints of pink and blue that caught the light in a way that reminded her of early morning surf.
Before climbing, she studied the ceiling, her eyes tracing patterns that most people never noticed. What appeared to visitors as a random collection of shellswas in fact a carefully composed mosaic—concentric circles expanding outward like ripples, subtle wave forms that flowed from one end of the room to the other, star patterns that mimicked constellations visible from the beach on clear nights.
Fifty years of collected treasures, each with its own story, each placed with intention. Some from her own beach walks with Richard in those early years. Some brought by Tyler from his travels. Many given as gifts by people who’d come to understand that Margo valued these small ocean offerings more than any expensive present.
The ceiling had begun with a single shell—a perfect sand dollar Richard had found on their first morning as owners of the shack. “For good luck,” he’d said, attaching it above the door. Gradually, they’d added others, and after Richard died, Margo had continued the practice, finding comfort in the slow transformation of ceiling into sky, into ocean, into memory.
She climbed the ladder carefully, one hand gripping the rail, the other cradling the shell. At eighty, she was still steady on her feet, though she took more care than she once had. Her fingers found the exact spot she’d envisioned last night—a space between a cluster of pale pink shells that formed one of the rarely noticed heart shapes hidden throughout the mosaic.
From her pocket, she took a small tube of adhesive and applied a careful drop to the back of the shell. The glue Richard had originally used was no longer made,but she’d found this marine-grade adhesive held even better against the coastal humidity.
As she pressed the shell into place, holding it firmly until the adhesive set, Margo allowed herself to remember. The day Richard had brought home the materials to build this ceiling pattern. The way he’d looked at her when she’d suggested arranging them to reflect the night sky. “Always the artist,” he’d said with that smile that still visited her dreams.
