J.J. put her phone on the table. She reached out and ran her finger along a shell that resembled the horn of a unicorn. It was bleached white.
She looked out at Haven Beach. An older couple, probably in their seventies, walked along the beach. They were holding hands. There was no hurry. The woman pointed to something on the sand, and the man picked it up for her. J.J.’s throat felt tight.
This was a beautiful place.
Back home, she’d be bombarded with memories. Here, she confronted a future that had slipped away, things she’d never get to do with Dean.
There was no right place.
“There you are.”
A familiar voice distracted her from her melancholy.
She turned around. She knew this drill. She knew she was about to face some major pressure.
J.J. had been on the other side of it a few times.
ChapterTwo
Libby
She’d waited long enough. Maybe D.J. had forgotten.
In the nine months since the tornado swept through Irish Hills, Libby had been busier than she’d ever been in her life. She’d found funds, made plans, cajoled the insurance company, and waited out a vicious winter that had halted construction projects.
She did all this without Dean Tucker. She missed Dean so much.
But D.J. Tucker had stepped up. He was taking a stab at running Tucker Construction in place of his dad. And it was working. Well, it was almost working.
Okay, it was working in the beginning, but not so much lately.
D.J. didn’t have the vision yet, or the wealth of experience like Dean did. But there were moments when D.J. Tucker was more than the son of a great man. Libby saw it. She’d kept Tucker Construction as the main contractor for the downtown Irish Hills renovation project because of the man D.J. could almost be and because of his dad. She just didn’t know how long her businesses could wait for D.J. Tucker to grow up.
D.J. was a big man, like Dean, but minus the beer gut. Though, from what Libby heard, D.J. was working on putting that gut on.
It wasn’t her business. She was his boss and not his mom. Though she felt more like his aunt, thanks to how close she was to J.J.
Well, how close she used to be. J.J. had left them and was mostly ghosting everyone from Irish Hills.
Libby texted and tried to get J.J. on the phone all the time, but replies were random and sparse. J.J. Tucker had disappeared for all intents and purposes. And Libby was just so sad about that. Things were off balance without J.J. in their group and without J.J. in Libby’s life.
J.J. could always see the humor. She was a cheerleader with an acerbic edge. She was the most grounded of them and yet the most likely to send them into peals of giggles.
But her friend needed to heal. Libby was trying to give her that, and at the same time, she held out hope that J.J. would find her way back.
J.J., the only one of them actually from Irish Hills, was the only one of them who didn’t see Irish Hills as her happy ending.
That was an issue that dogged her, always under the surface. Could J.J. really be gone for good?
But more pressing, immediately pressing, was where in the heck was D.J. Tucker? They were supposed to meet in her office and talk about plans for interior walls for the buildings on the south side of Green Street.
The main drag of Irish Hills was getting very close to being ready for business on both sides of the street now.
Despite nature and the machinations of a billionaire, Irish Hills survived and thrived.
Hope’s Table, Siena and Viv’s Shop, the Mercantile, and now the new little bookshop had filled the spots.
Libby was using the last open spot on the south side of the main street as a temporary office, but would be happy to switch to the vacant spaces across the street. Work on the north side was underway. After last summer, there had been moments she’d feared they’d just have to level it.
