“I owe you for the ride share,” she said.
He just looked at her for another beat, before he turned back to Mom and Cam. “See you next week.” With that, he turned without a backward glance.
Rude.
“What did I do to him?” Besides parking in his spot, but he towed her car, so they should be even. She watched his retreating back—and despite everything—she had to appreciate how good he made those scrubs look.
“That’s just how he is.” Mom shrugged as they headed out the clinic door, toward the parking lot. “Not much for conversation.”
“Seems odd for someone who specializes in speech.”
“Maybe.” She lowered her voice into what Eliana recognized as the gossip tone and Eliana leaned closer. “From what I hear, he used to be a lot more personable, but after his grandpa died, he changed.”
Eliana frowned and considered the man through a lens of recognizing that he was changed by grief. The gruffness, keeping people at a distance, lack of caring for his hair and beard, even the black scrubs… she could definitely see it.
Still. Her bank account was smarting from having to retrieve her car. It was a myth that content creators made a ton of money. She made enough to live off of, but Boston wasn’t cheap.
“Is your car back at Grandma’s?” her mom asked.
“Yeah.”
“Want a ride over there? We’re going to stop by and say hi.”
“It seemed like Grandma wanted some alone time. She couldn’t get me out of there fast enough to give Cam his ball.”
Mom laughed again. “Yeah, sounds like it. Maybe we’ll just head home.” She checked her watch. “It’s getting close to dinnertime anyway.”
Eliana hugged her mom. “I’m going to walk on the beach for a bit, try to get the creative juices flowing.” She knew herself well enough to recognize when the best thing she could do to create content was a long, peaceful walk to work through all her thoughts.
A motorcycle engine started, and she saw Asher straddling the seat and putting on his helmet. He’d changed into dark jeans and a T-shirt, one of those soft ones that screamed for someone to snuggle up to it. He leaned forward to grip the handlebars, and for some reason, the movement left her mesmerized.
Eliana blinked and tore her gaze away. Whoa. Major zone-out on the grumpy speech therapist. Maybe she needed to stop and get a sandwich first and get her brain right.
Eliana paid for a turkey sandwich to-go in the dining hall, and then walked the beach, determined to make the most of the few hours of quiet time.
She pulled out the notes app on her phone, hoping ideas for her first chapter would come to her. She knew what the topic was: introducing the concept ofHappily Single. She needed to give a brief overview of her own story.
But jotting down those one sentence prompts and knowing exactly what stories to tell and putting those into paragraphs were two different things. There needed to be a narrative arc. Yet, it couldn’t all be about her; it had to relate to every reader.
She walked to the end of the private beach of the Palms where a huge copse of trees reached out from a residential area toward the ocean. A low-to-the-ground wooden bridge spanned the marshy gap from tree-land to sand. She drew to investigate, an idea sparking, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on how it might work. A bridge metaphor? Or the gap between how you expected to feel when you were single, versus how you felt, and her book as an empowering bridge between the two?
Her thoughts came faster than her fingers could type them into her phone. She took a few pictures of the bridge and then sat on the railing as more thoughts came to her. Sometimes it was like this. One image could spark inspiration. Her final version of the chapter might not even have a bridge in it … but that didn’t matter. It got her brain moving creatively, and she could work with that.
She heard a noise that made her pause. It sounded like a motorcycle engine. It was far enough past the thick trees and foliage that she couldn’t see it. She tried to get back to her thought process, but that one little moment of distraction killed it.
Really, it wasn’t the motorcycle, but the immediate thought of Asher that had done it, which reminded her of the money she’d paid out for her car, which suddenly made her think of the money put in her account from her publisher.
She opened her bank app, and there it was. Several thousand dollars. Her stomach flopped. The fact they paid her before the book was written was sobering. This was only part of the payment—another third would come when she delivered the book to the publisher, and the final third when it released.
Movement caught her eye, and she spotted Asher at the edge of the trees, his head swinging back and forth. He glanced in her direction, but the tree’s shadows hid her. He carried at least six completely full bags, three in each hand. Grocery bags?
She ducked down as he scanned the area again, almost as if he was hiding something. Then he took off across the sand. He got close enough for her to see that the bags were indeed filled with fresh food—apples, bananas, oats, pasta, and tomatoes were some of the things she spotted before he approached the final bungalow in the row.
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him. All of the blinds were closed so she couldn’t see inside, even to see if he’d turned the lights on.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Chapter 5
