“Sure. We’ll put it in the beach bag.”
They walked, filling bucket after bucket and building their sandcastle. Each time, Faith tipped her head up on the way back to see if Jake’s truck was gone yet, and every time, it was still sitting right where it had been. Part of her looked forward to seeing him again. She wanted to feel out the situation, see how he responded to her, continue their discussions from last night. And she just wanted to talk to him again, see him smile at her. But another part of her thought it may be best if she didn’t. He’d made it clear that he only wanted to be friends and perhaps he was right. There were obviously some issues between them. She’d been just fine by herself until now. Surely all of these feelings and thoughts she was having were just because she was on vacation. Soon enough, she’d get back to her real life and she’d be just fine again. There was no need to make her life any more difficult.
“Hey, y’all,” her mom called out, waving to them as Faith helped Isabella carve out the moat with a shovel. Her mom was at the top of the dune, a beach towel and a novel under her arm. If Faith squinted her eyes, from that distance, the new cottage almost looked like the old one, and her mother like the young mother who had raised them. It made her homesick for those times before everything had gotten so complicated.
“Hi, Mom,” she called back to her.
Her mom trudged through the sand toward them, stopping at the western edge of the castle. “Wow, that’s wonderful,” she said with a big smile, her cheekbones making her sunglasses rise up on her face a little higher. “Your Aunt Faith used to make those all the time. Remember that big one you made when we were all here with Nan last time? It took you all day.”
“I do.”
Isabella was on her hands and knees, a hot pink shovel in her hand as she crawled around the edge of their castle digging the moat so deep that the sediment underneath was a dark grey color. “Do I need water now to fill it up?” she asked, looking up at Faith.
“You can try, but the water may sink into the sand. You may want to get two buckets full. That’s what I always did.”
Isabella grabbed the purple bucket and another green one and ran, one in each hand, toward the water.
“Faith, honey,” her mother said once Isabella was out of earshot. “I’ll watch Isabella. You might want to check on your sister. She hasn’t come out of her room. I knocked, but she didn’t answer. She’ll talk to you…”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. But what I do know is that whenever Casey is quiet, there’s something wrong. And, when you two were younger, she’d never talk to me. I’d have to get the scoop from you. Go up and see if you can figure out what’s going on.”
Faith nodded, knowing how Casey wasn’t the best at divulging her feelings. But her mother was right: She’d talk to Faith. She called goodbye to Isabella, who was already chatting animatedly to her mom as Faith crossed over the dune toward the cottage. Jake’s truck was still there. She hadn’t thought about that when agreeing to come up and talk to Casey. Now, she paused at the bottom of the steps, trying to figure out how she was supposed to greet him if she saw him. He was probably right there in the front room, painting the built-in. Should she be breezy and cool, or should she walk over and make conversation? It made her feel out of control a little bit, and she hadn’t felt like that in a long time. She started up the steps, trying to keep herself as calm as possible.
ELEVEN
Faith tentatively opened the door. Jake was tapping the lid of the paint can with a mallet. The built-in was beautiful—book shelves on the top and a double cabinet on the bottom, all painted a glossy white. But her eyes didn’t stay on it long. Her attention was on him. She was anxious to talk to him again. She wanted to see him, to look for any sign of how he felt about last night. Jake slipped the paint-filled paintbrush into a plastic bag, the hands that had held a glass of wine last night now spotted with white paint.
“Hey,” he said as she walked over to him.
“Hey.”
“I’m all done. No more work to do on the cottage, so I’ll be out of your hair.”
He was finished?
His words surfaced:I’ll be out of your hair. Faith was hoping the answer was no. She wanted to have more time with him. She wanted to have more time with him. To get to know the Jake she’d been with at the lighthouse and back at his cottage more. And she wanted to show him what this place meant to her, why she’d reacted how she had to learning about his work and what he was missing out on. Would he give her a chance to do that?
“There’s no more work to do? The cottage is complete?” She felt a stab of anxiety at the idea of not having Jake around. She enjoyed him popping by.
“Yep. It’s totally finished.” His words seemed flat. He wasn’t his usual, happy self.
“Oh…” She hadn’t meant for her disappointment to slip out.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, though, when I pick up Casey and Isabella to go fishing.”
With that statement, it was clear that he wasn’t planning to see her, in particular, again. And the fact that he was seeing Casey made her chest ache. She would have loved to try and lengthen the conversation to work in the fact that she wanted to see him again, but she had to go check on her sister. That was the whole reason she’d come in.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said, trying to put on a believable smile.
As Jake started to leave, Nan came into the living room, wobbling the box of photos.
Jake immediately took it from her and walked with her over to a chair where she sat down.
“Thank you, dear. That was kind of you.”
“You’re welcome. Is this good?” he asked, setting the box on the floor beside her and righting himself next to Faith.
