CHAPTER ONE
June 21, 2025
43 Days Left
A/Cis out in 217. Again.
It’s not the best text to get before six o’clock in the morning, but I’ve woken up to worse.
So I just realized that the smoked tuna dip we had last night had expired. SORRY!!!
Hi, it’s Nicole from the salon. Doooooon’t think you meant to send this text to me, lol.
Gen, I’m fucking tired of talking about this. It’s done. Don’t contact me again.
I haven’t deleted that one yet, and out of habit, I pull it up again, the words incongruous with my ex-boyfriend’s smiling face under his contact info. Chris sent that text more than eight months ago, and I’ve honored his wishes, but for whatever reason, as I sit on the edge of my bed this morning, the sunrise tinting my curtains pink, the waves softly shushing just outside, I find my thumbs moving across the screen.
About to go to battle with the A/C again. 217 remains cursed.
My thumb hovers over the send arrow even though I have no clue what this text might accomplish or even what Iwantit to accomplish.
Okay.
That’s not true.
I can already feel the summer bearing down on me, the weight getting heavier and heavier along with the heat and the humidity, and I want Chris to feel it, too.
We were supposed to do this together. This wasourdream.
The phone buzzes in my hand, and for one heart-jolting second, I think he’s somehow sensed me on the other end, that he’s in his bed on the opposite side of the country, missing me, missing the Rosalie Inn, remembering the first night it had been officially ours. How we’d drunk champagne from plastic cups sitting on the front steps, our toes buried in the warm sugar-white sand.
But no, it’s just a follow-up text from Edie, my best friend and right-hand woman at the Rosalie.
Geneva, I have very sweaty guests in front of me, and it’s not even 7AM. Whatshisface at the HVAC place isn’t picking up, and I can only bullshit these people for so long. Come save me or I quit!
Another buzz.
And not “quiet” quit or whatever that bullcrap is, I will FOR REAL QUIT. Loudly and dramatically.
I smile at that, some of the heaviness lifting as I take one last sip of coffee. The sun may just be rising, but I’ve been awake for a while, my brain doing its usual spin cycle:How do we get more guests, does our Instagram suck, should I hire a social media person, and if I do, how exactly am I supposed to pay them, and why is more money going out than coming in, and would itbesobad to just put a huge fucking For Sale sign on this thing and walk away, and if I do that, what exactly am I supposed to do next given that I’ve maxed out every credit card I own trying to keep this thing afloat, and why why why whyWHYdid I let Chris talk me into selling everything I owned and taking on the inn after everything with Mom, even with the massive mortgage on it, and God, how nice it must be to be Chris, washing his hands of the whole thing and walking away because for him, this was just a bad investment, not an entire fucking family legacy to uphold.
Sighing, I open my front door and step out, humid, salty air settling over me like a physical weight. Every other owner of the Rosalie had called the inn home, including my parents and grandparents, but when Chris and I had taken over, he’d been creeped out by the idea of actuallylivingin a hotel.
I’ve seenThe Shining,I’m goodhad been his line, and it had always irritated me because it wasn’t even a good joke. A rambling beach motel was hardly a terrifying fortress high up in the snow-covered Rockies. We weren’t going to gettrappedin it. Besides, I’d grown up there, and I’d survived.
Still, we’d ended up buying an Airstream and set it up just a little ways down the beach, a handful of short, scraggly pines between us and the inn.
Well, now justmeand the inn.
The distance is more mental than physical, to be honest. The inn is big and painted pink, for fuck’s sake, so it would take more than a few sad little pines to block the view. But it makes me feel better, this little “walk to work” I do every morning, the Gulf on my right, sand dunes gently undulating on my left. The water is calm today, smooth and glassy as a lake, and I watch a pelican dive, the splash overly loud in the quiet near-dawn.
This stretch of beach outside the Rosalie is public—my mom and her dad before her never wanted to fight that, knowing the last thing you should do in a tourist town is piss off the locals—but this time of day, it’s almost always empty.
Today, there’s one lone figure on the beach, an old guy in salt-stained khaki shorts, his skinny chest bare and slightly concave, his skin so tanned he looks like he’s been carved out of wood. He’s got a fishing pole in his bony hands, the surf splashing against his calves, and when he catches sight of me, he lifts a few fingers in a barely-there wave.
“Hey, Cap!”
He has an actual name, I’m sure, but he’s been “Cap” as long as I can remember, even if no one in town knows if he actually was a captain at some point in his life.
