“I heard you were grounded,” he said.
Celia’s heart swelled at the idea that Hanson was talking about her with other people.
“I was.I am.”Celia blushed.“I’m sorry about my dad.”
“I’m sorry about him, too,” Hanson said.“He seems like a piece of work.”
Celia let her eyes fall to the sand.She wondered how many high school lovers had come to a blustery cove to talk in private over the years.She wondered why she already referred to Hanson as her “lover” in her mind.Maybe he just wanted to be friends.
She was the weird, smart girl.This wasn’t the typical story.
“You have a good arm,” Hanson said coyly.“I can’t believe you threw a stone at my window, though.You want my dad to kill me?”
Celia felt a lurch but looked back at him to find him smiling.She grinned back, because it was impossible not to.Not for the first time, she wondered if this was what her own mother had felt when she’d fallen for her father.Not for the first time, she pondered what on earth her mother had seen in James Harper, a man so needlessly cruel.
How did anyone fall in love with the right person?she wondered.
“I can see how itchy you are,” Hanson said, leaning against a large rock and crossing his arms.The breeze off the ocean made his curls flicker across his forehead.“Being a senior is tough.You want to move on with your life, just like me.”
Celia was caught off guard.It wasn’t typical to imagine that the high school quarterback and so-called “king” of the senior class wanted to move on.
“Where do you want to move on to?”she asked.
Hanson shrugged.“I want to make something of myself, you know?Maybe that’s what everyone wants.My dad wants me to work with him after high school.He wants me to fold into his company and make it bigger and better after he’s gone.But sometimes I think he’s so cynical.Like, his agenda is always to make a dollar, two dollars, and two dollars into ten dollars, right?But what about the other things in life?”
Celia had never imagined that the wealthy Hanson Smith could think like this.“What are the other things in life?”she asked.She had no idea what he would say.
“There are places outside of Bluebell Cove, for one,” he said.“Maybe I want to go to college?Perhaps I want to get out of Maine?It’s so dang cold around here.What if I want to travel around the world?Go to Florida?See the warm sun for once?Learn how to surf?”
Celia imagined Hanson on a beach in the Gulf, his skin tanned, his muscles ropey.She tried to picture herself in this story but could only find herself far back at the beach bar, pulling her hair out over a story she wanted to write for a newspaper.Perhaps her life would be a permanent state of searching, making, and hurting.Maybe that was what she wanted.
She certainly couldn’t imagine herself on a surfboard.
Briefly, she told Hanson about her plans to attend Georgetown and become a journalist.“An environmental angle might be cool,” she told him.And then she parroted what Landon had said about making the world a better place, using the tools they had.
She could tell that this appealed to Hanson.
“I’m thinking about our world more and more, and how we should do what we can to save it.”Hanson bowed his head.“I mean, if you knew some of the stuff my dad was getting up to, you’d freak out.It’s downright evil, I think.”
Celia’s brain fizzed.Although she and Hanson were sharing an intimate moment, and although she felt closer to this handsome hunk than she ever had to another human (she thought), she couldn’t turn her journalist brain off.
“What is he doing?”Celia asked.
Hanson shook his head ominously and brushed his fingers through her hair.Her throat swelled.
“Trust me.You don’t want to know,” Hanson said, and then he pressed his lips onto hers, drawing her into his warmth, his beauty, his confidence.She couldn’t believe it was happening.She couldn’t believe that he’d answered her question with a kiss.
But all that evening, she let herself be swept up in this private and impossible romance, wondering what on earth would happen next.Privately, she knew she had to get to the bottom of whatever Hanson’s father was doing.Maybe she could wear Hanson down, eventually.Perhaps he’d slip.Or maybe they’d accidentally fall in love with one another.Perhaps they’d work together to fight both his father and hers and make the world a better place.Landon could help if he wanted to.Oh, but when she thought of Landon, she felt a stab of guilt that was hard to comprehend.Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t like this.Somehow, she knew to keep it a secret.
ChapterEleven
Present Day
Celia’s curiosity kept her up at night.Wide-awake in the rental house she’d picked for herself and Sophie for the summer, she opened all the windows to bring in the soft June breeze, which fluttered through the curtains and brought a magic to the space.Sophie was alone down the hall in her room, listening to music that Celia had never heard before.She had half a mind to knock on her daughter’s door and ask if she wanted to watch a movie or play a game of cards.But she knew that Sophie wasn’t exactly happy with her.Celia wouldn’t let her touch her mother Margaret's journals.She would hardly go anywhere in town at all and had gotten so quiet when they’d gone down to the beach that Sophie had grown nervous and asked to leave.
“You don’t understand,” Celia had said as she’d gathered the journals and put them back in the wooden box.“My mother?My father?They weren’t easy people.”
“You can’t protect me from people who are already dead,” Sophie had stammered back, her chin quivering.“I haven’t had a family, like, ever.And now we’re in the town you grew up in, and I’m even more in the dark than I was back in Washington, DC.What’s the point of coming back if I’m never going to learn about you, about my aunts, about the past?”
