Celia crossed her arms and glared right back.She’d just had her eighteenth birthday, and she didn’t take kindly to being treated this way.This deep in her “womanhood,” she’d more or less decided that her father had made her mother’s short life miserable, and he’d been the reason she’d gotten so sick in the first place.She’d begun to learn how to hate him.
“Now!”her father bellowed, and the sound struck a nerve in Celia, forcing her around the front desk and into his office.She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her.She remained standing as her father stormed in, slammed the door behind him, and said, “I always knew you didn’t care about this family, but this really takes the cake.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her father’s breathing was ragged.He stabbed his finger on the desk.“Do you know the kind of threat we’re under?Now that you’re playing this little game with the Smith family?”
Celia felt as though she’d been smacked.But she pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about.“I’m not playing any kind of game.”
James let out a mirthless laugh.“I’ve just received a letter from Mr.Smith’s lawyer,” he said.“They’re going to sue us for everything we have if you go ahead with your little article.They’re going to rip us to shreds.We’ll lose everything, Celia.We’ll lose the inn.We’ll lose the house.Your sisters won’t have food to eat or clothes to wear.You’ll be gone, so what do you care?But we’ll be ruined.”
Celia was stunned into silence.She thought she had been so careful.“I don’t understand,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.
“If you don’t understand, then maybe you aren’t smart enough to go to Georgetown,” her father shot back.“Maybe you don’t understand how the world works.”
Celia felt as outraged as a toddler.She reached for something, anything to throw, and landed on a pen, which she hurled to the corner.“Maybe you don’t understand!”she cried.“I know how you treated Mom.The girls don’t remember, but I do!I know how sick she was!I know she was sad, because you made her sad!”Her voice was shrill and awful in her own ears.
Her father blinked and blinked, his hands in fists.“You don’t know anything,” he said
“I know everything!”Celia howled.
Before her father could answer, before he could try to convince her of something she already knew was wrong deep in her bones, Celia bounded out the door and slammed it behind her.She felt like she was going to faint.Out she went, down to the cove, where she picked up stone after stone and threw them into the angry ocean.She couldn’t believe that the Smith family had discovered her article, couldn’t believe that the monstrous company had bested her.But as she hurled more stones into the sea, she realized that she’d been a fool to think that she, a girl of eighteen, could ever defeat an ancient and powerful company.
She pledged to keep going, to keep trying to right the wrongs of society.But she knew that she couldn’t publish the article, not now that Wren’s, Juliet’s, and Ivy’s lives were at stake.
ChapterSeventeen
Present Day
Since Wren’s return to Bluebell Cove four days ago, she’d hardly left the bedroom she’d been given in Ivy’s house, the same house where all four sisters had been raised.From the foyer, Celia eyed the door that Wren had closed behind her, her heart pounding with curiosity and fear.If she and Ivy tore down the door, if they refused to allow Wren the privacy she so craved, what would they find behind it?Would they find a tired, weak, and entirely too-thin Wren?Would she ever tell them what was going wrong?Or would she fight them tooth and nail?
It didn’t make sense that Wren had quit her European adventure to come back to Bluebell Cove.In May, after the reading of their father’s will, she’d been so keen to leave them behind.But what had changed in the few months between?Why had she lost so much weight?What had happened back in Paris?
“Any sign of her last night?”Celia asked Ivy.
“Nothing,” Ivy said.“I heard her get up to use the bathroom and drink water, but that was it.I brought food to her room, but she was sleeping, and I don’t know if she touched it.”
Ivy stood at the kitchen counter, scraping peanut butter onto toast, while her two children, Lily and Tyler, drank orange juice, stared at their phones, and prepared to leave for the inn.In the wake of showing Ivy Margaret’s journal entries, Ivy had recruited both of her children to help out, to clean and paint and sand and move things around.This pleased Celia to no end.For the first time, she had a niece, a nephew.
It was summertime, which meant she never worked Ivy’s kids too hard.During the previous few days, they’d already taken plenty of breaks to run through the woods and to the beach below, to swim beneath a splendorous summer sky, to stretch their legs and wash their hands of the paint they’d used back at the inn.Like her mother before her, Celia had made everyone sandwiches; she’d told them stories; she’d asked them about their dreams.And Sophie was already falling for her cousins, thrilled to have an extended family she could call her own.
Things were slowly mending between Celia and Sophie.
Celia hadn’t yet told Sophie that she’d seen Landon, that they’d been on a sort of “date.”She wasn’t sure how she wanted to refer to it in her mind.She wasn’t sure why she thought about it so often, either, nor why she texted Landon nearly every day to see how he was, to ask about his marine biology field, and to marvel at how evil the Smith family still was.She was getting up the nerve to ask Sophie if she could read over her article.Maybe she could help out.Perhaps she could do what she hadn’t been able to do all those years ago.Maybe she could finally be instrumental in taking down the Smith family—and Hanson—once and for all.
It was unlikely that the Smith family would see Sophie coming.Sophie was an outlier, a Washington, DC-born-and-raised idealist.Maybe she was the key.
Now, Sophie burst through the door of Ivy’s place, gasping for air, sweat glinting on her forehead.That morning, she’d been at the inn to meet some antique dealers who’d come to deliver the furniture that Ivy and Celia had picked out two days ago.“Any sign of her?”Sophie asked, eyeing Wren’s closed door and kicking off her shoes.Just as their father had done when they were children, Ivy didn’t let anyone wear them in the house.
“Nothing,” Celia said, her shoulders sagging.
Ivy dotted two plates of toast in front of her children and put her hands on her hips.“I’ve been thinking,” she said, her eyes churning like two storms.“We need to take her to the doctor.There’s no telling what’s going on with her.And you read Mom’s journals…” She trailed off, as though remembering what they’d read together felt too dark and painful to mention.
Ivy looked down at her teenagers, who were eager to listen, their eyes bright.“What are you still doing here?”she asked in her stern-mom voice.“Take your toast to the inn and get cracking.”
Lily and Tyler carried their toast to the foyer, their eyes down as they shoved their feet into their shoes and scampered across the lawn to the inn.Celia, Sophie, and Ivy watched them disappear through the front door.And then, Ivy traipsed up the stairs and didn’t pause to knock on Wren’s door before barging through.From downstairs, Celia could hear Wren groaning.
“I’ll be fine,” Wren said in that small voice of hers.“Really.I just need to rest.I need to regroup.”
