“Can’t,” she said.“I have to get home and…”
“Work at the inn.”Landon finished her sentence, rolling his eyes.“Same old story.I don’t even know why I asked.Let me walk you.”
Landon and Celia burst into the bright afternoon and zipped their coats to their chins.Their backpacks bobbed out behind them, and red and orange leaves flickered from the thick and scratchy limbs of oaks, maples, and birches.Standing at the crosswalk, they watched as the school bus rumbled past, taking other students out to the rolling hills that surrounded Bluebell Cove, a quaint town of a few thousand, built on stones and beaches between lush forests.Celia and her sisters and Landon had never traveled far from here.They knew very little about the rest of the world.
En route to the Bluebell Cove Inn, Celia asked Landon for pitches on his first article at the paper, hoping that it would kickstart her own creative engine.Landon thought for a moment, then laughed.“I can’t help but think this is a trap.”
Celia’s head rang.“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to tell me all my ideas are awful and assign me whatever you want the issue to be about,” Landon said.“I’m sure you have the first ten issues planned out, if not more.I know the way your brain works.You forget that we’ve known each other since before we can remember.”
Celia smiled, although her stomach buzzed with adrenaline.It was sweet that Landon and the others thought of her as organized, intellectual, and adventurous in her ideas.Perhaps she usually thought of herself like that, too.It was the editor's title that ate at her.She’d never had real success before.Maybe she wasn’t fully ready for it.
When they rounded the corner to see the Bluebell Cove Inn that afternoon, something about the old Victorian home struck Celia as remarkable.She stopped short and gazed at the way the orange sherbet light of midafternoon glowed across its windows and eaves, and at the way the mighty oaks out front seemed to sculpt around it, lending a perfect frame.The front porch, which her father had added on around the time of Celia’s birth, wrapped all the way around to the back, where a beautiful backyard descended to their own private rocky beach.Celia knew every detail of that property.She knew every patch of moss, every stone.But something about seeing it from a distance took her breath away.
“What’s up?”Landon asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I was thinking about something,” Celia said.
“You’re always up to something,” Landon said, cutting a dimple into his cheek.
Across the porch, guests of the Bluebell Cove Inn sat in rocking chairs and chaise lounges and sipped iced tea, wine, and beer, and either regarded the glorious garden or watched the sunlight play across the Atlantic.Celia recognized several of the guests, some of whom had checked in with her as recently as yesterday, and others who’d come to the Bluebell Cove Inn every year, going as far back as she could remember.Some of them even remembered her mother, which felt like a shock.Among her sisters, Celia was the only one who remembered her mother well at all.
“Yo, I’ll call you tonight,” Landon called as he headed off.“My head is spinning with calculus.”
“You think I know how to do calculus?”Celia cackled.“What am I going to need all those numbers for in journalism?”
“I know, CeeCee,” Landon said, using a nickname only he didn’t get in trouble for using.“But you know I want to be a scientist.I have to pull myself together.And you’re smarter than me.You always have been.”
Celia smiled to herself and hurried the rest of the way to the porch, where a surly-looking older woman with bright white hair gazed at her from over the top of her half-moon glasses.“Darling,” she said, her voice pinched, “if a man refuses to walk you all the way to the door, you shouldn’t give him the time of day.I should have learned that lesson with my first husband.”
“I don’t want to date him,” Celia said automatically, bruised that nearly every adult under the sun seemed far more interested in her romantic life than her intellectual one.
“I’m telling you,” the woman said, as though she wanted to teach this lesson no matter what, “you must demand what you want from men in this world.Otherwise, they’ll eat you up.”
Celia thanked the woman and went inside to find her father, James Harper, at the inn's front desk, a phone pressed to his ear as he scribbled on a notepad.“And you said that delivery’s coming at seven tomorrow?”he asked, eyeing Celia in a way that suggested she was late, and he was going to have a word with her about it.
But before he could, Celia’s little sisters, Wren and Juliet, raced around the corner, squealing and reaching out to swat one another, as though they were in an elaborate game of tag that had slightly different rules.Being creative spits of energy, it often seemed like they made up their own rules on the spot.Celia bent to stop them from running too fast, especially among all this vintage furniture, then whispered to them, “It’s beautiful outside!Why aren’t you running yourselves silly out there?”
“Come with us!”Juliet cried, clasping her hands together.
“Please!”Wren echoed.
At their adorable smiles and pleas, Celia’s heart swelled.At twelve years old, Juliet was five years younger than Celia, and Wren was three years younger than that, which made her nine.But for many years, Celia had been expected at the front desk of the Bluebell Cove Inn so her father could tend to other tasks and “keep the ship afloat,” as he called it, especially in the wake of her mother’s death.It often felt as though Celia had had to give up on her childhood long ago.One of her goals was to ensure that her little sisters could squeeze as much joy out of their own childhoods as they could.
With Juliet and Wren safely outside, Celia found herself behind the desk, smiling at a family of five who’d come to check in for a beautiful weekend away in Bluebell Cove.Her father was still on the phone but took it to his office, giving Celia a knowing, pointed look that seemed to say, “Don’t mess anything up, or else.”
“It’s just gorgeous here!”the mother of the new family said as they collected their keys and maps.“I can’t believe you get to live here full-time.”
“Does the family live here at the inn?”the father asked, gathering his three-year-old daughter’s hand in his to make sure she didn’t run far.
“We live right next door,” Celia said.
The father and mother gazed at one another adoringly, probably imagining a perfect, quaint alternate reality in which they raised their family next door to an inn they managed together.It wasn’t Celia’s place to tell them how not romantic the reality of running an inn really was.That “romance” was one of the inn’s biggest selling points.
My mother doesn’t think it’s romantic, either, Celia thought.
“And I imagine you’ll take over when you’re older?”the mother asked.
