Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and forced her eyes away from Elliot and over to the breakfast nooks, which were glowing and ready for their first round of breakfasters tomorrow morning.
“Elliot, you’ve seriously outdone yourself,” Celia said brightly. “My sisters and I are so grateful for all your hard work on this. I know it wasn’t always easy.”
Elliot laughed. “There was a learning curve with all the eco-friendly stuff,” he said. “But it made this project a whole lot different from your average redesign. I’ve already started advertising myself to future clients as an eco-friendly carpenter. I keep telling them, you know, we have to change now. We have to think about our future and the future of Bluebell Cove.” He beamed and ruffled his dark curls so that sawdust flicked off them and onto his shoulders.
Her sisters laughed good-naturedly. It was as though they’d spent all summer and into early fall, joking together and building camaraderie. Ivy hadn’t spoken to Elliot once since she’d seen him working at the eco-lodge—not because she hadn’t wanted to, but because she hadn’t known what to say.
How could she account for all they’d been through?
Now, Ivy ached to reach forward and touch the sleek line of the table he’d made for them. She ached to sit quietly in the corner and watch him sand the last of the corners and blow the sawdust to the side. It was remarkable that he was the head carpenter on the redesign of the Bluebell Cove Inn. After all, he’d worked here before.
He’d been an integral part of Ivy’s life, if only briefly. But Ivy was sure her sisters didn’t know the extent of it. Maybe Elliot didn’t remember.
What her sisters knew was that Ivy and Elliot had been students in the same year at Bluebell High, which felt like a thousand years ago, a time during which Elliot had been a basketball star as well as his carpenter father’s right-hand man. Back then, Elliot’s girlfriend was Shelly Triplet, the cheerleader-slash-math wiz who’d gone on to major in mathematics and eventually gotten a job at MIT. Ivy and her sisters knew that after they’d left Bluebell, Elliot and Shelly had made it work for a little while. During Shelly’s undergrad, they’d gotten married and bought a house. Elliot had worked on wealthy Bostonian properties, made pieces of expensive furniture, and tried to be happy in Shelly’s shadow. But after a few years, the strain of Elliot’s lack of intellectualism versus Shelly’s ultra-math-brain had gotten to them. By the time they’d all turned twenty-two, Elliot had returned to Bluebell to take over his father’s carpentry business, where he’d mostly kept to himself. Ivy had seen him on a few incredibly intense occasions—but her sisters didn’t know about that.
“We’ll leave you to it.” Celia thanked Elliot again before guiding Ivy, their sisters, and Ivy’s daughter back into the kitchen.
Right before Ivy turned the corner, she couldn’t help but glance back and find Elliot’s eyes on her. He offered a soft smile, then turned his back to her to put his tools in his box and get ready to go. A shiver went down Ivy’s spine.
In the kitchen, Celia blushed with a mix of excitement for the day ahead and her joy at her “beautiful date” with Landon. “He should be here any second,” she said, after she’d walked Ivy through what had happened last night and how right it felt. “I hope everyone in town really comes to the opening party. After everything that happened with the Smith family, I want everyone to know they can trust us to put our best foot forward and help Bluebell Cove as best as we can.”
“It’s all anyone can talk about,” Lily said, beaming at her aunt.
“You’re sweet,” Celia said.
The opening party was set to begin at three thirty that afternoon. The catering company van pulled up outside, bringing with it white-coated chaos agents who wanted to kick the Harper family out of the kitchen. Ivy followed Lily, searching the streets for some sign of Elliot Rhodes’s truck. But it looked as though he was already gone.
“I want to check on your brother,” Ivy said to Lily, “and make a few phone calls about tomorrow’s shipments. Want to head home for now?”
Lily seemed reticent, as though she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the eco-lodge just yet. But after a moment’s hesitation, she forced a smile and said, “Sure.” She followed Ivy back to the house next door, where Wren was already on the staircase, heading for the room she’d claimed as her own when she’d come home. She needed to rest before the party later. Tyler was on the sofa, flicking through channels, his bedhead mussed and his body a scrawny string bean under his massive Bluebell Cove High School Athletics shirt. At seventeen, he was already the spitting image of his father—a slightly younger version of the man Ivy had met and fallen in love with all those years ago. Sometimes that fact gave her whiplash.
“You’d better get ready, Ty,” she said, snaking past the sofa to pick up his bowl of cereal, where just a little bit of milk remained. “We have the party later, remember?”
Lily collapsed on the sofa next to her brother. “It looks insane,” she told Tyler, speaking of the eco-lodge and all the work they’d done. Ivy was aware that her children felt a sense of ownership over the eco-lodge. They’d helped out the past few months after Celia had asked them to. They’d sanded and painted and thrown their hearts at a space that, for many years, had remained vacant.
Ivy still couldn’t believe that their father had stipulated in the will that they couldn’t sell the inn until they’d kept it running for an entire year. A part of her wanted to fight it, to remind her sisters that she’d worked tirelessly at the Bluebell Cove Inn for the better part of her life, that she shouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.
But she knew what Celia would say. "Nobody asked you to be a martyr." Nobody asked you to give up your life. And isn’t this what you wanted? Didn’t you want to stay in Bluebell with Daniel? Didn’t you want to have Bluebell Cove children and live a Bluebell Cove life?
The answer, Ivy knew, was complicated.
When her children spoke excitedly about the approaching party, Ivy crept into the kitchen, made herself a mug of tea, and sat by the window, watching the rain. She willed more storm clouds to rip open over the eco-lodge. She wasn’t sure why, but she wanted the day to be a failure. She wanted Celia to know what it was like not to get everything she wanted.
Ivy was accustomed to messiness. She was accustomed to failure.
Chapter Two
Memorial Day
2007
At nine months pregnant and a few days’ change, Ivy strained to stand upright at the front desk of the Bluebell Cove Inn. Sweat bubbled on the back of her neck and all along her spine, and she felt swampy and strange in a big, loose dress she hoped hid how monstrous she felt. Still, every single guest who wheeled their bags into the Bluebell Cove immediately fixated on how pregnant she was and asked question after question, usually finishing with, “You shouldn’t be working any longer! You’re about to pop!”
Each time she said the same, “Ha ha! Can’t stop till the baby comes! It’s a family business. You know how it goes. We’ll put the baby to work when she gets here!”
Ivy’s smile made her cheeks ache. But when her father, James, came in from the back porch to see how things were going, she made sure to put on her bravest face and act the part of the charming front desk hostess he needed her to be. Back in the old days, back before Celia had taken off for her new life in Washington, DC, James had always thought Celia was better at working the front desk; he’d thought she was better with people and knew exactly what to say. Ivy struggled with it. But after four years of working at the inn post-high school, she felt she was on the verge of making sense of it, of socializing, of saying the right thing. She hoped.
When James Harper wasn’t cozying up with guests and telling fantastical stories from his long and brilliant life on the coast of Maine, he glowered at both Ivy and whatever paperwork awaited him in his office. Things at the Bluebell Cove Inn had been patchy at best the past year, especially after a storm over the ocean had destroyed three of their top-selling rooms. Now that construction was underway, they hoped to reopen the rooms by midsummer.
