She’d thought he was dead.
Daniel kissed her forehead and murmured, “I’m here, now, honey. I’m here.”
Ivy didn’t have the strength to ask where he’d been or what had happened. She was suddenly cast forward into the world of childbirth, a world of life-altering pain and terrifying questions from which she wasn’t released for another six hours.
Their daughter, Lily, was born at one o’clock in the morning. She was seven pounds and nine ounces of beautiful, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and little dark curls all over her head. Ivy held her baby as tears fell down her cheeks. In her heart of hearts, she thought, You’re here, my baby, and now I’ll never be alone again.
Chapter Three
Present Day
The dress Ivy picked for the opening party at the Bluebell Cove Eco-Lodge was a deep blue that made her think of the sea late at midnight. She leaned into the mirror and tried and failed to perfect her makeup, seeing in her face more of the fine lines that had begun to haunt her in her mid-thirties. Now that she was forty, she knew she had to prepare herself emotionally. She’d tried Botox a few times, but the cost had put her off. Given what she knew about her own finances, it felt entirely irresponsible to throw her money at her face.
Except that time has passed, she told herself, thinking of her growing children, the ever-changing inn, and her sisters returning to Bluebell Cove.
Suddenly, in the mirror beside Ivy, her daughter, Lily, appeared: eighteen years old, with adorable plump cheeks and long, curly hair. She’d opted for a red dress with puff sleeves and a pair of flats that reminded Ivy of the early 2000s. It was remarkable to her how styles came in and out of fashion. Everything felt like it was about to return—from bell-bottoms to chokers to wedge heels.
“You look pretty, Mom,” Lily said, pressing her lips together to fix her lipstick. She’d opted for a shade that seemed too old for her, too formal, but Ivy told herself not to say anything. Lily had to make her own fashion mistakes, just as Ivy and all her sisters had.
“You look gorgeous,” Ivy said, turning to look at Lily, at a young woman who seemed far more sure of herself than Ivy ever had. A young woman who knew how to laugh far more than Ivy ever had.
They padded downstairs to find Tyler hunched over on his phone. He wore his nicest pair of jeans and a button-down shirt that, Ivy knew, itched him around the collar.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Ivy said, opening the front door and ushering her children to the party next door.
Already, it seemed like all of Bluebell Cove was there. People Ivy had grown up with, people she recognized from her children’s schools and her trips to the grocery store and their stop-ins at the flower shop, milled past, drinking glasses of wine and catching up with one another about their summers, about how “grateful” they were that Celia had “put that criminal Smith hotel out to pasture.” Celia was Bluebell Cove’s hero.
Ivy recognized several of the attendees as people who’d once frequented her flower shop. They were people who’d once thrown money at her to make their birthday arrangements, their wedding bouquets, their Valentine’s Day gifts, and so on. But over the years, many of them had dropped off without explanation. Did they still buy flowers for their loved ones? Did they get their flowers somewhere else? Or had buying flowers fallen out of fashion like skinny jeans and side parts?
Ivy still wasn’t sure what to make of the drop in flower sales. But she told herself not to think of it now. It was too much to carry in her head. It made her brain feel like a balloon.
Celia, Juliet, and Wren stood in the plush lawn near the bar, smiling beautifully in a way that made them all look like the spitting image of their mother, a mother they’d struggled over the years to understand. It had come to light recently that their mother had suffered terribly from depression and had considered leaving their father over the years. The Harper sisters guessed that this depression and heartache were what had made their father such a difficult character to understand. Ivy had taken the brunt of it, she knew. She’d stayed behind to take it.
“You look beautiful, girls!” Celia said, bending forward to wrap first Lily and then Ivy in hugs.
“This is so exciting, Aunt Celia!” Lily cried. “I mean, the place looks insane. We never could have done it without you.”
“Honestly? It’s a miracle,” Juliet said, shifting her weight onto her high-heeled shoe, a high heel that spoke of her life in the big city. It was still a life that she kept private from the rest of them.
Celia blushed and raked her fingers through her hair. “It’s so cool that the entire community came out to support us.”
Ivy ordered a glass of wine from the bar and turned to catch Tyler disappearing around the side of the eco-lodge with a few other teenage boys. She felt a stab of fear at the realization she knew so little about Tyler’s life these days. She wondered whether she kept her distance from him because he looked so much like his father. That she was scared of him, too scared to know much of what he was up to. She loved him desperately, but her love was constantly marred by her memories and by all that had happened to them.
If only Tyler’s father were here to make sense of all this. If only Tyler’s father were here to explain to Ivy just how terrifying and strange and exhilarating it was to be a teenage boy.
As it stood, Ivy was lost. Celia didn’t have any boys to speak of and couldn’t offer her help, either. Not that Ivy would ever seek help from her older sister. Not about something so private.
Again, Lily was talking to her Aunt Celia about something. Ivy tuned in, her heart thudding.
“And it’s been incredible to learn more about sustainability and careers within that whole field,” Lily explained. “I mean, my entire life, teachers have asked me what I want to be when I’m older. I used to always say something silly like, ‘I want to be a singer,’ or ‘I want to be an artist,’ or whatever. For a little while, I said I wanted to take over at my grandfather’s inn, or I wanted to run Mom’s flower shop. Ha.”
At Lily’s ironic laugh, Ivy felt a stone fall into her stomach. Would it really be so bad to take over at the flower shop? she wondered. She had flashing memories of her little daughter, touching delicate petals of flowers so gently, asking her mother questions about perennials and winter sowing and bulb layering, about flowers she’d never heard of and their habits and needs. Ivy had loved telling her daughter everything she knew about growing flowers and arranging bouquets.
Ivy had felt purposeful. She’d felt full of wisdom.
She filled her mouth with wine and told herself to put a smile on her face. She didn’t want anyone to notice how glum she felt.
But Lily wasn’t done. “I mean, our planet, our world! That’s what I want to focus on,” she said. “When I look at the stats? When I read about global warming and what it’s doing to our coastlines? When I read about what overfishing has done to our oceans? I get so angry, Aunt Celia. It makes me want to do something. And it must have been like this for you? When you wanted to go into environmental journalism, did you feel all this fire?”
