I’ve almost finished the romance novel that I bought from Mia. I’m not the same person I was when I started it. I’ve taken my time on purpose because there are too many parallels between this fictional guy and me.
The hero just told the heroine he’s in love with her without explaining who he really is. He’s standing in his kitchen, making her coffee, rehearsing the confession in his head. I close the book and set it on the small table beside me.
It’s almost over—the book and my stay here. I officially have a month left.
After breakfast, the two of us are on the beach with our boards. She kept her promise and is teaching me to surf. The morning sun is bright, and the swells are gentle enough that Wendy told me we were doing a lesson. I’m getting better, and I can almost stay on for thirty seconds before eating shit sideways. Whether I stand or fall, she cheers me on from the shallows like I won a competition.
“Again,” she says, holding my board steady in waist-deep water.
“I need a minute.”
“You need to stop thinking so hard. Your body knows what to do.”
I waggle my brows at her.
She splashes me with a laugh. “Focus, Banks.”
We go for another hour. By the time she calls the lesson, my eyes burn, and my arms are jelly.
“You’re doing great,” she says.
“You’re being kind,” I tell her, brushing my pinkie against hers.
She smiles and glances away from me.
We walk the boards up to the rack behind the B&B, and she rinses them with a hose.
I take a real shower and a nap. When Wendy enters my room, it’s dark. I flick on the seashell lamp next to the bed. She sits, and I see the worn leather album and a small wooden box in her hands.
“What’s that?” I ask, sitting up right beside her.
“Something I want to show you.” She climbs onto the mattress and crosses her legs, setting everything in the space between us. “This is the original guest book.”
She flips the album open. The pages are yellowed, and the handwriting changes from entry to entry. Some are in pen, and others are in pencil that’s barely legible from the years. I lean against the headboard. The pages turn, and so do the decades. There are names, hometowns, dates of stay. Some of the entries are one line while others fill the page.
“Read this one,” she says, pointing to an entry from 1983.
We came to Seaside because our marriage was falling apart. We left because it wasn’t anymore. Whatever is here, protect it. The world needs more places like this.
—David and Lacey Meredith, Savannah, Georgia
“There are hundreds of these stories.” She turns a few more pages. “This couple came every year for fifteen years.This woman stayed for a month after her husband died and wrote that Gran had saved her life. This family brought three generations here for a reunion, and the grandmother said it was the first time she’d seen her grandchildren in four years.”
Wendy opens the wooden box. Inside are folded letters, postcards, photographs from guests who wrote years later to talk about how the stay at Seaside had changed their lives.
“Gran keeps every single one.” Wendy holds a faded postcard between her fingers. “She reads them when she’s having a bad day. She says the letters remind her why the house matters.”
I pick up a postcard from a woman in Ohio who stayed in the Seahorse Room in 2014. Four sentences thanking Gale for a conversation they had on the porch about grief. The ink is faded, and the edges are soft from being handled.
Wendy runs her finger along the spine of the album. “This place is alive, Carter. It holds people’s stories. Their worst moments and their best ones. That’s why I can’t let some corporation with a checkbook turn it into a resort with a rooftop pool and a cocktail menu. I don’t know what to do.”
She closes the album and rests her hand on the cover. “I want to be here in twenty years. I want my kids to grow up in this house the way my dad did. I want to sit on that porch when I’m Gran’s age and read letters from people whose lives changed because they had walked through the front door.”
She looks at me, and her eyes are bright. “I’m so scared I’m going to lose this.”
“Did something happen?”
“They called,” she whispers. “I heard their voices and how badly they want the property.”
