I sigh and look up at the sky, willing myself the strength and the patience to deal with this. She hasn’t turned around, so I speak softly, trying not to scare the shit out of her. “June. It’s Mason.”
She doesn’t even flinch. “I’m aware that you’re standing there,” she says dryly. “You’re a large one, Mason Grant. For a moment I thought I was being stalked by a buffalo.”
Then she makes a show of moving some twigs and leaves around, like she’s just tidying up the landscape. She gets to her feet, and I notice the fresh flowers she’s left on the ground.
I study her as she avoids my eyes. “Are you ... visiting their graves?”
Shetsks irritably. “Of course I am. You’re not the only one who cared for them.”
I realize that, of course. Just never would’ve occurred to me that I’d run intoherhere. This isolated cliff is at the edge of a public park, but I rarely run into anyone here.
“And it’s not really a grave, is it,” she says brusquely as the wind off the ocean whips her hair around her face. “I just come by on my rounds sometimes.”
This woman and her rounds. She’s always walking the woods and the beaches and every path that meanders around Orchard Cove. There have been times when I’ve had to pull my truck over to talk to her on the side of a road when I see her out walking, because it’s the only way to pin her down.
And just like that, she brushes her hands off and starts walking briskly, back into the woods.
I consider letting her go and focusing on what I came here for.
The wildflowers dangle from my hand, petals fluttering in the ocean breeze. My parents’ actual gravesite is in a graveyard over in Vancouver, in a plot with my mom’s family. That was their wish. Maybe it was a concession they agreed to: life in Orchard Cove, for his family; eternal rest in Vancouver, for hers.
But this is the place where I come to visit them most often, and I do think of it as their grave.
A sort of final resting place. The place where their lives ended.
I lay my wildflowers next to the small bundle of pale-yellow peonies June left, and go after her. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days, June.”
“Have you?” she says flatly. “Why?”
Does she really not know why?
This is the thing about June—I never know when she’s being straight with me, or what her true intentions are. I don’t know if the gaping holes in our ability to communicate are a product of treachery, ignorance, or actual incompetence on her part.
June Spencer is not an incompetent person. Not in business. But the rest of her life? Who knows. I’ve never known a thing about this woman that someone else didn’t tell me, and so my understanding of her is a maddening patchwork of gossip, speculation, hearsay, possible outright lies, and guesswork.
“I’d like to talk to you about Pier Seven,” I tell her, because I have literally no idea if she knows this or not. Maybe she missed or just plain deleted/destroyed every voicemail, email, and actual registered letter that my realtor and I sent her over the past few months, or the urgent texts I’ve sent over the last nine days, since I found out she leased out the building to Sierra. “I was pretty disappointed that you leased the building to a stranger for Sunshine Fest rather than leasing it to me.”
“And what does your disappointment have to do with me?” she asks bluntly, like a woman who has no time to waste. She reminds me of my grandpa that way; Tommy Grant has grown more impatient in the last decade or so, as if there’s an hourglass in his head constantly ticking down the sands of his time on earth.
“My family leased the space last summer during Sunshine Fest,” I remind her. “My parents were making plans to buy the building from you, before ...” For some reason, I don’t finish the sentence. Maybe it’s the weight of it, always much heavier the closer I am to that damn cliff.
“Your parents, yes.” June stops in her tracks. I stop, and she fixes me with her pale-gray eyes. “Notyou. I had a lot of respect foryour parents. And yes, we talked a great deal about what could be. They had grand plans.”
“It was more than plans,” I press. “You had a verbal agreement.”
“According to whom?”
“According to my parents. And it’s one I would hope you’d consider honoring, given the circumstances.”
“The circumstance, while tragic, is that your parents died,” she says. “Rest their souls. I would think such an experience might teach you not to waste time on what could be and focus on what is.”
“That building belongs with my family,” I press. “We have the means to get it back up and running. Investing in that building means investing in the town. Now that your family, other than Lee, is long gone from Orchard Cove, you can’t possibly have the means to do that.” She frowns, but you don’t pussyfoot around with someone like June. “And if you’d ever had any interest in restoring the restaurant, you would’ve done it by now.”
“That’s a presumptuous position to take for someone who really doesn’t know me.”
“Come on, June. I’ve grown up with you. You’re the grouchy, stubborn, impossibly difficult lady on the other side of the fence.” Her frown deepens. “Or so I’ve been told. But we don’t have to be enemies forever. If we do this deal, maybe it’s a long-overdue first step in our families learning to work together instead of always butting heads.”
She snorts. “Were you always this tragically naive?”
