Page 35 of Windward Hearts

But there was no point in asking herself what she might have missed. What she had to do was move forward.

Mary shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you, but at least it keeps our lives interesting, right?” she said.

“It sure does,” Cadence agreed. “Although, if I could pick your brain for one more moment…”

“Of course!”

“Do you have any suggestions for getting her excited about glasses if it does turn out she needs them? Obviously we’ll start with getting her in for an appointment at the eye doctor, but if she’s this resistant to even telling us she has the issue, I’m worried that she won’t want to wear the glasses if she gets them. I can’t exactly follow her around and make her wear them everywhere.”

“Honestly, I suspect that won’t be an issue for very long,” Mary said. “I know that’s not a super helpful action for right now, but if you let her pick out her own frames, maybe make a big deal about letting her pick them out. Usually it’s just the change that worries them. Once she gets over the adjustment, she’ll probably realize that it’s much, much better to be able to see than not. And if she really, really hates them, you can start thinking about contacts. She’s still a little young, not necessarily from a medical standpoint, but because the littler ones don’t always bring the right level of hygiene when it comes to sticking their fingers in their eyeballs, but…” Mary shrugged. “You have that option in your back pocket. But again, I doubt you’ll need it.”

Despite Mary’s assessment that this advice wasn’t necessarily actionable, Cadence felt a whole lot better hearing it.

“Okay,” she said, feeling some of the worry of the last few weeks pour off her in waves. “Okay. I’ll make an appointment with the optometrist, and go from there.”

“That will give you a solid answer, but I feel… oh, about eighty percent certain,” Mary said. “Maybe even ninety. So, try not to worry until after you see the doctor, okay? And in the meantime, I bet Mr. Hartley would be open to switching up his class seating. He’s very nice, so I bet he would even move the whole setting around so that nobody suspects that the move is about Izzy specifically. I’ll mention it to him.”

From the faint way that Mary brightened when talking about the young teacher, Cadence wondered if the nurse didn’t have a little bit of a crush on the man. But that wasn’t her business unless Mary made it so, so she decided not to comment.

“You’re the best,” Cadence said. “Thank you so much.”

“Oh, all in a day’s work,” Mary said, dismissively. “We only test the kids’ eyes once per year, and it’s really not frequently enough. Sometimes, the issues come on relatively quickly. Or they don’t, and the kids don’t say something, or don’t even notice, until they really do need the glasses. But your doctor will clear all that up.”

Cadence stayed at the window to her daughter’s classroom for a few more minutes after Mary said goodbye and headed back to her office to continue with her workday. Izzy repeated the same pattern that Mary had described a few times, where she would look up at the board like it was some kind of mystical puzzle, then return to just tapping her pencil on her notebook, rather than actually writing anything down.

No wonder Izzy had been having a hard time with her studies, Cadence thought with sympathy. She’d been trying to memorize everything without any help from written notes.

Cadence left after that, waving a much more cheerful farewell to the secretary at the front of the school than her welcome had been. She felt lighter than she had since Izzy had started bringing home tests with uncommonly low scores. She would wait to hear from the doctor before she considered the matter settled, but this information felt right.

She made the appointment at the eye doctor before she even left the school parking lot. They were able to offer Izzy an appointment for the following week, which gave Cadence just enough time to prepare her daughter for the visit but not enough time for them all to stress over it unduly.

As she drove herself home, she wanted to laugh out loud with the relief of how good it felt to finally, finally make some movement forward on Izzy’s difficulties. With just a little bit of luck, this would be the solution, and they could put all of this behind them.

Besides, she thought with a smile, Isabelle would look simply adorable in glasses.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Eleanor hummed to herself absently as she went into the kitchen to grab a plate of the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that she’d baked for that night’s book club. The snacks didn’t have a theme this week, since the book didn’t necessarily lend itself to such a thing, but Eleanor had decided that the group needed some comfort food, since they were currently reading a deeply tense thriller.

It was a good book, for sure. Eleanor had struggled to make herself stop at the section they were scheduled to read before this meeting, since she feared that any information about the novel’s endless twists and turns would show up on her face.

But still. She really wanted to know if the protagonist’s husband had secretly committed a murder when he was a high schooler. Because if it wasn’t him, did that mean that it was the neighbor? But she was so sweet! Surely it couldn’t be the neighbor!

Her mind was so caught up in the twistiness of the novel that she ignored her surroundings until a flicker of movement caught her eye. She looked up at her kitchen window⁠—

And screamed when she saw a face looking back in at her.

She barely managed to stop herself from dumping the entire plate of cookies on the floor, and she only managed that because she recognized the face.

“What the heck, Shane!” she cried as her brother winced on the other side of the window. She put down the cookies and then opened the window, letting in the cool evening air. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Sorry,” he said, twisting his mouth to the side apologetically. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Certainly not,” she said sarcastically. “Why would you be trying to scare me when you came creeping outside my kitchen window in the dead of night?”

“Well, it’s only six in the evening,” Shane reasoned. “I don’t know if that’s the dead of night. Not at this point in the year, anyway.”

“Shane,” she groaned. “Why are you standing outside my kitchen window?”