Page 15 of Christmas By The Shore

They were back on the freeway in no time, and Catherine proceeded to spend the next six hours combing through a second draft from one of her more long-winded writers. His prose wasn’t necessarily engaging, but it kept her mind occupied, and that was all she could ask for.

As they drove through Cape May, Catherine ended up closing her laptop and appreciating just how adorable the town was in all its holiday glory. Even though it wasn’t even technically Thanksgiving yet, most of the shops downtown were strung up with friendly, sparkling lights, and half had trees in the window. The coffee shop on the corner offered a plethora of holiday-themed drinks, and a very noticeable sprig of mistletoe hung over the door.

There was a dusting of snow on the ground, but not enough to make the drive treacherous. Cat knew there was likely to be more in the coming weeks, but thankfully, her parents had a big four-wheel-drive SUV that they said Cat and McKenzie could use while they were in town.

The colorful Victorian inns and mansions lining the shore all looked the same as Cat remembered, if not sporting a fresh coat of paint or two. Her parents’ house, in one of the few remaining residential neighborhoods on the coast, was small compared to these homes but still much bigger than her apartment in the city. It wasn’t Cat’s childhood home—that was back in a suburb of Newark—but her parents had lived there for over a decade, so the area felt familiar and welcoming.

On their way out of the main section of town, Catherine rolled down her window a little bit to breathe in the crisp, clean air. It was so quiet. Aside from the sound of the tires crunching on the snow, there wasn’t much else punctuating the small-town silence. She sighed happily as a wave of relaxation washed over her.

“See what I mean about this being a really good place to write?” she asked McKenzie. “I can totally see you finishing your novel out here. It’s like the perfect writer’s getaway.”

“I know that. If you’d taken me here while I was writing my first book, it probably would’ve taken me half the time!”

“Then why are you still having doubts about finishing this third one?”

“It’s funny,” McKenzie said instead of answering Cat’s question. “You’ve worked with writers for most of your career, and yet I still think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of howwriter’s block actually works. If something as simple as a change of scenery was going to make a difference, I would’ve found that out ages ago.”

“Okay, so whatdoesmake a difference?”

“I don’t know! I just have to wait until it goes away.”

“And if it doesn’t go away before your next deadline?”

“You tell me.” She shrugged. “I swear, I’m not trying to make your life any harder, Cat, but the muses just aren’t speaking to me.”

Cat sighed. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying, and I’ll back off. I was just trying to help you talk through it. I thought maybe it would spark something, or we could pinpoint exactly where this block is coming from.”

“Honestly, I think if you’ll just allow me to spend the next few days relaxing here in Cape May, the future of this book will become a lot clearer to me.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Cat stayed true to her word after this and didn’t keep harping on the subject. She settled deeper into her seat and kept looking out the window as McKenzie followed the phone’s instructions and took a left at the next turn. Catherine could’ve navigated from there, but she enjoyed sitting back and not thinking about anything except how pretty the trees looked with their branches covered in a thin layer of white. She wasn’t going to admit it out loud, but McKenzie was right. She felt a million times better just being somewhere like this. The best part was that she knew there wasn’t a chance she would accidentally run into Chris while she was here.

That meant she had six weeks to figure out what she was going to say to him the next time they saw each other or if she wanted to meet up with him at all.

This thought was comforting, and one that served to quell whatever stress she was still carrying with her from the encounter they’d had that morning at the gas station.

“It’s that one up there, right?” McKenzie asked, pointing at the two-story seaside bungalow with a wraparound porch on the upper level. It only had two bedrooms and two baths, but what the house lacked in indoor accommodations, it made up for in patio space and an incredible ocean view.

“Yeah,” Cat said. “I would say you should park on the street, and that way, we can get my mom’s car out of the garage if we have to later on.” As they passed the neighbor’s modest home on the right, Cat noticed a big old truck parked in the driveway and a sign hanging in the window of their garage. “What does that say?” she asked, squinting to make out the letters, but the sunlight was hitting the white of the sign just right so that she struggled to get the whole message.

“Rowland Construction,” McKenzie said, stopping by the curb. “They must operate their business out of their house.”

“I didn’t know the old neighbors very well, but they were getting up there in years. Older than my parents, for sure.”

“Then I doubt they are the ones running the construction business.”

“Probably not.” Cat smiled. “Guess they moved. Hopefully, whoever lives in the house now is nice. I sometimes worry about my parents being here by themselves. I know they take good care of each other, but what if one of them were to, I don’t know, slipon some ice or something? It’s just nice to know that the people in the neighborhood are decent.”

“I get that.” McKenzie put the car in park. “I’m so grateful my mom finally hired a nurse to help her with some of my dad’s medical stuff. The second I found out that she was the one helping him up and down the stairs, all what—one hundred pounds of her—I started to fear the worst. And to think, she kept griping about how she didn’t want some stranger in her house all the time, and now the two of them are peas in a pod. They do everything together.”

Cat laughed. “Parents can be so stubborn sometimes.”

“Yeah, not like us,” McKenzie joked, and they laughed as they spilled out onto the street. Cat shoved all of their trash into the plastic bag from the gas station and grabbed just her work bag for now. She would come back for the rest once she got the heat running inside. They went through the garage, and Catherine punched in her own birthday to silence the alarm that started beeping the second they stepped inside the house.

“Wow, it’s really cold in here!” she remarked, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, only covered in a thin sweater. “Like,freezingcold.”

“I thought your parents only left yesterday morning,” said McKenzie. “How could it have gotten this cold overnight?”

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