Page 6 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
My heart and stomach seemed to switch positions. I slapped my hand to my chest, not sure if I was going to puke or pass out or burst into tears.
I had not loved my mother, not for a very long time. I had not missed my mother, not one day of my time away, not even in those first weeks, when I’d been terrified and alone and sure I’d be homeless and desperate forevermore. Though I’d felt guilt for leaving the way I had, none of that guilt had been for my mother’s sake.
My mother was the entire reason I’d left. I was not sorry the woman was gone. I hadn’t shed a single tear or felt a single heartbeat of sadness upon learning she’d died.
Yet something inside me now felt like mourning.
“Mom?” Wyatt said softly behind me. “You okay?”
That boy had been entirely too focused on me for the past year, entirely too dedicated to taking care of me, protecting me, being ‘the man of the house.’ I wanted my goofy kid back.
Therefore, I needed to build a new life that made him feel like we were both safe and strong again. Starting right now.
Steeling my spine and squaring my shoulders, I grabbed a piece of calm from the far corner of my head and pulled it forward.
“I’m great. There’s even more to do here than I thought, though. Let’s get the food and our packs out of the truck and leave everything else until the morning,” I said, turning to tousle my son’s shaggy hair. “It’s too dark to unload the truck now, anyway.”
“What about the car?”
We’d towed our Golf across the country. I hope to live the whole rest of my life without hauling a car behind a damned moving truck ever again.
“We’ll need to tow it to the U-Haul place and take it off the trailer there. Otherwise we won’t have any way to get back.”
“Uber?”
I laughed and hooked my arm over his neck. “Wyatt, my love, you now live in a town of about one thousand people, tops. I will swallow my tongue if anybody’s driving for Uber here.”
Clearly hoping to prove me wrong, Wyatt took his phone out. A few seconds later, he frowned. When he looked up, his eyes juddered with panic. “No service? There’s no internet? How can there be no internet? We moved to a place without internet?”
When I’d left, the internet was barely more than a toddler, and Facebook was just a thing for Harvard frat boys to rate the hotness of coeds. We’d been online here at the Sea-Mist, but with a modem.
“I’m sure there’s wifi, don’t panic. I just didn’t think to look into that. I’ll do it this week, I promise. Meanwhile, I’m sure the diner, or the library, or somewhere around here has wifi to use. We’ll check it out tomorrow, okay? Actually—in the morning we’ll take the car off the trailer after all. We need to get it out of the way to unload the truck, anyway. We’ll just have to trailer it again when the truck’s empty, so we can return everything and get back. But first thing in the morning, we’ll take the car into town. We’ll get some breakfast, and we’ll suck up all the little internets we can, okay?”
My return was certain to start the town tongues twitching; no point in delaying the inevitable. Catherine’s was the perfect place to dive into the deep end of the gossip pool. I was prepared for sharks.
Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Okay, Boomer. That’s not how it works, but okay.”
“I am a Millennial!” I corrected, adding some theatrical outrage to my expression. “You’re two whole generations off!”
“Then you should know how the internet works, huh?”
It was good to see him playful again—and I realized that the banter had started as we’d approached town. This journey had brought me backward, to a life I’d fled, but for Wyatt, this was forward. Away from the things he wanted—needed—to escape.
That understanding lifted most of the gloom from my mind. I grinned at my kid and pulled him close. “I love you, buddy.”
Wyatt’s arms were strong around my waist. “I love you, too. This is okay, Mom. This is good.”
“Even if it’s haunted?” I asked against his hair.
“Especiallyif it’s haunted!”
THREE: Homecoming
Ichecked my phone for about the thousandth time and decided that quarter to six was deep enough into the morning to give up on the night. I sat up in the near-complete darkness and sighed, rocking the kinks from my neck and shoulders. Nearby in the shadows, Wyatt snored lightly.
After a speedy tour of the rest of the cabin last night, we’d decided to use our sleeping bags one more night and camp in the living room. The two bedrooms were both full of landmines: my mother’s unmade bed and pile of dirty clothes over her old wing-back chair was even more disconcerting than the living room, and my own old bedroom still looking precisely as I’d left it was a full-on existential crisis waiting to happen.
To Wyatt, I’d suggested that the beds were too dusty for use.
