Page 10 of The Library of Second Chances
Island Girl
He’d been in town for a few weeks now, but he’d mostly been hiding out in his cottage poring over the boxes of old budgets, leases, meeting minutes, and other paperwork the town had sent over. Then at night when he couldn’t stop running through potential redevelopment scenarios in his head, he’d read the latest book he’d found from Island Girl. He’d soon found himself ordering books he’d read previously online just so he could pass them along to her.
He’d enjoyed the books she’d left for him so far, but it wasn’t the authors’ prose that had kept his attention. It was the loopy handwritten notes in the margins. Whoever Island Girl was, the passages she’d marked, along with her notes to the side, revealed seemingly opposed personality traits. She was at times both a dreamer and a cynic. The combination of the mystery of her identity and her completely opposed outlooks was quicklybecoming a drug he couldn’t get enough of. He instinctively felt as if Island Girl understood him.
The first passage she’d marked in the latest book showed her dreamer side.
“In that precious interval betwixt night and day, a space of enchantment unfolded, defying the constraints of mere hours—a mystical lavender expanse, suspended between worlds, where time dared to linger.”
In the margin she’d written:
This is how I feel every time I watch the sunrise.
He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand as he looked out at the water, the sun now well above the horizon. He’d never experienced hot like this before. Sure, it had been hot on some of his runs the past two years he’d been living and working in San Diego, but there hadn’t been this kind of humidity. It was as if someone had put a wet towel over his head and told him to try to breathe through it. Maybe the sunrise here felt more magical in the fall. He hoped he wouldn’t be here long enough to find out. The city couldn’t afford to hire him to stay on and manage the development—although they would need someone—so he was only here for however many weeks or months it took to come up with a profitable plan they could implement on their own.
He flipped to the next passage she’d underlined, this one markedly darker than the last:
“They went on, living their lives, forging ahead through blunders and missteps. Meanwhile, I found myself stalled in some indistinct moment, a prisoner of my own uncertainties, with no clear knowledge of the escape route.”
There was no note in the margin this time, which only made him more curious about her. Why did she feel stuck? Was she stuck in a marriage? A dead-end job?
He flipped to another underlined passage.
“Happiness, it seemed, might resemble an hourglass with its sands steadily dwindling, particles sliding and intermingling, much like thoughts in one’s mind.”
Her note in the margin asked a simple question:
Is happiness a state of mind?
For the next underlined passage, she’d simply drawn a heart with a jagged line down the middle.
“Regret’s sting lies in the halting of affection for that initial love, a sentiment once as unbridled as the open sea, now confined to the quiet depths of memory.”
Did it confirm his suspicion she was stuck in a loveless marriage? He knew all too well what it was like to realize your relationship was over. To admit you’d failed. It had been doubly hard for him since he’d demolished both his love life and his career at the same time.
After Logan had spent two years putting together the North Port project in San Diego, it had all fallen apart in the eleventhhour because he’d had the audacity to break up with Catherine Albright, the daughter of one of the wealthiest and most well-connected men in San Diego, Jack Albright. Jack had never even bothered to find out what had caused the breakup, but in less than forty-eight hours he’d convinced every anchor tenant in the North Port project to abandon it and with that the bond issue had failed. With no funding and no anchor tenants, the city decided to hit pause while it searched for a new consultant. One that could get the job done.
It was the second time in his career that his love life had gotten in the way of him closing a deal. He’d vowed it would be the last. The first had been early in his career, when he’d gotten so wrapped up in his budding relationship he’d missed the signs the deal was collapsing, but the second had been more egregious. A career-ending kind of failure. Business and pleasure should never be mixed.
The Heron Isle job hadn’t only been appealing because it was the first—and only—offer he’d finally landed after San Diego, but also because the mayor had joked with him about his romantic prospects here. He’d apologized for it being a terrible place for a single man like Logan because the local population was so small and most of those of marrying age were already coupled off and settled down. It had sounded perfect to Logan.
But now here he was, only a few weeks on the island, and not one, but two women were distracting him. First, what had started as a friendly note to a fellow Fitzgerald lover had turned into some sort of book-pen pal situation that was becoming increasingly personal and vulnerable. And then he’d met Lucy with her big brown puppy-dog eyes and her boundless enthusiasm for the historic building that had once been home to what were surely some traumatic dental procedures before the days of Novocain.
Maybe they were both married anyway. Except he hadn’t seen a ring on Lucy’s finger. He’d checked before his brain registered what he was doing. But she was the opposition, so that would keep her at arm’s length. And the woman in the Little Free Library? Well, he didn’t even know her name, and he certainly didn’t plan to be in town long enough to find out. She had good taste in books, but that was it. Okay, so she was also the embodiment of some bizarre dichotomy that made his brain work in overdrive, and he loved trying to put the puzzle together. But mostly he was reading to keep from wallowing at night and drinking more bourbon than he should. That was all.
Closing the book and standing to go back inside, Logan looked up the beach to the north and marveled at the wide, sandy expanse that seemed to go on forever. The other side of the dunes were dotted by one- and two-story beach houses that looked as if they’d been there for decades. Boardwalks snaked from nearly every house through extensive dune systems that separated the homes from the sand by a good fifty yards in most places.
Unlike many of the towns up and down Florida’s east coast, the incorporated portion of Heron Isle had restricted development to no more than twenty-five feet high, which had kept the island’s two resorts relegated to the small unincorporated north end of the island. Here they’d retained the quaint feel of a Florida beach town of yesteryear. He had to admit he’d never seen anything like it.
While there was a certain appeal to the nostalgia of it all, his practical side knew the town couldn’t go on like it had been. They had some serious infrastructure needs—from the boardwalk he’d walked down this morning that shifted under his weight to the failing air-conditioning at the elementary school he’d read about in the paper.
None of these problems were insurmountable. In fact, they could easily be solved if the town had some new revenue streams. That was why the job had appealed to him—it was exactly the quick win he needed. He’d find the new revenue streams, help the town hire someone to manage it all, and then he’d be off to somewhere bigger and better.
After showering and dressing, Logan headed straight for the coffee shop downtown to fuel up for a big day ahead. When he parked at the marina, he marveled again at the premium land the city owned—land that could easily be better monetized. In addition to the marina and the building on it that housed the Waterway Café, the town also owned all the land that extended one hundred yards in each direction from the marina along the water. It was a thin strip of land because of the port that had historically been run by the city, but it was still prime real estate.
Walking east from the marina into the historic downtown, he stopped to read more of the plaques attached to nearly every building, which reflected a surprisingly wide variety of architectural styles from Classic Revival to beaux arts with Italian and Spanish influences that made the town unique even among historic towns. He stopped to read the marker for the oldest surviving hotel in Florida, a two-story boarding-house-style accommodation that still operated on Main Street.
The Heron House was originally built as the first boarding house on Heron Isle. It has housed a variety of guests since it was built in 1855, including Union soldiers during the Civil War, famous visitors such as the Vanderbilts and Carnegies, three Presidential candidates and one sitting president, Ulysses S. Grant. It remains the oldest surviving hotel in Florida.
