Page 12 of The Library of Second Chances
To Les Années Folles,
Island Girl
To Les Années Folles—to the crazy years, as the French called the time period in the 1920s when the Hemingways, Scott and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, and the others of the Lost Generation lived, worked, and played in Paris.
Island Girl had him more curious than ever now. He tried to piece together what he knew about her so far. She enjoyed historical novels about the Lost Generation. She’d never been to Paris, but wanted to go, which was why Logan had ordered the memoir by the literary walking tour guide he’d enjoyed.
And now he knew more about her. But this note was sadder than the ones that came before it. She said she could relate to feeling unheard, overlooked, and unloved. He was moreconvinced than ever she was in a difficult marriage. He felt a sense of protectiveness, even if he didn’t know her. You could learn a lot about a person from the books they read—who they admired, what piqued their interest, even how they viewed the world. Heck, he felt he knew more about Island Girl from her notes than he’d ever learn on a first date. Not that it was like that. He wasn’t interested in a relationship, and it sounded like that was the last thing this woman needed right now.
He was intrigued, though, and he didn’t want this discourse to stop. It reminded him of the pen pal he’d had as a kid. Their little classroom in Wisconsin had been paired with one in New York. Their teachers thought it would be good for kids growing up on farms to learn what it was like to grow up in a big city, and vice versa. They’d exchanged letters all school year.
He’d learned that his pen pal Dominic lived on the fifth floor of a building in Manhattan and had to walk three blocks to catch a glimpse of grass, a stark contrast from the acres of farmland that surrounded his childhood home. Virtually everything about their lives had been opposite, and it was fun to imagine what it would have been like to ride the subway to school and take field trips to Broadway shows. Those letters from Dominic had inspired Logan to go away to school, to experience big-city life firsthand. He occasionally thought of Dominic and wondered what he was doing now. Maybe he’d been as taken with small towns and farm life as Logan had been with Dominic’s city life and was off in the Midwest somewhere milking cows. Nah, probably not.
Moving from city to city so frequently could be lonely, and Logan blamed his poor relationship choices on the nature of his job. Having a book pen pal was perfect. It would give him the friendship that was so difficult for him to form when he arrived in a new town, without any of the romantic entanglement.Besides, it seemed Island Girl needed someone to talk with as well.
Taking the book with him, he headed to his temporary office at city hall. He had to focus on the job at hand. If he couldn’t pull out a win on Heron Isle, he might be the one who wound up back in the Midwest milking cows.
Six
Lucy
Lucy stared down at the same blank page in her journal that she’d been looking at for the past hour. On the mornings she didn’t meet Taylor to walk, she’d go out on her back porch overlooking the ocean and write in her journal while she drank her coffee and watched the sunrise. Spending time at the beach was the perfect start to every day.
Unfortunately, her peace and tranquility had been interrupted this morning when she spotted a man she was pretty sure was Logan Lancaster running on the beach. He’d been heading south toward town. Even from a distance, she could see the well-defined muscles that sculpted his chest and arms. That image of him had occupied her every thought since, and instead of journaling, she’d wasted a half hour chastising herself for thinking about Logan’s physique and those piercing green eyes. Her morning time was hers alone—until he’d barged in and taken over even that. Later today she needed to think about how to get him out of town and out of their business.
Pulling in a deep breath, Lucy closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of the waves crashing on the shore beyond her porch. A laughing gull flew overhead, its unique call the only other sound this early. Later in the morning, families would set up umbrellas and scatter sand toys for kids to build castles, and the gentle breeze that blew in off the water virtually year-round would carry the sounds of the children shrieking with excitement as waves crashed over their legs. Lucy loved the soundtrack of living by the sea in the summer.
As the tension in her shoulders eased, she began to write.
I am grateful for this view.
I am grateful for?—
She paused; her pen suspended above her journal. What? That there was still time to stop Logan Lancaster and the rest of the council pushing for the development?
No. Her gratitude journal was for things she was truly thankful for, like her little cottage on the beach or the bookstore. Other days it was the Waterway Café having had her favorite soup on special or the peonies she’d brought home from the flower shop to sit on her counter. Lucy looked toward the edge of her porch for the dune sunflowers that sprang from the sand, but even they looked wilted this morning, and it wasn’t even that hot yet, at least not by Florida summer standards.
Frustrated, Lucy slammed the journal shut. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been unable to find something to write in it.
Annie had taught her to keep a gratitude journal back in high school when she was at that age when girls needed their moms the most. It had been hard to find anything to be grateful for when her mother had just walked out one day, telling Lucy andher father she was moving to Los Angeles because she needed “something more.”
Why wasn’t Heron Isle ever good enough for people as it was? First her mother, then Carter, her ex-fiancé. He’d left two summers ago for a job in Chicago saying the offer was “too good to pass up.” Now, even the people she thought cared about the island more than anyone else—the mayor and the town council—had decided what they had wasn’t good enough. They called it progress, but it mostly felt like a sucker punch. Why did everyone want something more? Bigger, better, more exciting, more growth.
People came to Heron Isle year after year because they loved the long stretch of beach that felt uncrowded even during high season, the freshly caught seafood that came in on boats every day, and the chance to slow down. Didn’t the council see that they could lose everything that made Heron Isle special? People came here for something different. Every major tourist destination from Myrtle Beach to Daytona Beach and beyond had chain restaurants serving frozen seafood, go-cart tracks, waterparks, and fancy stores lining their shores. And that was exactly what the last set of proposals had looked like—the first step to becoming what every other beach town had become over the past three decades.
Newly motivated, Lucy decided to hit some of the downtown businesses that opened early before it was time to open the bookstore for the day. She’d meant what she’d said last night: it was important for the business owners to get on the same page. She didn’t have time to wait for their meeting later in the week. Logan might stop by any one of them before then. She had to get there first.
She stopped by the bookstore to put her lunch in the fridge in back and quickly go over her notes from their previous Downtown Business Owners Council meetings to refresh hermemory. She pulled the file from a cabinet beneath the front counter and turned on her computer to check for any new emails in the chain the group kept going.
While she waited for it to boot up, she checked the one message blinking on the answering machine. She hadn’t been able to bear throwing away the machine because it still had Annie’s outgoing message on it, and Lucy called to listen to it every once in a while, just to hear her voice. She knew eventually she’d have to figure out how to move the recording over to digital voice mail, but for now the system still worked. The message was from a literary agent asking if she’d received the details for an author’s signing the following month, so she went back to her computer to check her spam folder for the email since she hadn’t seen anything come in.
But before she could, her hand froze on the mouse when she saw Leona Lord’s name at the top of her inbox. She hadn’t heard fromherliterary agent in months. Leona had landed Lucy her first book deal, but the publisher went belly up before it was released. Her agent had tried to shop the book around, but after a string of rejections she advised Lucy to start working on her next book. Lucy had written another, but it, too, was passed on by every publisher her agent had pitched.
Lucy was too dejected after that to write a third. The first deal had obviously been a fluke because the other publishers passed quickly, saying things like “cute idea but missing that special something.” She wasn’t even sure Leona actually was her literary agent anymore. The last time they’d spoken, Leona had implored her to write another book. When Lucy hadn’t, she assumed Leona had finally given up on her.
Taking a deep breath, Lucy clicked to open the email.
Lucy,
