Return to the Beach House Read online

  Dedication

  For Josi—thanks for hanging in there with me

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  P.S.

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Books by Georgia Bockoven

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, Marcia. You came through for me yet again. I knew nothing about horses before I created a character who loved them. My confidence to plunge ahead came from knowing I had a world-class equestrian to go to with questions. And as always, you came through with the answers. If something slipped through, it’s entirely my fault.

  A second thank-you really needs to be added to the above—this one for being the world’s best veterinarian and taking care of my literary companions with dedication and loving skill, even the one who showed no appreciation at all and had everyone at the clinic terrified to come near her.

  A loving thank you goes to John, Sidney, and Cassidy for guiding me through teen waters. You’re the best research assistants ever!

  Finally, there’s Samantha Spurlock, an extraordinary young woman who is an example of everything good and caring in her generation. You give me hope.

  Prologue

  The Beginning of May

  A truly good face-lift is never obvious, whether performed on a sixty-year-old woman or a hundred-year-old home. The thought followed Julia Lawson from room to room as she made one more pass through her beloved beach house before heading to the airport to fly home to Eric and the kids.

  She’d put off the work that needed to be done for too long, telling herself she was afraid of losing the charm that accompanied the decay, but in quiet moments of honesty she acknowledged that she was mostly terrified of losing the fragile memories of inconsequential moments with Ken and Joe and Maggie that, for her, were as much a part of the beach house as the tradition of summer renters.

  Her heart still ached a little when she looked back. The burgundy-and-green sofa that now resided in the living room was beautiful and cushiony and inviting. But it wasn’t the one where she had curled into the arms of her beloved first husband, Ken, and talked about the future while they watched flames dance in the fireplace. They’d never suspected or entertained the thought that dreams can be as fragile and vulnerable as sand castles built too close to the shore.

  Year after year, through the emotional turmoil of learning to live without Ken and then finding her second soul mate, Eric, she had found ways to ignore the threadbare material. She’d even managed to cope with the holes that appeared in the armrests until the day the painful truth came tumbling out of the mouth of four-year-old Cassidy, the daughter she’d had with Eric: “Mom, this thing stinks.”

  The kitchen table where she had shared a hundred cups of coffee with Joe and Maggie had a loose leg that no amount of glue could coax back into a sturdy upright position. The sliding-glass door required muscle to get it to move, and the windows had an insulating factor somewhere between Shoji screens and gauze. The carpets were threadbare from decades of sand wearing away the fiber, and the walnut wall-to-wall bookshelves that Joe had made for his beloved Maggie when they owned the beach house were bleached and dried from the sun.

  Still, even after Julia had finally decided she would not sell, she’d done nothing but the most necessary repairs, each year promising herself that next year she would get started. But then she temporarily gave up thinking about renovating when, almost twelve months to the day after she and Eric were married, she was pregnant. A year and a half later, surrounded by carpet samples and paint chips, she felt a familiar wave of nausea and realized she was pregnant again.

  Always at the back of her mind was the knowledge that without a faucet so old it had come off in her hand she might not have met Eric, the extraordinary second love of her life. She wouldn’t be the mother of two stepchildren and two preschoolers had she updated the house after Ken died. Would she be tempting destiny by making so many changes all at once?

  Finally, after the birth of their second daughter, and with gentle nudging from Eric, she’d tried working with contractors, flying out from Maryland for periodic meetings, then going home more frustrated than when she’d left. Even the ones who had gained their reputations by restoring and maintaining the quaint multimillion-dollar cottages in Carmel failed to understand her attachment to decades-old shutters that hung slightly off plumb and brick walkways with cracks and chips outlined with bright green moss.

  Understanding her almost paranoid reluctance to move forward, Andrew, her next-door neighbor, and one of Ken’s best friends, had stepped in and volunteered to oversee the restoration. Julia trusted him the way she’d once trusted Ken and the way she trusted Eric now. With his intimate connection to the house, he understood why it was so hard for her to make even the most rudimentary improvements. More importantly, he understood why it was necessary for her to be able to return after the work was completed and walk through the door feeling as if she’d come home.

  And she had.

  Almost.

  Fresh paint inside and out, and new rugs over the refinished hardwood floors were in keeping with the character of a house that had been built over a hundred years ago. Then vacationers had arrived via horse and buggy, an almost inconceivable contrast to the hybrid car that sat in the driveway now.

  She’d involved Eric and the kids by giving them the job of picking out the material for the curtains and bedspreads in the bedrooms. Fitting their personalities, the fabrics were busy and brightly colored and not something Julia ever would have chosen. They would take some getting used to, but that feeling would come. It wasn’t that the now colorful rooms weren’t attractive, they were just different. So different she could no longer imagine Ken or Joe or Maggie living in them.

  The craftsman quality of the refinished walnut bookshelves in the living room had given her pause when she first arrived. It wasn’t that they looked new, it was that even through all the polish they were as familiar as the sound and feel of the ocean outside the new triple-paned windows. For just that moment she had wondered if she’d actually been looking for a way to escape the memories that tied her to the beach house.

  And then she had gone into the kitchen, where she had felt an instant, almost overwhelming sense of emotional betrayal. How had she ever convinced herself that granite and stainless steel could or should replace subway tile and you-can-have-any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-white appliances? What had she been thinking?

  The kitchen had gone from an old sweater you loved but changed out of when company was coming
to a designer blazer. What would Joe and Maggie think? And Ken? He’d loved everything about the house just the way it was.

  Or had he? Was he reluctant to make changes because he was afraid of offending Joe and Maggie? No matter how long he’d owned the house, he always thought of it as truly belonging to them. But he’d died unexpectedly—a man who’d never even had the flu—and left the caring about such things to her without telling her what she was supposed to care about the most.

  And then, less than a year later, Joe and Maggie died, taking the dreams and hopes and desires of their lives with them. Reeling from her loss, Julia discovered that grief is a color—white. It is the gathering of other colors and combining them until the joy of yellow, the passion of red, and the calm of blue disappear. She was left with nothing but the daily effort to go on.

  When Eric fixed her broken faucet and over the summer became a part of her life, he not only restored the primary colors but reopened her world to violet and orange and green. Gradually, carefully, she moved out of the shadow of white and back into sunflowers and grass and ocean waves. When their daughter was born two years later and they were alone for several minutes in her hospital room while they waited for the attendant to bring a wheelchair to take her to the car, a sliver of sunlight escaped the curtain and bounced off her wedding ring, spraying the opposite wall with miniature rainbows. Julia had never believed in signs or portents—until that moment. A tear slid down her cheek and landed on her baby’s blanket. Whatever sorrow had lingered in the depths of her heart was gone, replaced by the understanding that she was exactly where she should be and with the people she should be with.

  Julia did a final sweep of the house, taking pictures with her iPhone that she would send to Eric and the girls while she waited at the airport for her flight home. As she tried to angle herself for the best shot of the master bedroom, she stopped to pay attention to the wash of afternoon light coming through the window. This was the room she had lived in with Ken, the room where Joe and then Maggie had died, and the room that she and Eric used now whenever they came west during the winter. She put her hand out and turned the diamond on her wedding ring to catch the sunlight. The room danced with color.

  There should have been ghosts, but all she saw were rainbows. The house had accommodated change the same way she had . . . aware of the memories and love behind them, but unwilling to miss one moment of the journey ahead.

  But she still didn’t like the kitchen.

  The End of May

  Andrew Wells tried the front door to the beach house and, as he’d hoped, found it unlocked. He should have started looking for Grace here instead of at her usual beach and forest haunts. He took off his shoes and stepped into the foyer. “Grace?”

  “In the kitchen,” she called. “I’m going over the counters one more time before the Kirkpatricks arrive.”

  Julia had dropped the professional housekeeping service she normally used and hired her cash-strapped, eager-to-earn-money-for-college next-door neighbor, Grace—the adopted daughter of Andrew and his wife Cheryl—for the summer.

  Not only was Grace supposed to take care of the house before and after the renters arrived, she was their contact person while they were there. It was her job to make sure the renters had whatever they needed and to handle any problems that might come up. She took this responsibility seriously, preparing for any eventuality as diligently and thoroughly as a mother otter grooming her pup, making lists of everything from an automobile repair shop to twenty-four-hour doc-in-a-box clinics.

  Seeing that she’d already vacuumed, Andrew was reluctant to cross the plush Aubusson area rugs and leave footprints. “Are you about ready? We’re leaving in a few minutes.”

  Grace popped her head around the corner. “No problem. I can do the bookshelves when I get back.”

  After glancing at the gleaming walnut wood, Andrew noted that not even a speck of dust reflected in the sunlight coming through the sliding-glass door. Julia could not have found a more dedicated or fanatical caretaker for her beloved beach house. Responsible, caring, loving, and dedicated, Grace was the antithesis of her biological mother, Rose, and had survived years of neglect and callous indifference—basically raising herself while her mother indulged in the “free” life of a vagabond.

  Only it wasn’t free. Grace had paid a heavy price in her deep-seated belief that if she’d only been better or prettier or smarter, her mother wouldn’t have abandoned her so many times. When Grace was eight and Child Welfare entered the scene, Rose handed her over without so much as an alligator tear. Three years and four foster homes later, Grace came to live with Andrew and Cheryl. It took eight months before she flashed a genuinely spontaneous smile and an entire year before she could get into the car without asking if she would be coming back.

  Grace crossed the room, skirting the carpet with the dexterity of a gymnast on a balance beam. Dressed in cutoff jeans and a tank top, her thick, sun-bleached hair cascading over her shoulders, and her face glowing with the unique light of youth, she looked like the iconic Super Bowl advertisement of a seemingly ageless Cindy Crawford reaching for a Pepsi.

  Since she had turned fifteen two and a half years ago, total strangers had approached her to tell her how beautiful she was. At first the attention had scared her. Now she simply ignored it. Andrew reacted, however, with a fierce protectiveness, no matter how many times Cheryl tried to convince him that not every man who looked at their daughter was consumed with carnal longings. He just wished Grace was a little more like her older sister, Rebecca, who had learned through her time in the foster care system—before being adopted by Andrew and Cheryl—how to stop unwanted attention with a withering look. Instead, no matter how obnoxious the behavior directed at her, Grace was unfailingly polite, far too trusting, and painfully eager to please—an ulcer-producing combination for a father of daughters.

  Grace dug her keys out of her pocket and locked the door. “Tell me again what time the Kirkpatricks are arriving tomorrow.”

  “The best estimate I could get was sometime after noon. Is there a reason you need an exact time?”

  “I thought I’d go by the nursery and pick up a couple of phals. If that’s okay with you. I saw some whites and a couple of yellows in the back room that still looked pretty good.”

  Andrew grew orchids commercially, shipping stock throughout the United States and Canada. He specialized in phalaenopsis, not only because they were long-lasting and shipped well, but because he loved growing them. The back room was where he kept the plants that didn’t meet the shipping standards because they either were too far along in their blooming cycle or had unattractive color breaks. More often than not, after a second bloom, the color deviants ended up in the trash. But there were enough surprises in the process that Andrew found it hard to just automatically dump them.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” he said. “Rebecca is getting an order ready to ship. I’ll have her set a couple aside for you, and she can bring them home tonight.”

  “She’s not going to the airport with us?”

  “Trust me—your mom doesn’t expect a major send-off, and all your brother cares about is getting a window seat. It’s perfectly okay with them to be dropped off at the curb.” Andrew put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder and gave her a hug. Grace worried more about hurt feelings than Bobby’s preschool teacher did with a roomful of four-year-olds on their first day in class.

  “Well, it’s important to me.”

  “A-mariachi-band-and-balloons important?”

  She laughed. “Close. But I’ll compromise with parking the car and walking them to the security gate.”

  “You know Bobby is going to have a fit if you try to hug him in front of all those people.”

  “I can handle a five-year-old.”

  Andrew unlatched the garden gate. “You bribed him, didn’t you?”

  She acted shocked. “Would I do something like that?”

  “If it’s chocolate, your mom will s
hoot you.” Bobby reacted to an ounce of chocolate the way most people reacted to downing half a dozen Red Bulls. And of course, he was the kind of kid who ranked chocolate above any other food, including pizza.

  “Hmm . . . I could slip him some M&Ms and they wouldn’t let him on the plane.”

  Andrew’s heart broke a little at her attempt to use humor to cover her fear of people she loved leaving her. “They’re only going to be gone a month,” he said tenderly. “You’ll be amazed how fast it passes.”

  “I just don’t like good-byes,” she admitted.

  “I don’t like them either. I’m just better at hiding it.” He tapped his finger on the end of her nose. “And it helps that they’re only going to L.A., not across the country.”

  For what had to be the tenth time, Grace asked, “Why did this happen? What makes someone’s brain stop working the way Grandma’s did?”

  “Figure that one out and you’ll not only be richer than Bill Gates, you’ll save a hell of a lot of heartache.”

  “Do you think Grandma April knows what’s happening to her?”

  “She knew in the beginning. I doubt she does anymore.”

  “How sad to watch someone you love disappear like that. Especially your own mother.” She leaned into Andrew as they crossed the space that separated their house from Julia’s. “At least Mom knows Grandma April isn’t leaving her willingly. I guess that’s something.”

  PART ONE

  June

  Chapter 1

  Breathtaking.

  Alison Kirkpatrick was at a loss for any other way to describe the view from the back deck of the beach house. She considered calling her friend Linda to tell her about it, but Linda had little interest in the world west of the Hudson River.

  Alison needed new friends. Especially now that her best friend, her widowed daughter-in-law Nora, had remarried, and her grandson Christopher was about to go away to college. There were nights it was all she could think about. No matter how long she stayed in bed, sleep was as likely as any real bipartisanship in politics. She either grabbed her iPad and read one of the books she had on her digital bookshelf or wound up in the kitchen digging through the freezer for the Ben and Jerry’s she liked to tell herself she bought for Christopher. She’d never understood people who turned to alcohol for solace when there was ice cream.