Summer By The Sea

“Be patient with my niece when you meet her,” were Cassandra’s final words on the subject that morning. “She’s had a hard life.”

Sam just nodded.

A week later, he regretted everything he’d agreed to with Cassandra for his and Lucy’s summer.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_57b28556-e149-5a92-8ceb-8ed31e0416e5)

One week later

SARAH BUCKLEY KICKED the door of her rental car shut. The friggin’ thing. Hours stuck in traffic driving up from the airport on the wrong coast had done nothing to improve her already pissed-off attitude.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to drive herself. Her time was simply too valuable. Instead, other people drove her. She sat in the backseat and made calls and tapped out directives aimed at the future sale of her company. Now, it seemed like she was back to square one with that. She was furious—she’d worked too freaking hard for this crap to have happened to her, especially the way it had.

She reached through the open window and yanked her briefcase off the passenger seat. But the top wasn’t zipped securely, and the books she’d packed came tumbling onto the sand in her Aunt Cassandra’s weed-lined excuse for a driveway.

Textbook after textbook. Sarah was a tech engineer by training—she’d been reading ebooks well before they became mainstream—but these books weren’t for quick perusal or for an underling to bullet-point for her—no, these she’d assigned herself to study. Since her college and MBA days, she’d always retained information better when she’d marked it up by hand.

In disgust, she bent over to collect the textbooks. Meditation. The Art of Zen Business. How to Speak with Millenials.

Idiocy. Unfortunately, her new financial partner and major investor was into this crap. She resented that she’d been forced to bring him in as her partner, but she’d had to—she needed his capital and his good counsel. The sale of her company couldn’t happen unless he was pleased with her. To impress him, she’d even hired a crew to install a Zen garden in her San Jose home—they were probably finishing it up today. The aggravation was enough to make her weep. She’d hated to deface her beautiful home, renovated slowly, carefully over the years—she’d started with the small house when she sold her first company, and then had made additions. Now, she had a beautiful custom-designed house with an attached pool, her own gym—and a ridiculous Zen garden, because Richard Lee was into Zen.

With a snort of disgust, she tossed the books into her Chanel bag, which was now covered with sand in the rustic New Hampshire driveway. With her heels equally sandy, she leaned against the car and surveyed the wreck that was Aunt Cassandra’s cottage.

Tiny. And Sarah knew it because she’d been here once before. The cottage had two small bedrooms and a bathroom that was too cramped for a soaking tub. The paint was peeling and the screen door hung half off its hinges. Rambling red roses bloomed prolifically on the rail fence, just as they had in the summer before the worst day of her life, and it was that small, innocent detail that punched her right in the gut.

Her eyes watered. No swear words occurred to her.

Sarah felt twelve years old and all alone in the world again. She’d spent one magical summer in this place, the last summer her parents were alive. They’d driven her up from Connecticut to spend two weeks with her eccentric aunt, a famous children’s book illustrator.

She and Cassandra had ridden fun, old-fashioned bicycles with wicker baskets on the handlebars. Down the boardwalk they’d careened, part of a daily expedition to the library to check out whatever books caught their fancy. Cassandra had bought her ice cream cones and gently drawn out Sarah’s hopes and dreams for her future.

“You’ll be a woman of substance one day,” Cassandra had promised her.

That encouragement was the reason Sarah could never completely hate Cassandra for not being there when she’d most needed her.

Sarah found herself sniffling, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand as if she were twelve all over again.

Two months after she’d returned from that August visit with Aunt Cassandra, on a sunny autumn afternoon, the principal at her junior high school had stood solemnly at the door of Sarah’s English classroom. After she’d followed him into the hallway, he’d spoken the worst words she could have imagined.

Her parents were dead.

All of her grandparents had already died.

Her father’s only brother had been off in the army in Germany.

And Cassandra, her mother’s sole sister, had been somewhere on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, inside an artists’ colony with her married boyfriend. They most definitely hadn’t wanted to be found by the outside world.

Sarah wiped her eyes. At twelve, she’d learned tough lessons about self-preservation, self-reliance, success and grit. The hard, cruel world didn’t help the vulnerable. People could be abusive, both emotionally and physically, and strangers didn’t take care of the weak.

But soon she would be invulnerable. Just a few more months of putting up with her new partner, Richard Lee, and his games and indignities, and then she could take her company public. That’s when the really, really big money would start coming in. Then she could say “screw you” to the Richard Lees of the world, and anyone else for that matter, for the rest of her life.

Slinging the briefcase over her shoulder, she hauled herself to her feet and glanced around. Hadn’t Aunt Cassandra heard her yet? Her arrival hadn’t exactly been subtle, with the slamming door and textbooks dropped on the driveway. Then again, maybe her aunt’s hearing wasn’t great. Sarah guessed she would be in her midseventies by now. Sarah had been the only child of parents who had waited until they were in their forties to marry.

Well, Sarah was turning forty herself this summer. And that milestone birthday wasn’t improving her mood, either.

Scowling, she tried the handle of the cottage door, but it was locked. Strange. Aunt Cassandra hadn’t believed in locked doors when Sarah was twelve, but that was back in a magical, faraway past when the world seemed so much more innocent than it was today.

Sarah went around to the beach-facing side of the cottage, put a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun and peered inside the living-room window.

The furniture was different than she remembered. The paintings on display were also new. But she could see into the open doorways—the two bedrooms and the tiny, rustic bathroom—and it was apparent that no one was home.

Cassandra must have stepped out.

She couldn’t have gone far. Her aunt didn’t drive, and her mobility was limited.

Sarah dropped her bag and went out to the beach to search for her. On a sunny June weekday afternoon the shore was dotted with people. Couples, families, groups of moms and kids. A lifeguard with a perfect body stood beside his chair. Arms crossed, listening to one of the moms as she spoke to him in an animated fashion.

But no Cassandra.

Frowning, Sarah checked the time on her phone. She was right on schedule. Cassandra knew she was coming. Sarah had written the letter to her aunt herself—no email for her free-spirited, unorthodox aunt—and Cassandra, in her flourishing, dramatic script, had confirmed Sarah’s visit.

What the hell?

One would think that if her aunt really cared, then she would be more careful. Or could she be doing it again? Could she be cavalierly reburning the bridge that Sarah had let stay burned for all these years before deciding to tentatively rebuild it just last month?

Sarah didn’t know because Cassandra wasn’t here to ask in person. And it wasn’t as if Sarah could simply direct her administrative assistant to zip off a quick text message to her aunt.

Cassandra had no cell phone, no email address—not even a tablet with banking apps. She still wrote paper checks. She relied on the post office to mail pleasant notes written on real stationery. Her lawyer in town handled any communications of urgent importance.

Sarah didn’t have an administrative assistant here to deal with a lawyer, anyway. That meant she had to hunt down her technophobic aunt herself, on her aunt’s terms.

Gritting her teeth, she took out her phone and pulled up the lawyer’s contact number.

“Kimball Law Firm,” a young female voice answered.

Sarah gripped her phone and spoke firmly, like she always did, as a woman of substance. “This is Sarah Buckley. Put Natalie on the line.” She swallowed and thought of Richard Lee’s admonition to her. “Please,” she added.

“Ms. Kimball is in a meeting right now, but I’ll take a message.”

“Who is this?” Sarah demanded. “What is your name?”

There was a slight pause at the other end. As there should be.

“This is Sophia, Ms. Kimball’s assistant,” the woman said pleasantly. “Would you like to leave a message for Ms. Kimball?”

“Yes, tell her to get her ass down to Cassandra Shipp’s cottage to let me in. Otherwise, my aunt will be looking for a new lawyer to manage her affairs.” Anger coursing through her, Sarah clicked the phone off and tossed it onto the sand.

It sat there, winking in the sun.