The Bookstore on the Beach - Brenda Novak Page 0,28

with them. But she knew how Autumn had felt about Quinn, because it had been impossible for Autumn to hide it. She’d had such a crush on him in school she’d doodled his name on all of her notebooks, cut his pictures out of the yearbook and put them up all over her room, lingered at the field whenever he had baseball practice so she could watch him play—and have him walk past her to get to the locker room. If Laurie didn’t remember those antics, it was because her mother had protected her from looking like a lovesick fool by purposely not passing along those details. Since Quinn had been going out with another girl—except for brief periods of time when they were broken up, like the one during which she’d been so forward with him in his childhood tree house—she probably hadn’t seen any reason to embarrass either one of them.

Now Autumn was grateful her mother had always been so reserved. If Mary was as much of a talker as Aunt Laurie, the whole town would know how Autumn had felt about Quinn and would be coming up to tell her he was now available.

Thanks for not reminding her, she wrote back.

He looked good tonight.

He’d always looked good—was easily the most handsome man she’d ever known. All that thick, dark hair paired with his light eyes was striking. But she recognized her mother’s response as a subtle attempt to discover her reaction to him, and she wasn’t going to let on that seeing him had affected her more deeply than she’d imagined it would. It was probably normal to feel a little breathless when confronting someone you’d once craved that badly.

I feel terrible for what he and his parents are going through, she wrote back and couldn’t help smiling. Nothing too meaningful could be gleaned from that.

Nice dodge, her mother replied with a winking emoji.

She was mildly surprised that Mary had called her out on her response. They typically allowed each other to parry when necessary. I’m married, she wrote as though they shouldn’t even be discussing another man.

But was she still married? Or was she widowed?

I’m not putting any pressure on you, her mother wrote back. Good night.

Autumn sent her mother a kiss emoji but sighed as she plugged her phone in to charge and left it on the nightstand. How long would her life be like this? She felt suspended in time—unable to reclaim her husband and reunite her family and yet unable to move on without him.

She climbed into bed, frowned at the empty spot beside her, then reached for her laptop. After eighteen months, it’d become a habit to go online and search for Nick’s name. If he’d been killed and his body had been found, maybe an article would pop up before she heard from any authorities about it.

She clicked on a couple of new links, but the person involved wasn’t her husband, just someone with the same name. After that, she read everything she could find on what was going on in Ukraine. A Ukrainian woman she’d met in a chat forum a few months after Nick went missing knew English and had been willing to translate various articles from the daily paper so she could have more specific and detailed news. Her name was Yana, and she sent it via a voice mail on WhatsApp. But she hadn’t sent anything in over a week. The articles she translated had been growing fewer and farther between over the past several months. She’d been doing it for so long—with no results as far as finding Nick—that she was probably losing interest.

Autumn covered a yawn as she surfed to her Facebook page. She couldn’t help hoping that even if Nick no longer had a cell phone, he could somehow reach her through social media.

But there was nothing new there, either.

She was about to close her computer so she could get some sleep when she received a friend request—from Quinn Vanderbilt.

Her mouth fell open as she stared at it. He’d never been on Facebook before. Why now? And what did he want? She was in town for only three months. She had two teenage kids and a missing husband. He had an incarcerated ex-wife, angry ex-in-laws who happened to be local and a mother who was battling cancer. They were both in a mess when everyone else their age seemed to be cruising along.

She could use a friend, and he could probably use one, too.