The Bookstore on the Beach - Brenda Novak Page 0,9

most likely dead. It was another thing entirely to hear it from someone who knew the area and the situation far better than she did. This one response sounded completely frank—so frank that along with all the other emotions zipping around inside her, she felt a degree of guilt for suspecting Olynyk of trying to cheat her. Maybe she just hadn’t asked the right questions.

“Where could his body be?”

“Anywhere. But you want me to keep trying to find it, yes?”

Squeezing her eyes closed, she let her head fall back. Now they were searching for a body?

God, what should she do?

Tears trickled from her eyes and rolled back into her hair while she struggled to decide. For the most part, she’d quit weeping at random moments. Having Nick gone had become normal. What was new was the realization that she’d come to the end of the road. It was time to give up no matter how difficult it was to let him go.

She thought of those rain boots in the corner upstairs. The fact that he would probably never come back to wear them made it almost impossible to speak. “I’ll send you another two thousand. That should take you through June. But if you can’t provide something concrete by then—something that shows you’re on the right trail—that will be the end of it. Do you understand?”

“Tak.”

After the past eighteen months, she’d learned enough Ukrainian to know that meant yes. She also knew how to say thank you: “Dyakuyu tobi.”

“Nemae problem.”

No problem. She shook her head as she disconnected, but another call came in before she could finish going down the stairs. It was her mother.

“Are you coming?” Mary asked as soon as she answered.

“Yes. I’ll be right there.”

* * *

After Mary ended the phone call with Autumn, she leaned back, feeling the soft sand give slightly beneath her palms as she watched her grandchildren bodysurfing in the ocean. She loved this small part of the world. Living in Sable Beach had brought her peace and safety. She walked down to the water almost every night to visit the sea and be heartened by its constancy and beauty. It was more of a mother to her than her own mother had ever been—her real mother, anyway. She loved watching the gulls swoop and land and study her as curiously as she studied them.

One gull who visited this beach quite often was missing an eye. He would cock his head and look at her with the eye he had left, but he wouldn’t venture close, not as close as the others.

She felt a certain kinship with him. Although hers were less visible, she had scars, too. They both clung to the sanctuary Sable Beach provided and weren’t willing to trust too much.

Would the peace she’d found here last? Or was everything about to change? For so long, her secret had felt safe. But thanks to the interest Autumn had shown in finding her father—right before Nick went missing—and the technological advances that made DNA testing commonplace, she was on edge again, like she’d been in the beginning, always wondering what might sneak up from behind.

Taylor had mentioned something only two weeks ago that indicated Autumn had been talking about her father again. Mary could remember the exact words and even the tone of her granddaughter’s voice: I think it bugs Mom that she doesn’t know more about her father’s side.

Mary had glossed over that statement by saying she didn’t know anything, either, but she felt that was a harbinger of doom. The subject would come up again—this time with Autumn—and probably before the summer was over. Mary desperately wanted to stick with her story, to keep everything status quo, but she knew she couldn’t get away with that, not when a simple DNA test could give Autumn the means to track him down and prove her a liar.

And if she came out and told her? What would Autumn do with the information? Mary was afraid she’d reach out to people she didn’t want her to have any contact with—and was loath to allow back into her own life.

The thought of that nearly caused her to pump her fist at the sky and scream, “Over my dead body!” It was the fight in her that had carried her through those terrible years. But despite all she’d done to protect Autumn and create a new life for them both, and despite all she might do to keep the past from catching up with her,