If for Any Reason (Nantucket Love Story #1) - Courtney Walsh Page 0,6
tastes.” They got in the car and ventured out into the narrow, crowded streets. Driving in Nantucket was typically more of a bother than it was worth, but Hollis didn’t know how much luggage a tweenager would have when he left the cottage that morning.
Jolie sat quietly, staring out her side of his Wrangler. A group of boys about her age came bounding out of the Black Dog, laughing. Hollis thought they looked like they were up to no good. His daughter seemed to have a different opinion.
Jolie craned her neck to watch them walk down the street, and one of the boys lifted a hand to wave at her. She giggled and turned back around.
“Nantucket boys are off-limits,” Hollis said.
“Oh, please, Dad,” she said. “You were a Nantucket boy.”
No, he wasn’t. Not really. His family spent the summers here because an old college buddy got Dad a job at the yacht club. The money had been good enough to come back summer after summer, to bring Hollis’s mom and eventually their family. The rental cottage was part of the deal, so how could Jeffrey refuse? It was like a gift, a working vacation that gave his kids summers they never would’ve had otherwise.
Those summers became a family tradition, and now, thanks to a few very wise investments, Jeffrey McGuire owned that little rental cottage.
So, yes, Hollis had spent his summers here, but no, he wasn’t a “Nantucket boy.” Growing up, he didn’t know how it felt to have a disposable income. He didn’t have people picking up after him or clearing the path so every one of his dreams would come true. The McGuires earned their money. And he’d made something of himself.
Now money was the least of his problems. Now he fit in. And yet, he still didn’t.
He’d always be more comfortable in his Nike running shorts than a suit and tie. And he knew at his core he was still the same kid, sitting on the outside looking in on a life he didn’t really want.
Maybe that’s why he felt so displaced.
Maybe that’s why it had been a year since his dream died and he’d yet to figure out what his next step was.
“You’re doing it again,” Jolie said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Are you this upset over Mom getting married?”
“No, not at all,” he said.
He gently accelerated as he caught a glimpse of the woman he’d seen getting off the ferry. She pulled a suitcase down the busy street, and while she sort of looked like a tourist, she also sort of looked like she knew the lay of the land.
“Who’s she?” Jolie followed his gaze to the sidewalk.
“Maybe nobody,” Hollis said. “Probably nobody.”
“Or maybe somebody?” Jolie waggled her eyebrows.
Yeah. Maybe somebody.
Hollis gave the woman one last glance as he stepped on the gas and drove away.
CHAPTER 3
EMILY SUPPOSED SHE SHOULD FEEL THANKFUL that Nantucket hadn’t really changed. It was still the same charming island it had always been. Nobody would ever wonder why people chose to vacation here or, in many cases, spend their summers here.
If circumstances were different, Emily might do the same.
But circumstances being what they were, it was hard to feel that rush of sweet nostalgia. Even as she walked the cobblestone streets. Even as she window-shopped in the boutiques. Even as she remembered the way she and her mother would zip through town on their preferred method of transportation—the old bikes they buried in the shed behind the house.
She could practically hear the ding of the bell on her mother’s robin’s-egg-blue bike as they pedaled their way up and down the narrow, crowded roads.
Emily and her mom loved to ride all over the island. They’d search for seashells, dig up clams, collect rocks on the beach. Led by passion and not by common sense, Isabelle Ackerman had been the most carefree person Emily had ever known, which was perhaps what made her untimely death an even greater tragedy. All that zeal for life snuffed out in an instant, leaving only memories that played on a continuous loop for Isabelle’s daughter.
Her mother’s death had awakened something inside her. It made her keenly aware of the passage of time, the way it cruelly walked out, without a word of warning.
Somewhere around her sophomore year of high school, Emily had stopped living cautiously. She began to buck her grandmother’s rules, to carve her own path.
She’d been carving ever since. Living her life the way her mother had dreamed she would.