Meet Me at Sunset (Evening Island) - Olivia Miles Page 0,5
while for once their mother wasn’t fussing over them getting their hair messy. She was too busy drinking what she called lemonade (but the girls knew better) and playing cards to notice. Evening Island brought out the best in her too. In all of them, really. Well, except for their father, but his stays were brief: two weekends per summer, one at the start and one at the end.
Back then, Ellie couldn’t understand how her father was so restless here, so unable to just relax and take in the surroundings. She still couldn’t understand it, but Gran had, and that was why she had left the cottage to her three granddaughters when she’d died.
Because there was no other food in the house and she’d managed to kill the vegetable garden last summer when there was a dry spell and she had sheer forgotten to water that patch of lawn back near the shed (Please forgive me, Gran), Ellie grabbed the spinach wrap and a big bag of salt and vinegar flavored potato chips and then, because hey, it was Saturday night, a bottle of white wine. And a pint of double chocolate chip ice cream. Maybe she’d call Mandy or Naomi and see if they were up for something—but she knew that shops held longer hours on the weekends once the ferries started bringing people in from the Blue Harbor dock four times an hour, and most locals worked to serve the tourists.
“Hey, Ellie,” Donna said as she rang her up. She pushed a wisp of graying hair from her forehead and gave a friendly smile. Soon the summer staff would start, but lately, Donna always manned the counter. Ellie was starting to get a little uncomfortable by the fact that Donna probably kept a running tab of how many bottles of sauvignon blanc Ellie purchased in a week over the colder months. But there was no other option for shopping unless she wanted to take the ferry to the mainland, and that was just more trouble than it was worth half the time. Sure, Blue Harbor was a change of scenery, and the town was full of shops and people, some faces familiar enough, others new, but the ferry stopped running from January through March, and it only crossed twice a day in the off season, and you had to plan for it. And Ellie, well, she had never been one for planning. Just ask her father.
She pursed her lips at that, remembering that he was far away, that he never came to Michigan to visit, and that their phone calls had been further and fewer between. Lack of quality cell reception had been an easy excuse for that. Still, somehow it didn’t make the ache in her chest go away, try as she might. And oh, how she had tried. To tell herself that she didn’t care, when she did, deep down. So much. Too much, really.
She grabbed a plastic spoon for her ice cream. The dishwasher had stopped working last week, and she hadn’t the time nor resources to call anyone to fix it, and there were quite a few dishes piled up by now…
That was the problem with island life, she decided. It made you lazy. Time slowed down, you went through the day at your own pace, and well, it was wonderful, really. Really, really wonderful. Except when it wasn’t.
Outside, she set her brown grocery bag in her bicycle basket. She eyed the front tire and decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. She’d walk the bike home and deal with it in the morning. Hopefully it just needed some air in the tires and not a patch. She had time…She may not have much else, but she had time.
At first, the thought of all that time to paint had been a dream come true.
Now…She stopped walking. Blinked. Felt her heart speed up and her stomach do something a little funny.
Now she was staring at the face of Simon Webber. Only it couldn’t be Simon. Simon hadn’t been back to the island in a decade, and sometime, long ago but probably not as long ago as she should have, she’d accepted the fact that he’d never be back.
And here he was, coming out of the bakery, as casually as if he had never left town, and for a second, she dared to imagine how that would have been. If he’d returned. Like he’d promised. How different life might have been.