The Promise of Us (Sanctuary Sound #2) - Jamie Beck Page 0,118
SERIES)
EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS IS AN EARLY EXCERPT AND MAY NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED BOOK.
CHAPTER ONE
Om Namah Shivaya.
“Let me photograph the treatment,” he’d begged.
Om Namah Shivaya.
“We’ll make art, raise money,” he’d promised.
Om Namah Shivaya.
Dammit, Logan.
Peyton opened one eye and stared across the undulating surface of Long Island Sound, which glittered all the way to the horizon. Six hundred thirty-two attempts at meditation in as many days, and she still couldn’t master her own mind. Maybe she could blame it on the aftereffects of chemo.
Since childhood, she forced herself to look for silver linings in her darkest moments. By thirty-one, she’d mastered that ritual. Last year, she even found two for chemo, like the way she could blame it for all kinds of personal failings. Its other plus? Chemo had been a handy excuse for opting out of her mother’s endless list of social and philanthropic invitations. Of course, those benefits didn’t outweigh the weight gain, skin discoloration, nausea, mouth ulcers, and hair loss she’d experienced while undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Dwelling for months in a decaying body had forced an existential dread that produced few answers, but she’d never been a quitter.
Peyton curled a jaw-length strand of oddly wavy hair around her finger. Still short, but progress nonetheless.
She uncrossed her legs while taking a deep breath of briny air and then stretched them out, digging her toes into the warm sand, her gaze fixed on the line where sea met sky. These past few months, she’d stared at that distant place for hours, contemplating her life and purpose and other things she’d never before given much thought.
Late afternoon had become her favorite time of day. Lazy hours bookmarked by the high activity of midday and the lonesome stretches of night. These moments of peace and presence were probably the closest she’d ever get to nirvana or zen, or wherever it was one is supposed to arrive at through meditation.
“Peyton!” her brother called from the patio. When she glanced over her shoulder, Logan waved her toward the house. “They’re here. Come see!”
A few days after her initial diagnosis two years ago, he’d cornered her with his camera and big idea. He’d always been able to talk her into anything, and she’d relished his schemes until now. If she didn’t love him so much, she’d seriously consider lining his shower with shaving cream later.
Logan turned and went back through the French doors without waiting for her. She hugged her legs to her chest, pressing her forehead to her knees. Why bother with meditation? She had no time for serenity. Not with her brother and Mitchell Mathis—PR pain in the butt—constantly coming at her with to-do lists.
Peyton pushed herself up and brushed the sand from her bottom, slipped on her sandals, and strolled up the lawn toward the rambling old mansion. Only recently had she really understood why her great-grandfather built Arcadia House and why he’d come here—away from most of the world—to write. She barely remembered Duck, as Logan had nicknamed him, but his legendary work and name lived on—not just here, but all around the world.
She hadn’t even closed the doors when Logan bellowed from the vicinity of their father’s office, “Back here.”
She found him standing at Duck’s old walnut writing desk, surrounded by overstuffed bookshelves imbued with the faintest hint of tobacco, with his hands on either side of a large cardboard box. When she was a child, this room had been off-limits and, consequently, a place she’d snuck into time and again, tempting fate. Funny how, back then, she’d perceived fate and consequence as a game. Checkmate.
“Aren’t you blown away?” His smile, warmer and more promising than a summer sunrise on the Sound, temporarily settled her. Then he lifted a copy of A Journey through Shadows from the open carton.
Her gaze skittered away from the cover image and landed on her Birkenstocks. Before cancer, she wouldn’t have been caught dead in such footwear. Lots had changed since her Joie-sandal days. Some for the better and—she wiggled her toes—possibly some for the worse.
“Yes,” she replied dryly. Blown away, all right, but not the way he meant it.
Like any little sister who’d ever worshipped her older brother would, she’d agreed to his plan. She’d thought she was dying and had little to lose.
The result? The memoir in his hands. A combination of his pictures—including the austere black-and-white midchemo cover photo she now actively avoided—alongside her most personal fears and naked emotions. The sight of it reminded her that, in a matter