the garden center to pick up a few things for the yard without having to keep Charlie from jumping in all the decorative fountains.”
“Have at it. Want me to take the dog?”
“I’ll put him back into his crate for now. Liv said that’s his happy place.”
“Got it. I’ll just carry the whole thing upstairs, where he can hang out with us. Send Charlie up before you leave.”
As he headed up the stairs with his toolbox in one hand and the dog carrier in the other, he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Olivia and their intertwined lives.
Her dad had been a mentor to him, one of those genuinely good guys driven to try making a difference in the world. He might have done amazing things, if he had lived past his forties instead of dying in a fire where he never should have been in the first place.
His fault.
Cooper set the toolbox down a bit more heavily than he should have, and Olivia’s little dog whimpered at the sudden noise.
“Sorry, bud,” he said, setting the carrier down more gently.
He still missed him. Olivia’s father had been one of the most decent men Cooper had ever known. The fact that he went into that building because of Cooper’s own stupidity still haunted him.
Join the club, Steve, Cooper wanted to say. The ghosts of all the people he couldn’t save could probably fill the chapel of the local church.
His mother.
Natalie.
None of his efforts had been quite enough.
Yeah. All those ghosts were the reason he hadn’t come back to town as often as he might have over the years. Cape Sanctuary didn’t exactly live up to its name, in his case. For him, it was a place of sorrow and regret and inadequacy.
“Hey, Uncle Coop. I’m here to help.”
As his nephew climbed the stairs in his oversize cowboy boots, Cooper pushed away the memories.
He couldn’t fix the past, but he was here now for his sister. Melody was the entire reason he had decided to apply for the fire chief job in Cape Sanctuary.
She was stuck here alone with three boys, abandoned by her soon-to-be ex-husband. She tried to put on a good front, but he could see the baffled grief in her expression when she let down her guard.
He wanted everything to be perfect for his sister. That had been his goal since the day she was born. The fact that her life had come to this, that her bastard husband had destroyed their marriage and her self-confidence without a backward look, made Cooper want to punch his fist through a wall.
Okay, he would have preferred to punch his fist through Rich Baker’s face. He couldn’t do it, though. He didn’t want to end up in jail, like his and Mel’s father, who had spent most of their childhood as a guest of some correctional institution or other. Since he couldn’t beat the living daylights out of the man who had broken his sister’s heart, he would settle for stepping in and helping her out with the boys as much as he could.
If that meant coming home to Cape Sanctuary and taking the tame and rather staid job of fire chief in a small California tourist town, it was a sacrifice he was more than willing to make.
That was what he should focus on, Cooper told himself as he showed Charlie the water valve beneath the sink. These boys, his sister, his job. They were all that mattered. Not a certain lovely former neighbor or the shocking, unexpected awareness she sparked in him.
5
CAITLIN
She hated this so much. On a scale of one to ten, sitting in Mimi’s hospital room and waiting for her to go into surgery ranked about a million times infinity.
Caitlin sat in the ugly, uncomfortable chair in her grandmother’s room. Her head throbbed and her stomach felt a little sick, like that time she got food poisoning from eating bad potato salad at her friend Emma’s house.
The hospital smelled. Mimi’s room wasn’t so bad. Her room smelled like all the flowers people had brought her, which Caitlin had arranged on a ledge beside the window, where her grandmother could see them.
The rest of the place reeked, though, of disinfectant and pee and despair.
Sitting here was so boring. She didn’t have the focus right now to read anything and she was all caught up on her YouTube subscriptions. Sure, she could always play one of the games on her phone to pass the time, but it was hard to concentrate