The Sea Glass Cottage

“I will. Thanks.”

After she ended the call with Melody, Olivia immediately called her mother’s cell. When there was no answer there, she dialed Caitlin’s phone and was sent straight to voice mail, almost as if her niece was blocking her.

She glared at the phone in frustration.

Left with few other options, she finally dialed the hospital in Cape Sanctuary. To her relief, after she asked whether her mother was a patient there, she was connected almost instantly to a room.

“Hello?”

Her mother did not sound like herself. Usually Juliet’s voice was firm, confident. She wasn’t exactly brusque, merely self-assured and determined to waste as little time as possible.

Today, Juliet’s voice was small, hesitant, almost… Frightened.

With her own emotions frayed from the week she’d had, Olivia was aware of a subtle thread connecting them for once, as unexpected as it was unusual.

She was frightened, too.

“Mom. What’s going on? Is it true you were in an accident?”

“How did you find out?” Juliet asked.

Not from you or from Caitlin, she wanted to answer tartly. The two people who should have told her hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone, had they?

Otis came running over with his favorite toy and sat at her feet, happily chewing.

“Melody called me, saying she’d heard bits and pieces and knew you had been injured. Apparently you had a fall. Are you okay? What happened?”

“It’s the stupidest thing. I’m so embarrassed.”

“I don’t think the word embarrassed needs to enter the conversation here. You’re hurt. You had an accident. You didn’t break a bottle of pickles at the grocery store. Did you fall off the roof?”

Juliet released a breath. “I was up on a ladder, trying to hang some baskets I had just potted to the hooks in one of the greenhouses, and…something went wrong.”

Olivia frowned at that momentary hesitation. “Something?”

“The ladder buckled or it wasn’t set up right in the first place. I don’t know exactly. To be honest, everything’s a bit of a blur. Of course, that might be the pain medicine talking.”

“What were you doing up on a ladder? You’re the boss. Don’t you have people to do that?”

“We’re shorthanded. Don’t get me started.” Juliet’s voice sounded somewhat stronger. Talking about the garden center she loved must have helped take her mind off the pain and fear.

“I spent three years training Sharon Mortimer to be the assistant manager under me and she decides two weeks ago to take a job running the nursery at a box store in Redding. Can you believe it? Where’s the loyalty?”

She didn’t want to deal with the garden center’s personnel issues right now, when her mother was lying in a hospital bed. “What are the doctors saying?”

“You know doctors. They only want to give you bad news.”

“What did they say?”

Juliet sighed. “Apparently I have a concussion. And I broke two ribs and also my right hip. That’s the side I landed on. They were afraid my wrist on that side was broken as well where I tried to brace my landing, but it seems to be only sprained.”

How far had she fallen? Good heavens. It sounded horrible. “Oh, Mom.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Juliet assured her. “I was only on the ground for a few minutes before one of my customers found me and called paramedics. And they were there right away. So handsome.”

Juliet seemed to be drifting away again.

“What are the doctors saying about your recovery? Will you need surgery? A cast?” Olivia pressed again. She had no idea how a broken hip was treated.

“Dr. Adeno, that nice new orthopedic doctor, was just here and she wants to do surgery tomorrow. I still haven’t decided if I want to go through with it.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s not like Botox, Mom. It’s not about whether you feel like it or not. If you need orthopedic surgery, you don’t have many options. Not if you want to walk again.”

“She says I’ll be in the hospital three to five days and need four to six weeks of recovery. I can’t be away from the garden center that long! The whole place will fall apart, especially without Sharon.”

Everything always came back to the garden center. Why was she so surprised?

After Steve Harper’s tragic death, her mother had stepped up to run the business that supported her family and had surprised everyone—probably most especially Juliet herself—by being great at it.

Olivia had tried not to resent her mother’s long hours as she had immersed herself in learning the business.

She had never been gifted with the green thumb of her father, or her older sister. Steve and Natalie had bonded over their time in the garden. Nat had loved playing in the dirt while Olivia much preferred digging into a good book.

“This couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” Juliet suddenly sounded close to tears.

“Spring growing season.”

“Right. Our busiest season of the year. And that traitor Sharon deserts us for stock options and a better 401(k). What am I going to do? I can’t have surgery tomorrow.”

Again, her mother sounded frightened and Olivia had no idea how to handle it. Juliet was one of the most together people she’d ever known. Hearing this vulnerability in her voice disturbed her almost more than the accident itself.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently, not knowing what else she could say.

“I wish you were here.”

The small, frail-sounding words came out of nowhere, almost as if Juliet didn’t really know she had uttered them.

Olivia stared into space while she felt something odd and sharp tug at her chest.

Her mother needed her. For once, Juliet wasn’t the invincible almost-fifty-three-year-old widow running a successful business and raising her teenage granddaughter on her own. She was an injured woman who needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it.

In the end, that was all that mattered. Olivia reached for a piece of paper, already mentally going through the list of things she would have to do in order to take extended emergency family leave from her job, close up her apartment and head out of town.

“I’ll come down for a few days,” she said instantly, without giving herself time to panic. “I’ll be there as soon as I can make the arrangements.”

“Oh. Oh no,” Juliet said quickly, as if coming to her senses and realizing what she had said. “I know how busy you are. Anyway, what will Grant say?”

Grant was her ex-fiancé. Though he was an executive at her job, he wasn’t directly over her department and had nothing to say that mattered. At least he hadn’t in the six months since they broke up. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. This is an emergency. I can take some time.”

“Oh. I hate to be a bother. I feel so stupid.”

“You’re not a bother and you’re not stupid.”

What kind of weird universe had she slipped into where she was the one giving her mother counsel? That wasn’t the natural order of things. Usually Juliet didn’t need Olivia or anybody. After Olivia’s father died, her mother had tried very hard to prove that to the world.

“I’ll get down there soon as I can.”

“I’ll be fine, honey. I promise,” Juliet continued to protest. “Don’t come. Do you hear me?”

Before Olivia could answer, Juliet switched gears. “Oh. I need to go,” she said. “Caitlin just came in.”

Of course her mom needed to go if Olivia’s fifteen-year-old niece was there. She almost insisted her mother hand the phone to Caitlin so Olivia could yell at her for not calling her the instant she found out about Juliet’s accident, but she had a feeling Juliet would refuse, ever protective over the daughter of the child she couldn’t save.

“All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Don’t come down, honey.” Her mother suddenly sounded far more like herself, her voice brisk and in control. “I mean it. We’ll be fine. I may not be able to get around for a few weeks, but I can supervise operations at the garden center just fine from a wheelchair. I’ll call you later in the week. Bye. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she started to say, but by then, her mother had already hung up the phone.

Olivia sat for a moment, her dog happily chewing his toy at her feet and full-on rain splattering the window now.

She was half tempted to listen to her mother and stay right here in Seattle, especially after Juliet had just bluntly told her not to come. But then she thought of Juliet’s frightened voice and knew she couldn’t stand by. For once, her mother needed her. If that meant Olivia had to bury her own anxieties and juggle work and clients to make it happen, she could do it.

2

JULIET

Juliet Harper ended the call to her daughter, aware even through her fuzzy, painkiller-addled brain of the usual funny catch in her chest that always showed up when she talked to Olivia.

Their relationship seemed so…wrong. She always ended up saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing.

Every time she spoke with Olivia, she had the best of intentions, determined this would be her chance to heal whatever was broken in her interactions with her daughter.

Instead, she would end up bumbling her way through a conversation, never saying what was really on her mind or expressing how much she loved and admired Olivia for all she had overcome.

She knew what was at the heart of it. She had failed one daughter so miserably and was desperately afraid she would screw up with the other one. The great and terrible irony in the whole situation was that her very fear was the main thing in the way of forging a warm and loving mother-daughter relationship with Olivia. The one she yearned for with all her heart.

“Who was that?” Caitlin took a sip from the soda she had brought up from the hospital cafeteria after Juliet had made her granddaughter go down and find something to eat.

Why couldn’t her interactions with Olivia be as easy as those with Caitlin?

“Your aunt Olivia. I asked you to call her. Why didn’t you?”

“I sent her a message,” Caitlin said, her tone defensive. “Maybe she missed it.”

“I told you to call her, not message,” she said. Caitlin always did things her own way and had since she was a baby. When other children would stack two or three blocks together, Caitlin would use them like percussion instruments. Instead of playing with dolls, she had dressed up the wriggling cats and tried to have tea parties with them.

She shifted in the hospital bed in a futile effort to find a more comfortable position.

Everything hurt. Who knew that one stupid decision, to climb a ladder without someone there to hold it for her, as she always insisted for her workers, could have such devastating consequences?

She should have known. She wasn’t stupid, though nobody would know that by the traumatic events of her day.

The pain meds were wearing off. Instead of asking for more or surrendering to her discomfort, Juliet forced herself to focus on her granddaughter.

She looked so much like her mother, with Natalie’s blond hair, bold eyebrows, stunning hazel eyes. Where Natalie had favored layers and big curls, like the style of the day when she was a teenager, Caitlin wore her hair short in an almost elfin cut. She dressed in her own unique style.

“Olivia must have got my message. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known you were hurt.”

“She only knows because Melody Baker called her. She and Olivia were tight as could be when they were in school. Always together. If you saw one, the other one was close behind. Kind of like you and Jake Cragun.”

Caitlin made a face. “We’re not together that much.”

Both of them knew that wasn’t true. Their neighbor had been Caitlin’s closest friend since grade school.

Caitlin had girlfriends, too, good ones, but Jake was her BFF, her confidant.

Juliet had always thought it was so sweet, the way the two of them were always talking a mile a minute to each other. When they weren’t together, they were texting each other or sending memes back and forth.

They had supported each other through some pretty tough things. Despite her young age, Caitlin had been a rock to Jake when his mother died of cancer three years earlier.

Juliet felt a pang when she thought of her dear friend Lilianne, who kept a smile on her face even when she lost her hair and when the grueling effects of chemotherapy treatment kept her on the couch for days afterward.

“How’s your English homework? Did you finish the essay you needed to write?”

“You’re in a hospital bed and you’re still going to nag me about my homework? Really, Mimi?” Caitlin said. She always called Juliet that, from the days when Caitlin had been learning to talk and instinctively tried to call her Mama, since Juliet had been her primary caregiver most of her life.

“It’s my job to worry about your homework.” Juliet frowned as she tried to adjust. Pain clawed at her and she couldn’t hold back a moan.

Worry furrowed Caitlin’s brow. “Right now, my English homework should be the last thing on your mind. For once, can’t you just rest and focus on yourself?”

Juliet wasn’t completely sure she knew how to do that. She had been taking care of those she loved all her life, from the time her own mother died when she was fourteen and she had to help her father raise her younger sister.

She hadn’t minded. She loved her family, loved cooking nutritious meals and keeping house. Marrying Steve right out of high school and slipping into life as a full-time mother and wife by accidentally getting pregnant on their honeymoon had seemed a natural transition.

And then, after all those wonderful years of marriage, Steve had been killed and she had been left to handle everything. The garden center. Sea Glass Cottage. The girls, with Natalie in and out of jail and treatment centers as she battled her addictions and Olivia slipping further and further away, like a freesia blossom bobbing on the breakers, being carried out to sea by a riptide.

She was trying. Exercising more, eating better. She had lost some of the stress weight she had gained after Steve died and she wanted to think she was more fit than she’d been her entire adult life, especially after her doctor told her regular exercise was one of the best ways to slow the progression of her condition.

What would happen now? Would she regain all the weight while she recovered from her injuries?

Had this stupid fall ruined everything?

The questions seemed to rattle together in her brain like dry seeds in a gourd.

“You should rest while you can,” Caitlin said, fluffing her pillow and adjusting the blanket.

Sleep did sound lovely. In sleep, she could push away all the fears and worries and unfinished tasks she didn’t make it to that day.

“What about you? Do I need to arrange a ride home for you? It will be dark soon.”

“I could take the bus if I had to, but I don’t because I’m staying here. The nurse told me this chair folds out to a bed, so I will just sleep in the room with you in case you need anything.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Why? It’s just one night.”

“Because you have school tomorrow. How do you think you’ll do on your history test on two hours of sleep in an uncomfortable hospital chair?”

“I’m planning to take a sick day tomorrow. You need someone here when you have surgery.”

She almost told Caitlin she had asked Olivia to come home, but suspected her granddaughter would not be thrilled at the information. For some reason, Caitlin didn’t seem to like her aunt right now, though they had been de facto siblings for most of Caitlin’s life and certainly since Juliet took full custody of her granddaughter after Natalie’s death, when Caitlin was not quite three.

Yet another thing Juliet couldn’t fix. Pain lodged in her chest, this time having nothing to do with her broken bones. She had tried to dig out the root of Caitlin’s anger toward her aunt, but this was one thing the girl wouldn’t share with her.

Oh well. It probably wouldn’t be an issue. She doubted Olivia would be able to come home. Her daughter was far too busy and successful and happy in the life she had created away from Cape Sanctuary. It was for the best anyway.

“I will call one of my friends to be here during the surgery. Maybe Stella or Jane could come while I’m in surgery. I understand that you might not want to stay at Sea Glass Cottage by yourself tonight. Let me call Henry and see if he can pick you up and let you stay at their place tonight.”

Caitlin lifted her chin. “Stop worrying about me. I don’t need a ride and I don’t need a babysitter because I’m staying here tonight.”

Some part of Juliet was grateful for her granddaughter’s loyalty. Caitlin could be the sweetest thing, affectionate and helpful, eager to please.

She could also be as stubborn as a mule with a canker sore.

“You have school tomorrow,” she repeated. “You can’t stay here all night. I appreciate the offer, honey. Truly I do. I’ll be okay. I can press a button if I need a single thing and the nurses will be here soon.”

“How are you going to stop me?”

She narrowed her gaze at the defiant tone, so familiar. When she spoke like that, she looked and sounded just like her mother had in the last few years when Nat had been so troubled. Slipping out at night, going to wild parties, coming home drunk or stoned.

She had learned some bitter lessons through the experience of being Natalie’s only remaining parent in the last three years of her oldest daughter’s life. She wasn’t about to make the same mistakes: passivity, inertia, acquiescence. Forget that.

“Young lady,” she said sternly. “You are still a minor and I am still your grandmother, not to mention your legal guardian. I might be in a hospital bed but that doesn’t make me completely helpless. You are not staying at this hospital tonight. I will make that clear to the entire medical staff if I have to. You don’t have to stay with Henry and Jake if you don’t want to. I can call another of your friends. Maybe Emma or Allie. It doesn’t matter to me. You choose. But you’re not staying here.”

Caitlin looked slightly shocked at her fierce response. “I just don’t want you to be alone.”

“I’m in a hospital full of people who will be coming in and out at all hours of the night to check my vital signs and take my blood and roll me this way and that. By the time they release me, I’ll be desperate for some alone time.”

Caitlin still looked as if she wanted to argue, but before she could, a knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” Juliet called, grateful for the interruption.

It wasn’t a nurse with another dose of pain medicine, as she was hoping. Instead, Henry Cragun and his son Jake pushed open the door.

“Hey. You up for visitors?”

Juliet fought the urge to pull the hospital blankets over her head. How ridiculous, when she was injured and in pain, that she could worry about vanity right now, but she hated the idea of Henry Cragun seeing her like this.

Wounded, frail, broken.

Old.

She sighed. While she didn’t particularly want Henry here, perhaps he and his son could talk some sense into her stubborn granddaughter.

“Hi,” she said, aware she sounded slightly breathless. With any luck, Henry would merely assume she was in pain. He could never guess that lately she always felt this way whenever he was around.

While Jake went immediately to Caitlin to give her a hug, Henry headed to her bedside. He was carrying a vase full of flowers, big lush pale pink peonies she knew probably came from his garden. They looked feminine, almost sensual in the hands of such a tough, hardworking man.

“Those are gorgeous,” she managed, her voice squeaking. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He set them on the table beside her bed, then gave her a long look. “Oh, Juliet. What have you done to yourself now?”

She felt old and clumsy and stupid. “I broke the cardinal rule of ladders and now I’m paying the price.”

“I hear you had quite a nasty fall.”

“She has two broken ribs, a concussion and a broken hip,” Caitlin offered, ever so helpfully.

Juliet felt like an ancient old crone.

Henry winced in sympathy. “You never do things halfway, do you?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Surgery tomorrow and a few weeks of recovery and I’ll be good as new.”

He raised an eyebrow, clearly doubtful, and she wanted to throw a pillow at him. She was trying to be optimistic here. She didn’t need a hospital room full of Debbie Downers.

“I hope that’s the case,” he said. “What time is surgery tomorrow?”

“We’re not sure yet,” Caitlin said.

“I haven’t decided if I’m having surgery.”

It was a stupid position and she knew it. Of course she had to have surgery. She had a broken hip that needed to be repaired. She had no choice, and no amount of trying to exert a little control would change that.

“I hope you know that Caitlin is welcome to stay with us until you break out of here. Even after, if you need to go into a rehabilitation center.”

She was an old lady with a broken hip who might need to go into a nursing home to recover.

Could her life hit a lower point?

“Thank you. I was hoping you’d say that. There you go, honey. You can stay with Henry and Jake for now. I’ll compromise. You can take a sick day tomorrow to be here during my surgery as long as you email your teachers to find out what homework you might have.”

Her granddaughter pouted but apparently didn’t want to argue in front of their neighbors and friends.

“What can we do to help?” Henry sat in the visitor’s chair, entirely too close for Juliet’s comfort. Of course, anywhere he chose to sit in the room would be too close for comfort.

That was the awful pain pills talking, she told herself, but she knew it was a lie. Over the past few months, she had developed a completely ridiculous attraction to the man.

She couldn’t be attracted to him. He was her friend. One of her closest. His late wife had been one of her dearest friends.

She needed to focus on that and not on the way her pulse seemed to jump whenever he was near and her insides felt shaky and weak.

She cherished his friendship too much to ruin everything. Not only that, but he was eight years younger than her, and as a local landscape designer with a thriving company, he was one of her best clients at Harper Hill Home & Garden. She couldn’t lose sight of that.

“I don’t know yet, to be honest. Right now, I can hardly think straight. I just want to make it through the surgery tomorrow and then I’ll focus on how to make it through the next few months.”

He reached for her hand, his skin warm and a little rough from his work as a landscaping contractor.

“I would tell you to call me if you need anything, but I’m pretty sure you won’t do that, will you?”

She wanted to lean into his hand, into him, and let him take care of everything. That was one of Henry Cragun’s defining traits. He came across as a strong, capable man who could handle any crisis, from a leaky faucet to a woman who hadn’t had an orgasm with someone else in years.

She didn’t lean into him. Instead, she slipped her hand away to play with the edge of the hospital blanket. “I don’t think I need help right now, but thank you. I have good employees.” At least the ones who were left. She felt the betrayal all over again of losing Sharon.

“Well, keep me posted, then. I’ll be around.”

She found more comfort from that than she probably should. “Thank you.”

A knock at the door heralded more visitors.

“You’re a popular person today.”

“Yeah. And all I needed to do to win the popularity contest was fall off a ladder.”

He smiled as the door opened and Lucien Hall, her longtime neurologist, walked in.

Juliet could feel panic swelling in her along with the pain. Oh no. She should have anticipated this. Lucien treated her disease and was one of a very small number of people who knew about it.