Some Kind of Wonderful (Puffin Island 2)

essed that I haven’t even started to sort through her things. I’ve been a wimp.”

“You’ve been busy. Traveling. Working. Living your life. She would have approved.”

“I’m wondering what she would have said about Zach being back. Those first few weeks after he left, I remember her sitting on the edge of my bed trying to feed me chicken soup. She kept saying, ‘He’s a good man, Brittany, but he doesn’t even know it himself.’ I had no idea how she could think he was a good man when he’d walked out on me. She said that one day, when time had passed, I’d see it more clearly.”

“And do you?”

“I think so, but it’s taken me ten years. This is one of those occasions where I’d like to be able to rewind time.” She stood up, tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder and used her good hand to help scramble down from the rocks. “I’d better go. I want to make a start.”

“Are you sure I can’t call Em? I don’t like to think of you being sad and having no one to hug you.”

“I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll go up to the shelter to walk Jaws first. He needs the exercise and he likes the company.”

“ZACH IS A BIT like you,” she told Jaws later as they ambled through the fields that led along the edge of the Warrens’ farm. “He doesn’t trust easily. I guess deep down he thinks that every human he meets is capable of putting a wire round his neck.”

Jaws grunted and stopped to thrust his nose in the grass, apparently unsympathetic to the traumas of humans.

He’d put on a little weight and Sara was delighted with his progress.

“He’s going to make a wonderful companion for someone,” she told Brittany as she put him back in his kennel along with a bowl of food. “We just need to work out who that someone is. Right now we don’t know what will happen to him next.”

She and Jaws had something in common, Brittany thought. Neither of them knew what was going to happen next.

For the first time she was grateful for her damaged wrist because she didn’t want to admit, even to herself, that Zach was the reason she didn’t want to leave.

That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

No matter how much she sympathized with him, it didn’t change the fact that it would be stupid to make plans around a man who had already hurt her once.

BACK IN THE COTTAGE Brittany climbed the ladder to the attic and flicked on the light, a single bare bulb in the center of the room.

Deciding that one of the best cures for sexual frustration was hard physical labor, she hauled box after box into the center of the room. Realizing she couldn’t get them downstairs with only one hand, she sat cross-legged in the dusty attic and sorted through her grandmother’s life.

It was in the third box, buried under paintings of the seashore and a collage of pressed leaves and flowers that bore her grandmother’s signature, that she found the diaries.

There were four of them, each one sturdy and thick, bound in dark red leather and smelling slightly of dust. Opening them, she saw pages and pages of her grandmother’s even handwriting.

She found the first diary and started reading. By the end of the first page she realized two things. One, that Kathleen had been a fine writer, and two, that she was holding in her hands a chronicle of her grandmother’s life on the island from the day she first arrived.

It was a love story, and one with plenty of bumps along the way.

Brittany’s grandfather had been a lobsterman, born and raised on the island at a time when the population was less than three figures and the entire community was focused on fishing. He was one of generations of Mainers who relied on the sea for income.

Her grandmother, raised in Boston, had struggled to adapt to a place where most of the land was national park. She’d found the winters long and brutal, and wrote eloquently about the ways in which the community had helped each other.

Emotion shone through the words, bringing light and color to the descriptions of life on a rural island. There was fear, exhaustion, exhilaration and hope, but underpinning it all was love. It was clear her grandmother would have lived anywhere, learned to adapt to any lifestyle, as long as she was with her husband. It was also clear that none of it had been easy.

Brittany let the diary fall into her lap.

She’d always known her grandmother was a fighter, but she’d never known any of the detail. Her grandmother was the sort who either solved a problem or accepted it. She never complained.

But she hadn’t allowed a single hurdle to derail her relationship.

Brittany thought back to those first horrible weeks after Zach had left, when she’d alternated between pounding cliff paths in an attempt to run off her misery and lying in the bed with the covers over her head.

She remembered her grandmother stroking her hair.

Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, honey.