She waited until her boss hung up, and settled for throwing herself down on the bed instead. The thick down coverlet enveloped her like a cloud,
muffling her frustrated scream.
She’d taken a day of paid leave for the drive to Hideaway, damn it. Maybe she should have “accidentally” left her phone in her apartment, as well. This trip was going to be hard enough without her needy boss calling every half-hour.
Then again, reassuring her manager that the world wasn’t going to fall down if Lainie spent one day away from her desk was a great distraction from actually dealing with her feelings about returning to Hideaway Cove.
Her grandmother was dead. Lainie’s last relative on her father’s side. And Lainie still hadn’t figured out how she felt about it.
Oh, she knew how she felt about all the stuff surrounding her grandmother’s death. The inheritance. The bureaucracy. The endless, maddening meetings with lawyers. It all made her so angry, she could scream.
The thing that made her stomach twist was that she didn’t know what she felt behind the anger. Once all the legal headaches were over, how would she feel about her grandmother’s death?
Lainie knew she should be grieving, but Iris Eaves hadn’t been a part of Lainie’s life for fifteen years. Lainie had tried to reach out to her again after she graduated high school, but that hadn’t ended well.
She might as well have been dead the whole time. And now that she actually was…
Lainie groaned and closed her eyes. Now that she was dead… it was kind of a relief.
She swore quietly. Wow. Some loving granddaughter you are.
Maybe she would be able to mourn for her later. Maybe when the creditors had been appeased, Lainie would have time to grieve her grandmother’s death, and the wasted relationship they never had.
Or maybe by the time everything was settled, the whole ordeal would have soured any good feelings she had left for that half of her family.
Lainie sighed and turned her phone off. Not just screen-locked, but off. She’d spent what was left of the afternoon catching up on work calls and emails, and playing phone chicken with her grandmother’s lawyer. She knew she should call the storage company where her grandmother’s furniture was being held, but she couldn’t face that right now. She deserved a few hours off. She needed it.
And she needed dinner.
Lainie rolled over and grabbed a pile of glossy leaflets from the bedside table. It was only a small pile—Hideaway Cove was one of those places that had just one of everything. One guesthouse, one gastropub, one corner shop.
Cute, but surely it gets boring after a while? What if you didn’t like what the restaurant served—or what if the people who ran it didn’t like you?
She leafed through ads for an ice-cream parlor, boat hire and some sort of crystals-and-candles wellness center before she found what she was looking for. Caro’s Hook and Sinker, Hideaway Cove’s famous, local, and only restaurant.
Her stomach growled at the plates of food pictured on the front of the leaflet.
Well, if it’s the only restaurant to survive in the town, it must be good, Lainie told herself, and grabbed her purse.
The salt air struck her as she stepped outside. She waved goodbye to Mrs. Hanson through the big bay windows at the front of the B&B. The old woman smiled cheerfully back at her.
Mrs. Hanson looked like she was in her eighties, but had wrestled Lainie’s bag up the stairs to her room as though she was half that, ignoring Lainie’s protests that she could carry her own luggage.
It must be the sea air, Lainie thought, breathing it in. Isn’t sea air meant to be good for you? Or is it just that all this salt acts as a preservative…
Lainie let her mind wander as she walked along the main street to Caro’s Hook and Sinker. She had the leaflet with her, in case she needed to check the little map on the back, but soon realized she wouldn’t need it. Hideaway Cove was almost ridiculously tiny: one main street along the waterfront, with a few roads leading back toward the hill that edged the inlet. Mrs. Hanson’s B&B was right at the end of one of these, practically wedged into the side of the hill. The Hook and Sinker was on the main road. Lainie just had to keep walking until she hit it.
It was a calm evening, and Lainie wasn’t the only person out walking. She exchanged smiles and greetings with a young family and an old couple.
This isn’t so bad, she told herself. Probably no one here even remembers me. And so what if they did?
Lainie tried to ignore the flutter of anxiety that twisted her stomach every time she caught sight of someone new. Ever since she’d realized she would have to go back to Hideaway Cove to look after her grandmother’s belongings, she had been haunted by the ridiculous fear that everyone in the town would remember her. The girl whose grandparents threw her out of town.
Stupid. She shouldn’t let what happened fifteen years ago affect her so much. Even if her family had been the subject of town gossip once, surely that was all water under the bridge by now.
A burst of music interrupted Lainie’s moody thoughts, and she looked up to see the sign for the Hook and Sinker right in front of her.
The pub was an old wood and stone building, with heavy-duty storm shutters around all of the windows. Golden light poured through the windows and the open door, and Lainie stepped through into a warm cacophony of music, laughter, and the smell of food cooking.