She couldn’t get to Ellie’s studio fast enough. She had to see her children. She had a horrible, sickening feeling that something had happened to them in her absence. That she had done them wrong by leaving them, even for only a couple of hours.
She felt wild as she hurried across the docks, her heel nearly catching in one of the wood holes and toppling her forward. She swung open the door, her heart feeling like it was beating out of her chest, as her eyes scanned the room for the girls. It was quiet. Too quiet.
“Hello?” she called.
From somewhere in the distance, she heard a muffled sound. Her sister’s voice. “Out here! We’re on the dock!”
She hadn’t even realized there was another door to the studio until she saw it, half-hidden by a large, unfinished painting. She went outside, the relief that she was about to be reunited with her girls already making her shoulders relax, until she saw them.
They were standing on the dock. A bucket was at their feet. Rose was holding up a giant fish—in her bare hands—and Victoria was splashing about with two more in the bucket.
Ellie looked on gaily, while chatting with old Edward, who grinned broadly and said, “Teaching these girls how to fish! Good to see you, Hope! My, all grown!”
Hope took in the sight. She couldn’t even prioritize her manners and make small talk with Edward, who had once been a handyman for the Taylors.
“I thought they were learning how to paint,” she said faintly.
“Oh that.” Ellie tossed a hand in the air. “Too much mess.”
Hope’s eyes popped. And this wasn’t?
She stepped forward, reached for her girls and then thought the better of it. They smelled. They actually smelled like…fish. And Rose, she now saw, had things that she could only hope were not fish guts in her hair.
Hope felt the backs of her eyes prickle again, but this time it was not from feelings of regret or guilt. This time it was from exhaustion. Pure exhaustion at the thought of what it would now take to handle this situation.
She had the urge to turn around. To flee. To let Ellie help clean up the mess that she had made.
She wanted to go back to Darcy’s peaceful home. She wanted to sit in silence and sip iced tea and talk about tile samples and paint swatches.
She did not want to touch her fish-slime-covered children.
Or deal with the fallout of taking them away from their fun.
“Looks like we’ll be walking home.” She hated the thought of ruining the stroller, even if it would take forever to walk home. Ellie had left it parked in front of the store, clearly having no need for it.
“What? A little fish smell never hurt anyone!” Edward began to laugh, a laugh that verged on a cackle, and Hope began to have the impression that she was the brunt of some joke.
Her jaw set as she stared at her sister, who was all too happily laughing along with Edward. Still, when Ellie caught her expression, something in her eyes flashed.
“They had fun, Hope,” Ellie urged.
“Are you implying that they don’t have fun with me?” Hope demanded.
Ellie opened her mouth to say something and then seemed to think better of it. Hope didn’t wait around to continue the conversation. She had to pry a fish from her daughter’s hands, then suffer through the inevitable tantrum that followed, then walk nearly a mile back to the cottage and then hook up the garden hose, if Ellie hadn’t broken it.
That last thought was unfair, she knew. But it was also unfair of Ellie to create more work for her like this.
“I’m just saying,” she said as she shook Rose’s wrists until the fish fell into the bucket, “that I only asked for two hours of help. I cook. I clean. And I just asked for two hours of help.”
“Hey, I never asked you to cook those breakfasts or dinners,” Ellie said, her voice rising to a near shout as Rose’s wails became shrill.
Hope didn’t respond to that. There was no sense in pointing out that someone had to cook the meals in the house. Her girls had to eat. But did it have to be Hope, every damn day?
“I’m sorry,” she said, stopping herself. She blinked, not liking where she had taken this conversation. She was talking to her sister as if she were Evan, letting out frustrations that were misplaced, and unfair. Like she’d done with Gemma last week. “I just…I need to get these girls clean.”
She led her girls by the wrists into the studio, instructed them to wash their hands three times each—with soap!—and then did her best to dab at their arms and faces with soapy paper towels. Then she took the stroller and instructed them each to walk beside it.
Victoria had splashed her in the bathroom, and now her pants were wet, but she didn’t care. What she cared about was getting home and getting these girls clean. Because someone had to care about that.
Unable to bear the thought of walking down Main Street to get to the west side, she turned east toward Lakeview Road, hoping to eventually cut up through the forest that divided the two halves of the island, even if it did add an extra ten minutes of walking onto her timetable. She glanced down at the girls, who inched along, still begging to go back to play with their fish, which apparently had names: Petunia and Anastasia.
Make that twenty extra minutes, she thought.
Still, the view was so lovely that she almost didn’t mind. Lakeview Road was one of the quieter streets near town, full of residential homes, a few B&Bs, and anchored by one of the island’s midsize hotels, and a personal favorite, the old Lakeside Inn.
Rose and Victoria screamed the entire time, “My fish! I want my fish!” and Hope didn’t even try to bribe them into being quiet. She had no lollipops, and despite washing their hands, she didn’t want their hands anywhere near their mouths at the moment.
“No, Mommy, no! Go back! Go back to the fish!”
“We’re going to the house,” she ground out.
Now it was Victoria’s eyes that popped open in surprise. “We’re going home?”
Hope wavered for a moment. She was so thrown that she didn’t know what to say. The girls were used to Evan being away, used to it just being the three of them during most of their waking hours. But being away from their bedroom, their toys, from the only home they had ever known, that was different.
“Soon,” she said as she started walking again, only she wasn’t so sure about that. Now, with the opportunity she had here, she wasn’t sure of anything at all.
“Hello!” a voice called out and Hope cursed under her breath, not wanting anything to postpone her getting back to that cottage and trying her hand at that outdoor shower, until she saw that it was John, up ahead.
Her heart lifted, and just like that, the noise didn’t bother her, and she wasn’t mad at Ellie anymore, and she almost forgot about the fact that her children—and possibly even she, at this point—smelled like a fish market.
He was wearing khaki pants, a white linen shirt rolled to the elbows, and a smile that was downright contagious. And he was standing at the gate of the Lakeside Inn.
She pushed the stroller to a stop and the girls reduced their crying to a sniffle.
“Don’t ask,” she warned at the questioning raise of his eyebrow. She jutted her chin toward the inn, curious now to find him here. “Is this the hotel you’re thinking of buying?” she asked. She didn’t know why, but she’d expected something large and more corporate. This was one of the more intimate hotels on the island. She didn’t quite know what to make of that.