Chapter One
Hope Webb turned the final page in her novel and sighed. Real love. The predestined kind.
If only she could live it and not just read about it.
Unfortunately, every time she thought she’d found her happily ever after, the relationship crashed and burned. Even if she was prone to making bad picks, as her neighbor, Iris, said, she’d learned from her mistakes. The next guy she fell for would be totally into her, so the situation would be mutual. No crashing and burning allowed.
She cradled her open book against her chest, reclined in the frayed rope hammock, and let herself sink into a relaxed haze. Now wasn’t the time to think about her abysmal dating history. It was summer break. It had been months since she’d had time off work, and the peace was desperately needed.
A warm breeze riffled the flouncy hem of her yellow sundress where it rested against her pale thighs. Her favorite surfboard-patterned traveler tumbler sat on the plastic table beside her, loaded with iced chai.
Heaven.
Apart from the yapping of her neighbors’ Chihuahua, who’d apparently set his sights on a squirrel, and the sound of Iris cheerfully singing “Age of Aquarius” while tending her adjoining garden, things were tranquil in her Durham neighborhood.
Her cell phone buzzed.
She tugged down the brim of her floppy sun hat, determined to ignore it. That had to be Principal Carson texting again. She’d already uploaded her grades. Check. Done the last-day walk-through of her classroom with the school VP. Check. And turned her laptop in to the district’s IT center for its annual refurbishing. Check.
Check, check, check.
School’s out for summer.
Buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz.
Hope set her jaw. This was probably about summer school. Principal Carson had tried to get her to teach again this year, but she’d turned him down. She’d never been good at saying no—to anyone, really—but she was frazzled. Burnt out. And she badly needed a break from unruly students, complaining parents, and mountains of paperwork. Her job had its positive aspects, obviously, and she loved her students. But they were much easier to appreciate in September than in June. Besides that, she had her sister’s wedding to attend in their old hometown of Blue Hill, Maine, and she was leaving for it next week.
Jackie was marrying rich bachelor Brent Albright after a whirlwind courtship. Back when she and Hope were in high school and living in Blue Hill, the entire town had gone into a tizzy each time the Albright clan arrived for their annual summer stay.
Everyone in their friend group had been dying to meet the gorgeous Albright boys—especially Jackie, who’d dreamt of getting swept away into a life of privilege and luxury.
She met Brent face-to-face for the first time at a wedding she’d organized in Boston. It had, apparently, been love at first sight.
Buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz.
The vibrations escalated, causing Hope’s phone to dance on the flimsy plastic table.
This was no longer texting territory; a call was coming through. Which made her wonder if it was Principal Carson after all. He had a strange aversion to phone calls—especially when he was begging favors.
“I think that’s your phone, child,” Iris called helpfully from above her bright red begonia hedge, which in these postage-stamp-size yards stood only ten feet away.
If Hope didn’t love the stocky older woman as much as she did, she might have scowled. “Do I have to answer it?”
Iris laughed, her brown eyes sparkling with mischief. “They’re just going to keep calling if you don’t.”
Iris was skilled at delivering unsolicited—and uncannily accurate—advice, as well as plates of calorie-rich cookies. The woman loved to bake, which would have been great if Hope had inherited her mom’s fast metabolism. But no. She gained weight just by reading high-fat recipes. Not that she’d ever turn down all the goodies Iris brought by.
Hope lowered her sunglasses and peered at Iris, the warm afternoon light kissing the woman’s deep brown skin.
Iris gave her a sunny grin, and Hope groaned.
“Ugh, fine.”
That’s when things became eerily quiet. So quiet she could no longer hear the breeze sifting through the trees overhead or the low droning of honeybees by the honeysuckle-laden back fence. Even the dog had stopped barking, having scampered around the side of the building. The only sound breaking the silence of the humid afternoon was the steady clip-clip-clipping of Iris’s garden shears.
A really weird sense of foreboding blanketed Hope.
She snatched up her phone and saw the missed call was from her twin sister, Jackie. Her heart lurched as she stared at the barrage of text messages her sister had sent before the call, each one more frantic than the last.
Please call me.
Desperate emergency.
SOS
Where are you???
Ahhhh. Is your phone on vibrate???
She nearly dropped the phone as it buzzed again, then scrambled to answer it.
“Jackie?” she asked in a near panic. “What’s wrong?”
“OMG. Hope.” Jackie sounded on edge. “Where have you been?”
“Um, busy.” Hope flipped her book shut and set it aside. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the wedding!” Jackie wailed. “Such a disaster.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes! The Martin wedding is totally falling—”
“Wait.” The wedding her sister was working on? That’s what the crisis was about? Hope flopped back into the hammock. “I thought you were talking about your wedding.”
“Huh?” She envisioned her sister’s brow creasing below her wispy dark bangs. “How can I possibly think about myself at a time like this? The Martins are counting on me!”
Hope sucked air back into her lungs. Naturally, she’d assumed Jackie had been talking about her own wedding, and naturally, she’d been wrong. Her sister might be a phenomenal wedding planner, but she was terrible at making her own wedding a priority.
“You scared me,” Hope said. “I thought there was something seriously wrong. Like you and Brent were having trouble or something.”
“There is something seriously wrong. Mrs. Martin got into a fight with Emile Gastón.”
Hope closed her eyes. “Who’s Emile Gastón?”
“Only the most brilliant caterer in Boston, and Mrs. Martin had the gall to tell him his crème fraîche was a ‘flopé.’”
“Maybe it was?”
“That’s not the point. The point is I thought I had things all sewn up, but, now that the catering’s blown, I’m going to have to start over. And this is a double mess with the wedding going off in Nantucket. Do you know how hard it is to get anything done in Nantucket at the last minute?”