The Hesson House (Sisters of Edgartown) by Katie Winters

Author:Katie Winters [Winters, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Fiction, women's divorce fiction, sisters fiction, clean and wholesome romance fiction, Sea stories
Publisher: Katie Winters
Published: 2021-06-28T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Five days since the hurricane. Five days since Chelsea had made her spontaneous decision to disappear from her New York life and do one of the more cowardly things she’d ever done in her life: seek out her mother and hide. Now, she lay in her childhood bed, all wrapped up in blankets, three pillows behind her, and wondered if she’d ever had the strength to return. Her heart hammered with the thought of it. She thought about reading the fifty-plus messages from both her father and Xavier. Anxiety had become like a dear friend. She carried it around on her shoulder like a parrot.

Outside her bedroom, her mother paced as she spoke on the phone with Amelia about the potential fundraiser. Chelsea groaned and shifted beneath the blankets. The alarm clock on her bedside table read 11:14 in big, bold red letters. It demanded something of her. It wondered why the heck she refused to get up. She wondered it of herself, too. Was this depression? She had certainly grappled with that as a teenager in the wake of her father’s departure. She imagined telling her father that, now. “What you did to me when I was a teenager messed me up for good. And now you just show up unannounced and use me like this?’

Again, her phone began to buzz. It was Xavier. She allowed it to buzz itself until it couldn’t buzz any longer. Again, Xavier left a voicemail, another in a list of eleven. They had definitely read about The Hesson House and they had probably guessed that’s where she’d gone. She felt akin to a monster, having abandoned them. Then again, it was true what they said on airplanes: you had to put on your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else with theirs. In the recent weeks, she’d had great difficulty in learning how to breathe.

Chelsea slid out of bed and padded to the bathroom, where she took full stock of herself. Her reflection looked pale, a sunken-in face that had once blossomed with life and optimism. She brushed her teeth and then flossed, something she rarely did but made a mental note to do more. Life was long and unnecessarily cruel. You had to be kind to your teeth.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a mug of coffee as Olivia finally drew her conversation closed. She placed her phone on the counter then positioned her hands on her hips.

“I don’t know. Do you think we can pull it off?”

“Sure,” Chelsea said, not really sounding sure herself. But this was the only appropriate response.

“What are you doing today?” Olivia asked.

Chelsea knew what the question meant: it demanded much more of Chelsea than she was willing to give. She couldn’t go into the details of why she had left the city, nor could she discuss the fact that she had pondered whether or not she wanted to return to the city at all. The diner had reopened in the wake of the storm. Perhaps they could just pass on a few shifts to her, here and there.

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