The Summer Sand Pact by Jessie Newton

Author:Jessie Newton [Newton, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JEN Publishing

Chapter Sixteen

Kelli hugged her son tightly and said, “Mommy will be back in a couple of hours, okay?” She bent down and looked into his face. He was an equal mix of her and Julian, and she loved him so much. Sometimes he struggled when Kelli left him behind, and today looked like it might be one of those days.

“You can go have one of those breakfast sandwiches Robin made,” Kelli said, putting a sunny smile on her face. “Mandie said they were going to take the sports stuff to the beach. You like football.”

“Yeah,” Parker said, hanging his head. Kelli was never sure if he really didn’t want her to go or if he was putting on a show. She’d left him with her mother-in-law a few times recently where he’d acted just like this, and Ivy had said he’d completely transformed the moment Kelli was gone.

He’d talk and laugh and be perfectly happy without her.

“Okay.” Kelli straightened and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “Go on, then. Be sure to say please and thank you, and stay with AJ.” She’d asked her to keep an eye on Parker than morning, and AJ had looked up from her phone long enough to agree. She lived life so differently than Kelli, and she couldn’t imagine the casual way AJ existed on a day-to-day basis.

Last night, AJ had said not to worry about breakfast that morning, but the doubts had literally been consuming her stomach for a full day now. She worried she was going to upset Alice. She worried she was getting into a situation she wouldn’t be able to predict or control. She worried about what might happen then.

She swallowed, trying to tame the feelings and rid herself of them. The physical lump in the back of her throat went down, but Kelli had barely made it to the curb and the RideShare car she’d called before it returned.

“Benedict and Bacon, please,” she said as she closed the door, and the driver didn’t say anything before simply easing back onto the road. Kelli watched the island scenery go by, noting that the beach houses on the north side of Rocky Ridge had returned to the bright colors of the fifties.

Alice’s father had a lot of pictures showing what the island had looked like previously, and he didn’t understand houses like the one Alice had. Too much brick and glass, he’d said, but Kelli liked it.

The wooden houses and stacked apartments had charm too, though, and she allowed some of her nerves to seep out. The sky was bright blue this morning, without a single cloud anywhere, and when she got out of the car in front of the breakfast joint, the salt air blew off the water lapping against the shore only a hundred yards away.

Kelli did love the cove, and she would never see anything like this in Newark. In fact, the water there wasn’t even safe to swim in, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a deep breath of the air in the city.

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