Chapter 1
Emma Tremaine
Dad’s Place
Astoria, Oregon
“I need you to work this weekend.”
“I’m off this weekend, remember?” I laughed incredulously. “I asked for it off months ago.”
My stepmother gave me her trademark condescending look that had haunted my dreams since high school. “You know what a big weekend this is for my business, Emma. And we can’t operate without a waitress.”
“What about Amelia? Or Daphne?” They were both disasters as waitresses, but a warm body was better than nobody.
Lydia raised her eyebrows. “My girls don’t work here. You know that.”
Which was code for: couldn’t be asked to sully their hands with common work.
Unlike me.
But this time, I was going to push back. I was sick of being her whipping girl. Sick of shouldering so much of the load and the grunt-work of the business—a business I didn’t have even partial ownership of, which we all knew I was owed.
“I can’t.” I pushed past her to hang my ticket in the passthrough to the kitchen. Unfortunately, Lydia followed me and hovered so close that her signature scent warred with the maple syrup on the warmer under the window. I swallowed thickly and willed my queasy stomach to settle. “I bought my tickets months ago. Gwen and I are going to the music festival.”
“The Oceanfront Music Festival is exactly the reason you have to be here. It’s our biggest weekend of the year. Gwen is on the schedule for tomorrow, and you are too, now. End of discussion.”
“But—”
“What would your father think, Emma?” Lydia bent toward me until I was enveloped by her cloying scent and her breath puffed against my cheek. She lowered her voice to a menacing hiss. “If he knew that you thought the only thing keeping a roof over our heads, the only thing putting food in our bellies, was so beneath you? What would he think of you throwing off your obligations to go tothat summer festival? He’d be so disappointed. He’d be ashamed of you and your priorities.”
All the blood in my body froze. I couldn’t breathe, let alone think.
I missed my dadsomuch. It’d become this permanent ache in my chest this last year. He was gone, and I was left was this permanent sore spot that screamed at me that nothing was going to be the same ever again.
Lydia straightened as a satisfied little smirk curved her lips. “And don’t think I’m going to forget this the next time you try to call in. I know exactly the kind of person you are. We both do now.”
I could only watch in suspended disbelief as the only mother figure I’d ever had gave me another sneer and then stomped down the hall to the tiny office in the back.
I jumped as the door slammed shut.
I muffled my groan and rubbed at my stinging eyes. That had been a hell of a lot of drama for six o’clock on a Thursday morning.
I should’ve known the second I saw her car pull into the parking lot. Lydia never came to work before noon on a good today. On great days, she didn’t come in at all.
Clearly, today was neither of those.
“You’re not going to let her kill your plans, are you?” Gwen, my favorite cook and pseudo-grandmother, asked through the passthrough, a spatula in her right hand, her baby blue apron already streaked with grease.
“Gwen…” I sighed. I was too ashamed to say the words out loud.
So, she said them for me. “You are.” She shook her head sadly. “You gotta start living, kiddo. It’s what your father wanted for you. It’s why he left the restaurant to that…” She grunted, because even though Gwen hated Lydia, she also couldn’t say raunchy words out loud.
I would’ve laughed, if it all wasn’t so freaking sad. “It is what it is, Gwen. No point in railing against my fate now.”
“You say that like you’re not a young girl in your twenties. You have your whole life in front of you! Go out and live it! Get the fuck outta this backwater town.”
“Gwen!” I stared at her gob smacked. She didn’t cuss.Ever. “I can’t believe you said that.”
