“Hey there,” Ezra said. “I saw on Instagram you’re back in Provincetown?”
“I am.” She remembered, for the first time, that he’d met a mystery lady. The morning they left Provincetown together, he’d mentioned that he met an “incredible” woman the night before, but that she didn’t want to see him again because she didn’t “do relationships.” That was all he would say about her.
“Have you heard from your hookup?”
“Not really,” he said. “She’s a woman of few words. And even fewer texts.”
“Sorry to hear that. How’s the city treating you?” she said.
“I’d say at this point it’s an abusive relationship,” he said. “But then, I’m used to that. Oh—here’s Claudia.”
“Hey, hey, superstar,” Claudia said. “I hear you’re back on the Cape.”
“Yes! I decided to spend the summer in Provincetown to finish my manuscript.”
“Love that for you,” Claudia said. “Just don’t forget you’re speaking at the Boston Arts Club the first week in August.”
Shelby hadn’t forgotten. The Boston Arts Club was one of the oldest art institutions in the country and she was honored to have been invited for their summer reading program.
Now that she had Claudia on the phone, she had an idea. “While I’m out here I’m helping my friend who owns the bookstore. Any of your authors coming to the Cape? I’m sure she’d love to have them swing by the bookstore to do a signing.” Shelby didn’t want to admit how very much she was helping with the bookstore. Claudia might think she wasn’t taking her deadline seriously when actually, the opposite was true. She was cranking.
She’d started rewriting her book the night she ran into Justin and Kate Hendrik. Once she had the idea about two competing bookstores, she couldn’t go back to her original plot idea. She scrapped it entirely, and began writing about a thirtysomething single woman who owns a bookshop. She called the character Emily, which was her own middle name. Emily was preparing for the big summer season when wham—she’s diagnosed with breast cancer. At the same time, a competing bookstore owned by a newcomer named Jackson opens shop. The storyline followed Emily and her friends as they rallied around her shop. Shelby was also playing around with a romance subplot between the two competing bookstore owners, but she wasn’t sure yet. The one thing she knew was that the words were pouring out of her. The story was flowing much more naturally than the one she’d been laboring over. It was a huge relief.
Now she just had to make sure the real-life bookstore stayed competitive.
Twenty-One
Shelby hesitated outside of Town Hall. After spending the night before prepping with Colleen, it was time to make her case for beach access for Land’s End. Shelby borrowed Duke’s car and stopped by the apartment to pick her up, but Colleen was asleep. Doug refused to wake her.
“I don’t want her pushing it,” Doug said. “Please, just handle the committee meeting the best you can.”
So she drove back to Duke’s, parked the car, and they walked to Town Hall together.
She told him she didn’t feel right about petitioning without Colleen.
“Maybe we should wait for another night, when Colleen can make it.”
He shook his head. “You’ve got this.” Reluctantly, she followed him inside.
Town Hall smelled like wood chips and cherry incense. She went for the first time four years ago, the summer between junior and senior year. Colleen’s mother Pam brought them to hear an ecological lecture that their friend’s son was giving. The auditorium was full and she’d been impressed that the speaker, Justin Lombardo, was just a few years older and already had his master’s in Marine Science.
“The waters of the Gulf of Maine, an ocean basin that spans from Cape Cod to the southern shores of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, is one of the fastest warming regions of all the planet’s oceans,” he said. He was tall, with broad shoulders, dark wavy hair, and a penetrating gaze that she felt from the third row in the audience. “For fifty years, researchers observed the area’s water temperatures slowly warming, but in the past decade, that gradual trend sharply accelerated to the concerning scenario we see today.”
After the talk, Carmen Lombardo invited Pam out and during dinner, Shelby found herself watching him across the table. She listened to everything he said even as she went through the motions of other conversation. Every time he happened to glance in her direction, she offered a smile and when he returned it, she felt it like an electric shock. For the next week or so, she hoped to run into him on the beach. She even went to Lombardo’s restaurant hoping to spot him. But the summer ended, and she and Hunter drove back to Pennsylvania for their senior year at Bryn Mawr.
The next summer, their first night back at the Dillworth house, it was unusually hot with a stifling humidity. They were eating dinner on the deck when a flash thunderstorm hit. Within minutes, trees and power lines toppled over, blocking roads and knocking out the electricity. The entire town was without power on one of the hottest nights on record.
Colleen rushed over: volunteers were meeting up at Lombardo’s restaurant to help elderly residents who lost their air-conditioning. Some homeowners had generators, but many people didn’t and the concern was that the elderly would suffer over the long hot night. The couple who owned Harbor Lounge and several properties in town offered up a house on Pearl Street as a shelter.
Two dozen people convened on the front porch of the restaurant, where Mr. and Mrs. Lombardo assigned search and rescue zones. Shelby and her friend split up in opposite directions. Shelby was tasked with checking a three-block radius on the West End. Before she reached the first house, it started pouring again. Dressed in sneakers and a T-shirt, she was drenched through in seconds. Still, she pushed forward.
She knocked on a few houses but didn’t get any response. She kept moving, making a note to check them one more time before moving on to the next street. When she knocked on a door and saw it begin to open, she felt a rush of adrenaline. She imagined an elderly couple who’d been huddled in the dark, relieved to see a friendly face in their hour of need.
But the person behind the door wasn’t a vulnerable neighbor. It was the handsome marine biologist she’d met last summer.
“Can I help you?” Justin Lombardo said. If he recognized her, he showed no sign of it.
“Oh—I’m sorry. I thought this house was on my route.” She glanced down at her phone for the text she sent herself with the radius she was supposed to cover.
