Page 18 of Return to Rosewood Beach

She found herself pulling her phone out of her pocket, checking it yet again to see if he’d called her or at least sent her another text. There was nothing, and she had to rapidly blink back a rush of tears. She couldn’t understand him not thinking of her enough to at least send her a message every now and again. So far, he’d only replied to her when she’d been the one to reach out first. She couldn’t help feeling that if he really caredabout her, he’d be reaching out and asking her how she was doing and trying to make sure she was doing okay.

“Oh, we should get back to these photo albums,” Julia said with a sigh, turning back to the one placed on the coffee table in front of her. “I almost don’t want to. It’s so much nicer to think ahead to the future than look back at the past. The past makes me sad right now.”

Alexis swallowed, nodding without saying anything. She was worried her future was going to make her sad too.

CHAPTER NINE

Julia took a sip of her wine and tapped the back of her pen against her lips. She was curled up in bed, going over the stack of finance papers from the pub that her mother had given her. She liked math, and she hadn’t expected to find the task too daunting, but a preliminary glance at all of the paperwork told her that she might be in for more of a rollercoaster than she’d bargained for.

“Let me see,” she murmured, scribbling down a few figures in a notebook that was lying open on the sheets next to her. “What does that figure mean? Come on, Dad. These are pretty cryptic. You clearly weren’t expecting to go anytime soon.”

She bit her lip as tears sprang to her eyes again. She blinked them back and forced herself to concentrate on her math.

For another few minutes, she did her best to analyze all the documents and the lists that her father had written up by hand, but her frown soon became deeper and deeper. She took another sip of wine as she continued to scribble down notes, trying to make sense of the discrepancies in the paperwork.

All of a sudden, she froze. For a few heartbeats, she stared down at the paperwork, unable to believe her eyes.

There were questionable transactions littered across the documents, and she was suddenly hit with a guess of what they might be. At first, she hadn’t had any kind of idea what they were, but then she was hit with a hunch that she didn’t like in the slightest. Her heart was beating faster with dismay, but she climbed out of bed and went to get her laptop from where it was resting on a chair by the window. She brought it back to bed with her and opened it, pressing her lips together.

A great deal of money had been given by her father to some place called The Silver Horseman, and when she searched that name online, she discovered that it was a casino.

“Oh, Dad, no,” she whispered, feeling shock thump in her bloodstream with every heartbeat.

She searched for a few more of the names that had been written alongside the questionable transactions, and discovered three more casinos, all of which were close enough to Rosewood Beach that they could be driven to.

She clapped her hand to her mouth, taking a deep breath. It was clear to her that her father had been concealing a gambling habit, something that neither his wife nor any of his children knew anything about. Or at least she assumed her mother knew nothing about any of it—she felt sure Vivian would have said something about it before asking her to look over the pub’s finances.

She leaned back against the pillows, feeling stunned. She stared down numbly at the papers for a few moments, her mind racing.

She gazed down at the papers, her heart thumping, and then she started to shake her head. She refused to believe it. There must be some other explanation. Some of the transactions were dated as far back as twenty-five years ago, which would mean that Frank had been out gambling during some of thelong nights during her childhood when they all thought he was working late at The Lighthouse Grill.

She picked up the papers again, going over the numbers and hoping to find some other explanation. Maybe he invested in the casinos as businesses, or he was friends with someone who owned them and he leant them money…

But as she frantically tried to find some other explanation for what she was seeing in the finance records, she became more and more convinced against her will that her father had had a gambling problem. It became clear to her that a lot of the figures weren’t payments, but debts.

Her heart sank. She laid the papers back down on the bedsheets, taking a deep breath to try to steady herself.

Even more than the disappointment and shock that she felt, this created a problem. His gambling debts appeared to be unresolved, which left a huge hole in the financial security of the pub.

Oh, I hope Mom knew about this, she thought, running her fingers through her hair.

There was a buzzing kind of heaviness in the pit of her stomach. She kept pouring over the financial documents, taking sips of wine as she went, for the next few minutes, but the more she looked, the more she became sure that her father had had a terrible gambling problem, and that most of his debts were still unresolved.

She took a deep breath, closing her eyes. She didn’t want to have to tell Vivian. She hoped that her mother had known, or at least had an inkling, of what Frank had been doing with their money, but she was worried that her mother had had no more idea of it than she’d had, and that the news would break her heart all over again.

Julia stacked the papers slowly, telling herself that there would be a way out of their mess and that it was all going toturn out all right. Hopefully her mother already knew. Maybe there was even some other logical explanation that Julia hadn’t thought of. Maybe Vivian already had some kind of plan.

She turned out the light and lay down in bed, shutting her eyes tightly. She was dreading telling her mother.

“Did you know about this, Mom?” she whispered, opening her eyes again. “Or did Dad hide this from all of us?”

Vivian traced her fingers along the edge of a photo frame, gazing down at the picture of Frank. It was their wedding photo, a picture of them standing side by side outside the church and smiling broadly. His green eyes crinkled slightly at the corners, his face framed by the thick red hair that had started to thin into baldness in later years. She noticed how muscular he was in the picture and thought to herself with a smile that he’d still been fairly muscular even as an older man, despite his stomach softening a little.

He looked proud, she thought. Proud that he was marrying her, and confident In his ability to succeed. He’d just started The Lighthouse Grill a few months before their marriage, and he’d been on top of the world back then, sure that they would have everything they could ever want and more.

“I did have everything I could ever want, Frank,” she whispered, blinking back tears. “I had you, and a good life with everything we needed. And I still have all of our beautiful children.”

She took a shaky breath, telling herself she needed to steady her emotions and carry on with her work. She placed the photo inside a cardboard box—the last box that she needed to bring to the church before the funeral, which was in two days’ time. She felt relieved at the prospect of being done with all of the funeral arrangements, but at the same time she was grateful that all of the preparations had kept her busy. She was worried that hergrief was going to hit her that much harder if she slowed down for even a moment.

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