Page 46 of A Beach House Beginning

He would chat with Jenna about her upcoming day and would ask questions of Addie about camp and what other activities she was doing that summer.

A few mornings when he had extra time, he even offered to take Theo outside to the garden so that Jenna could focus on finishing up breakfast and getting ready for her shift at the gift shop, on the days she worked.

In the evenings, the routine was reversed. He would come to pick up his daughter about an hour after camp finished for the day. He never lingered long but took time to chat a little about the day and their respective plans for the evening.

Despite her lingering tumult over the kisses they had shared—and the secret part of her that undeniably wanted more—she quite enjoyed the routine they had fallen into. She sensed he did as well.

Everything changed on the morning of the girls’ last day of science camp.

The morning started like all the others. She and Addie both got up early to walk the dog on the beach as the morning mist hung heavy on the shore and the gulls swooped to scavenge for juicy treasure along the detritus left from high tide.

She wasn’t quite sure what happened. One moment, they were enjoying the morning, the next, the dog stopped to sniff directly in front of Jenna and she got tangled in his leash.

She could feel herself topple and reached a hand out to brace herself. Under normal circumstances, she would have been fine, simply annoyed at her own clumsiness. She landed on soft sand, after all.

Something in the sand wasn’t soft, though. She felt a slicing pain as her palm caught on something jagged buried in the sand. A piece of shell or driftwood, perhaps, or maybe even a shard of glass left by some unknown beach visitor.

She gasped at the pain and immediately rolled to her side, clutching her hand.

Addie looked down at her, wide-eyed. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

She pulled her hand away and saw she had a nasty cut about four inches running right through her life line, between her right thumb and forefinger. “I’m afraid I’m bleeding, though,” she admitted to her daughter.

She could only be glad she had been the one to fall and not Addie.

“Oh no! How did you cut yourself?”

“I’m not sure. Something sharp in the sand. I should find whatever it was so it doesn’t hurt someone else.”

“I can look.”

“I’ll do it,” she said quickly, with visions of Addie being cut as well. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself, too. Why don’t you keep walking Theo down the beach a little more, and I’ll dig around and see if I can figure out what it was.”

Addie looked undecided but after a moment, her daughter obeyed. She and the dog headed away from Jenna a short distance.

Her hand was now bleeding copiously, which was one of the reasons she had sent Addie away. She didn’t have anything with her to stop the bleeding so she grabbed a corner of her T-shirt and ripped, feeling a pang as she did.

This had been one of Ryan’s T-shirts that she had packed away after he died. She wore them as sleep shirts and to work out.

She still had several of his shirts left, including three that she had sewn into pillows for Addie’s room. Still, losing this one stung worse than her cut, like slicing one more thread between her and her past.

She quickly wrapped the strip of cloth around her hand, hoping to stop the worst of the bleeding, then dug through the deep sand there until she found the culprit, a shell from what looked like a Dungeness crab, with a broken, jagged edge.

She tossed it into one of the garbage cans set at intervals along the beach, then caught up with Addie.

“Mom, you need a real bandage,” her daughter said, taking in the makeshift bandage that was also now covered in blood.

Jenna strongly suspected she needed stitches, but she didn’t want to worry Addie. A trip to the doctor or urgent care clinic could wait until after she dropped off the girls at day camp. Meantime, she would do some rudimentary first aid back at their apartment to staunch the bleeding.

They reached the second floor landing to their apartment just as Wes came down the stairs from the third floor, chatting with Brielle.

He stopped on the stairs halfway to the landing and stared at her.

“Good Lord. What happened to you?”

He looked gorgeous, she couldn’t help but notice, in worn jeans, work boots and a T-shirt that stretched over his hard muscles.

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