Free Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble

just don’t leave us alone; we’ve paid our taxes faithfully for years, and Daddy before us. They should be able to wait a little while.”
    “Not with beachfront real estate as profitable as this. They’ll take the house and sell it to a developer and make a bundle off it, who will in turn make a bundle off it, while we walk away with nothing. How are we going to live then?”
    Millie mumbled something that Abbie couldn’t hear.
    “And do you know what will happen to the other residents in town once we cave?”
    “But she was in such dire need.”
    Marnie sighed. “We’ll have to sell more silver. It won’t fetch what it’s worth, but it will keep the hyenas from the door for another year maybe.”
    “You can’t. That’s the last set, and it was Momma’s favorite.”
    “Would you rather sell the house and grounds?”
    “It isn’t fair.”
    “No, but life isn’t fair.”
    Millie began to cry.
    Abbie tiptoed away. They were as generous as they could be. They’d taken in Abbie even though it was obviously putting a strain on their limited resources. She wondered if she should call Celeste. But what good would that do? Just worry Celeste because somehow Abbie doubted that the three would take money from their niece even if Celeste could come up with it.
    Abbie left a note on the kitchen table saying she was at the beach and would be back in time to help with dinner.
    She wouldn’t impose on the Crispins any longer. She had some money, plus a life insurance policy Werner had not told her about. It wasn’t much, but it would keep her afloat long enough to figure out what to do with her life. She wouldn’t use the insurance money on herself unless she had to. She’d find a good cause and donate it all. And then she’d figure out what to do.
    And that’s where she began her journal. What to do with my life . She sat cross-legged on the sand, the wind rippling off the water and the late-afternoon sun warming her back. She stared at the first sentence and the subsequent empty page. Sort of like her future, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, a barren desert? It could be anything she wanted it to be, she thought. She could stay right where she was. Get a job. Maybe Bethanne would need help in the summer. She would work cheap if it included room and board.
    Or she could travel. She could buy a car. Not a jeep or Humvee, but something girly, small and low to the ground, electric blue or silver.
    She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought. The truth was she had nothing to look forward to. But she wouldn’t write that down. Everything that was important about her had happened in her past, which would be okay if she was still on track. But she’d been derailed, and she didn’t know how the hell she was going to carry on.
    She didn’t write that down either.
    She wrote about Werner.
    S he’d just graduated from Ann Arbor and had gone down to Guatemala to help build Habitat houses. The trip was a graduation gift from her parents. She knew a little about construction, electrical work, plumbing. All the Sinclair children did. You never knew when you’d be called on to help your neighbor repair his roof or fix a burned-out fuse. And since she was the only Sinclair who hadn’t known from childhood which area of selfless service she would make her life’s work, she learned a little bit of everything.
    She studied communications in college. A degree that landed her a job as a weathergirl at a Chicago television station, which if you had a really good imagination—and all the Sinclairs did—you could count as a service job.
    But she was ahead of herself. She was in Guatemala. Werner was part of a Dutch filming crew who were making a documentary in a nearby village.
    They camped along with the Habitat people because the Habitat people had edible food, hot water, and decent living quarters. She and Werner started talking over mess and talked far into the night. He was older, wiser, so full of life, so determined to