Free Buck's Landing (A New England Seacoast Romance) by Cameron D. Garriepy Page A

his shorts on. Sofia rolled into his spot on the bed. “Don’t get up now,” he teased.
    She followed him into the kitchen a moment later in a silk robe covered in huge printed poppies. She opened the freezer and pulled out an unlabeled bottle. The contents were pale yellow beneath the frost.
    “Limoncello?” he asked.
    “Mm hmm.” Her eyes sparkled. A flush still lingered on her skin. “A friend of mine in DC makes her own. It’s wonderful stuff.”
    Silas reached into a cabinet for two small glasses and poured them each a few sips.
    They tucked into the lemon bars and toasted one another with the homemade liquor.
    Silas raised his glass. “To your father, who might not have partaken, but I think would have approved.”
    Sofia’s face clouded for a moment and he regretted inviting Jimmy’s ghost into the room. Then she raised her own glass, pushing the moment aside.
    “To my mother, who would have concluded such a meal with her own limoncello. I only wish I’d gotten to try it.”
    “To women of taste,” Silas agreed, “and exceptionally good red sauce.”
    After their belated dessert, Sofia poured them a second round of limoncello and curled up on the sofa, patting the cushion next to her. He sat and she fit herself against his body. He leaned back, and snuggled her close. The noise from the street drifted through the open windows and the waves washed below like a slow heartbeat.
    Silas woke a few hours later. The evening had cooled, and Sofia must have pulled the afghan from the end of the couch over them as they slept. Easing himself off the sofa, he slipped a pillow under Sofia’s head and tucked the blanket snugly around her. He pushed her hair away from her face and kissed her, noting the soft hint of a smile on her lips.
     
    ~~~
     
    Sofia woke alone on the sofa some time before dawn. When further sleep evaded her, she set about tidying up the apartment. Silas’s record choices were still stacked on the console. She slipped the vinyl into their sleeves and carried them into her parents’ room. The contents of the box Silas had emptied were in neat piles next to the carton.
    It wasn’t until she’d returned all the LPs to the box that she saw it. A shoebox from the mall store where she’d picked out her prom shoes, bought with the proceeds from her tips working the ice cream window, sealed with yellowed packing tape and her name, written on top in her own girlish script.
    She carried the shoebox into her bedroom and slit the tape open with a nail file. By the light of her bedside lamp, she lifted the lid. Inside were snapshots of her with Judy, with Dex, hugging people she barely remembered, their fire-lit faces joyful against the indigo sea. There was a knotted friendship bracelet, faded by sun and seawater, snipped clean off her ankle at the end of a summer. Bits of polished glass, a sand dollar, a ticket stub from a carnival. At the bottom, a Florentine paper journal, tied closed with grosgrain ribbon.
    Her diary.
    The pages were crammed with the fluid, looping penmanship she’d long ago left behind, chronicling crushes and heartbreaks, kisses with boys whose lips she’d forgotten, fights with Judy, and secrets confided around those beach bonfires.
    The pages also told the story of a girl who’d bled—figuratively—for her father’s attention. A note in the margin with her GPA and a bitter scrawl: another girl’s dad would have cared. The word “cared” underlined three times so hard the pen nip had almost broken through. A paragraph describing the night Judy’s parents had taken them into Boston to celebrate their high school graduation. She wondered at the coincidence of eating her first formal dinner in the DeVarona Boston’s dining room, Serenade.
    While her father had been invited as a matter of form, he hadn’t even bothered to decline.
    She’d seen her first off-Broadway musical that night, had her first champagne toast in their hotel room, and cried her last bitter tears