Page 2 of Bad Decisions

Chapter one

Jewel

Six Months Earlier

Foamy gray waves crash against the shore, tumbling smooth pebbles and fragments of shell along the water’s edge. I huddle deeper into my thick wool-lined coat, shielding my stinging cheeks from another salty blast. When I rushed out the door an hour ago, I thought my trusty old coat would be enough to keep out the bitter winter wind blowing in off the North Atlantic. I was wrong.

The misty dampness has seeped through my outer layers and is penetrating my sweater, reaching my thin long-sleeved T-shirt, chilling my skin beneath. A shiver shakes through my body, bone deep, and my teeth rattle against each other.

But as cold as I am, I needed to get out of the house. The walls were closing in around me until I felt like the very breath was being squeezed from my lungs. My family home, once filled with laughter and joy, is now just a building of thin walls, bare floorboards, and old furniture that’s seen better days. I wander the emptying rooms like a disinterested stranger.

Without my father’s exuberant, loving presence filling the rooms, it feels as desolate and lonely as this wide strip of white sand. He was my world, and now he’s gone.

Losing the one person who knew me the best, who shared my DNA, and who simply loved me no matter what, is an indescribable pain that has left a gaping hole in my heart.

Too young, his friends said to me at his funeral. It’s true, he was only fifty-four, and we thought we’d have many more years together. But age doesn’t discriminate. In a moment of distraction, the nineteen-year-old driver of the other car slammed head-on into my father’s old Ford truck, killing them both. Two lives extinguished forever in those seconds of horror.

A tragic accident, the policeman said when he called yesterday and gave me the conclusion of their investigation.

It was all of those things they’ve said, but none of that penetrates the blanket of numbness that has shrouded me since I got the call four weeks ago. It’s only sitting here on the cold, soft sand that makes me feel alive again. My face turns into the strong wind, and it whips the strands of hair that escaped from my ponytail across my face.

The first rays of dawn break across the dark ocean, and I look north, then south, along the miles of beach. This isolated spot has become my place of peace, somewhere to go when the green light on my old clock radio beside my childhood bed finally ticks over to five o’clock.

My body has developed a new habit of sleeping only a couple of hours at a time, so the nights drag on with lots of tossing and turning. Five is the arbitrary hour I’ve set for myself to get up. It’s one pitiful attempt at normalcy.

What even is normal when you’re grieving? Nobody knows until it happens to them. For me, it’s a planned routine, each hour timeboxed to keep me moving forward until the hole in my heart feels less empty.

I’m beginning to think it wasn’t the best idea to hide myself away from people who just want to help. But the little lie slipped freely from my lips when I couldn’t face another of my father’s friends offering me their condolences or another casserole to fill my small fridge. I know they meant well, but each time they wanted to talk about my dad, my heart bled like it was that first day. The day everything I had truly loved was ripped from me with a single phone call. I needed space to grieve. Time alone with my thoughts, trying to remember the good times rather than drowning in the frequent bubbling up of sorrow.

Through the early-morning mist, I see the only other human on the beach approaching. My heart kicks up a beat. It’s him.

The man runs along the hard-packed sand at the shoreline just like he’s done every day since he first appeared a week ago. His focus is solely on eating up the miles with each long-legged stride. Leg muscles encased in black compression running joggers, straining under the punishing pace.

I’m sure the first couple of days, he didn’t even notice me. But then on the third day as he approached my spot on the beach, his head tilted in my direction, and for a brief moment, our eyes connected. His deep pools of inky blue found a corresponding wash of sadness in my lighter ones. The visceral reaction to him, fleeting and disconcerting, was hard to comprehend or explain in my practical head, so I quickly looked away. And he ran on, stopping a little farther along the shoreline near the Carlson family’s beach house.

I know who owns all the properties along this stretch of the Southampton coastline, having grown up only a few minutes’ drive away. All the local kids knew the prominent families who owned these expensive houses, even though we generally only saw the owners during the summer. These huge, luxurious homes felt as foreign to me as the castles I saw last year backpacking around Europe. I had a happy, modest childhood, living in the tiny two-bedroom wood house with my dad, and I wouldn’t have wished it any other way.

Resting my chin on my bent knees, I watch as the stranger draws closer, his features becoming clearer with each stride. His short brown hair is plastered to his scalp with sweat, not disturbed at all by the wind. His face, all sharp angles and set in concentrated effort, is softened only by the trimmed beard covering his jawline. He’s handsome, not in a pretty college-boy kind of way like my last boyfriend, who was all shell with no substance. There’s something about this guy’s face that tells me he’s experienced life, and it hasn’t been all that kind to him. Maybe it’s the creases around his mouth that don’t quite manage to stretch into a smile, or the lines scored into the skin around his eyes from squinting against a too-strong sun.

I brush my hair back from my face, preparing to say hello as he passes by. Apparently, this is what we do, based on the last time I saw him, not yesterday but the day before.

Yesterday, I missed my visit to the beach; in fact, I barely crawled out of bed. It would have been my father’s birthday, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything other than shed another bucketful of tears.

No more tears, I tell my inner self sternly, especially when the stranger stops. My breath catches in my throat, and I whip my head to gaze out to sea. I don’t want him to catch me staring.

Damn, he’s walking up the sand toward me. This isn’t what happens; we should acknowledge each other with a nod, a hello, or a wave, like you do when you pass a random hiker on a trail.

Again, I brush the annoying loose hair back from my face, then turn my head to look at him.

Our eyes meet, and it’s not fear I’m feeling but skittish butterflies in the pit of my stomach.

Chapter two

Will

She’s back . My feet pound along the shoreline to the steady rhythm of the music blasting through my earbuds, each stride bringing me closer to the solitary figure in the distance. She’s about halfway up the beach, a small human island surrounded by an expanse of soft, pale sand, her knees hugged to her chest. The same woman I’ve seen every day for the past week, except for yesterday.

I’m glad she’s back. I don’t know who she is, but still. Something draws me to her, like an invisible line reeling me in. Maybe it’s just my nature to want to help people in distress, and she is upset. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a woman sitting on a cold, windy beach at dawn in the middle of winter has something going on.