Page 131 of Beautiful Place By the Sea

She smiles, too. “Your boss won’t mind you being a few minutes late.”

I laugh. “Tell her I appreciate that.”

“Consider it done.”

Maisie works on the applesauce, then shoots her pill with a familiarity that puts a dark underline and several exclamation points on the mental note I made to discuss her possible narcotics addiction with Oliver.

She closes her eyes, leaning back in her chair. “I knew you were a good egg.”

“Aw, I appreciate that.”

“All things considered, I understand why he did it.”

I tilt my head. “Why who did what?” She is definitely loopy from these pills.

“Why Oliver turned down the manager job,” she replies, sitting up again. She picks up a jumble of orange yarn from the arm of her chair and starts to do something vaguely approaching crochet.

My heart starts galloping in my chest. “What do you mean, when Oliver turned down the manager job?”

Maisie smiles gently. “It was the Monday before my surgery. I’d been talking to him about taking over Shoreline for quite some time, and he’d seemed interested. We’d discussed him buying me out, or managing the day-to-day and me taking a backseat to handle just the administrative aspects. We hadn’t quite firmed things up yet.” Her crochet hook dances across the yarn in her lap, generating a series of increasingly sloppy loops. “In any case, that Monday, he came in and told me he didn’t want any of it. That he was going to just keep working in the shop.”

My eyes must be as wide as saucers now. “But why wouldn’t he want it?”

Maisie’s looking at me with such sympathy, I can hardly stand it. “I think you’d be better off asking him, dear.”

Oliver, who has so little outside of his work at Shoreline, would have so much to gain from a promotion. Even more to gain from buying the shop, if he were somehow able to swing it. It makes no sense to me that he would step away from something that Maisie has almost certainly been grooming him for since she hired him. He’s the closest thing to family that she’s got, and I know he loves her like a grandmother. This transition makes all the sense in the world.

But he turned it down. Something gnaws at the edge of my brain, but it can’t be right. Can it?

The day she’s talking about was right after Oliver took me out on his dad’s boat. When he’d asked me if I wanted to stay on as a clerk at Shoreline, and I told him I wouldn’t be able to swing it because the pay wasn’t enough.

The day he’d carefully considered my answer, then nodded with finality as if he’d come to a decision.

The day he told me he loved me.

With one shuddering jolt, the truth comes into focus. I don’t even need to ask Oliver. I know exactly why he stepped away from the opportunity.

He did it for me.

After all, it was later the same day that Maisie offered me the very job Oliver walked away from.

Oliver turned it down so I could take it, so the money would work out and I could move to Ogunquit. So I could work at Shoreline, which he knew I wanted. So I could be with him and build a life here, in this beautiful place by the sea.

Thoughts are racing through my brain at breakneck speed, but one rises above the rest, echoing over and over against every edge of every other thought.

Oliver did this for me.

“I…I don’t know what to say.” I can barely think right now, much less form a coherent response to Maisie.

“You don’t have to say anything.” She sets her crocheting down and reaches out to pat my hand, which she misses by several inches. “I realize this might be a lot to process. But I do think, when you’re ready, it’s something you and Oliver should discuss.”

I nod wordlessly. She’s right, of course. And I think I want that conversation to happen sooner rather than later.

I’d thought walking away from the bookstore was the right thing specifically so the job could remain open to Oliver. I hadn’t realized he’d done the same thing for me.

Looking at the breakdown of my parents’ marriage, I’d been desperate to avoid a similar scenario—two people who loved one another but were deeply unhappy. My parents’ separation had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with bringing their problems into the marriage.

My dad couldn’t deal with the fact that he never met his biological father, who was apparently a horrible person. The fact that the parents who raised him essentially went to their graves withholding the truth. The fact that his mother lived in a platonic marriage; that his father could never be with the man he truly loved. And surely, all of that would be a lot to process, especially in the wake of my grandparents’ deaths.