Poppy wished it could be so simple. When they disembarked at the gate and she switched her phone back on, she found a dozen text messages waiting for her-all of them marked with the capital letters of increasing urgency.
Don't look at your messages.
Seriously – DON'T LOOK
I'M BANNING YOU FROM FACEBOOK.
(call me, I love you)
Her best friend, Summer. Poppy knew she meant well, but now there was no way she wasn't going to look. She stepped back from the scrum at the baggage carousel and took a deep breath, bracing herself before she clicked through to Facebook and saw the notifications waiting for her.
Congratulations, Owen and Poppy!
Poppy felt a weird out-of-body sensation, like she was looking at herself in another life. Her inbox was full: best wishes from distant relatives and old co-workers and old grade-school classmates she hadn't seen in twenty years. Best of luck for your life together. Here's to a beautiful bride! In all the rush to cancel everything and make sure all their guests were notified, Poppy hadn't thought to update her social media profile. It was just the same as it had been two weeks ago, with her engagement photo beaming out from the front page and a wall full of excited wedding countdowns from her family.
But the photo didn't show the doubts whirling in her mind, even then. Or the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach every time she looked at her engagement ring, and picked out a wedding dress, and tasted cake samples with their moms cooing over every slice. It felt like the walls were closing in on her, crushing her with icy panic, until she'd woken up in a cold sweat and known without a doubt she couldn't go through with it. She didn't love Owen, not the way she needed to if she was going to say those vows. And as much as she longed for a life with someone, building the kind of forever she wrote about every day, every instinct in her body was screaming at her, Not this time.
Not this man.
She guessed her instincts were right, because now the sinking feeling was gone-replaced by an epic black hole of guilt. It still made her sick with shame, remembering the look on Owen's face when she'd told him it was the end. Maybe he should have seen it coming-things had been distant and tense between them for months-but still, it didn't make it any easier saying the words "it's over" and ruining his life the way she did.
Aunt June would say she was being dramatic. She did, in fact, when she reached out and offered Poppy a lifeline: her beach cottage on Cape Cod.
"Trust me," June had said down the phone line, in her usual no-nonsense tone. "If you stick around, you'll let them talk you back into it. You need a nice change of scenery. And don't you have that book that needs finishing?"
Poppy didn't need reminding. Even now, hauling her bags off the conveyer, her deadline loomed large. Her already pushed three times, editor leaving panicked voicemails, black cloud of a deadline. The final book in her series, the installment all her readers had been waiting for. She'd been avoiding that blank page for weeks now, so Aunt June's offer couldn't have come at a better time. She could shut herself away miles from all the drama, and focus on giving her readers the happily-ever-after they deserved.
Even if her own happily-ever-after seemed further away than ever before.
It was still dark by the time Poppy claimed her rental car (and an extra-large coffee) and hit the road. She was worn out from travel, and counting the minutes until she could collapse into Aunt June's guest-room bed, but as the reassuring voice of GPS guided her down the wide freeway, she couldn't help but feel her tension ease. The miles disappeared in no time and the sky was turning pink as she crossed the Sagamore Bridge. It was the unofficial gateway to the Cape, where the bicep of shoreline arced in a lazy curl against the mainland, and Poppy could almost feel the change in the air. Six lanes narrowed to just a sandy two-way road, and then suddenly, the sun lifted over the horizon, glinting through the lush green woods and glittering on the dark ocean. Even though she had the car heater blowing on full against the early-morning chill, Poppy wound down the windows to inhale a lungful of crisp, tangy sea air.
It tasted like summertime.
Melting ice-cream cones and sticky sunscreen, the shriek of cold water, plunging into the pond-the memories hit her in a rush, and just like that, she was ten years old again.
The last time she made this drive, she was curled in the backseat, her head in a book while her parents bickered up front. They told her it would be an adventure, a whole summer at Aunt June's, but she knew well enough they just wanted her out of the way so they could fight at full volume back home. As she stood on the porch and watched their car disappear back up the bumpy lane, she was surprised to hear June say, "Ten bucks says they'll be divorced by the time they come pick you up again."