“You really like him; I can tell,” Callie said with a smile. She was glad to see Olivia happy.
“I do,” she admitted, looking up from her phone and dropping it into her handbag. “I like him so much that I think I’m willing to take that chance and see what happens.” She blushed and broke out into a huge smile. She took a drink and the band started to play. “What did Frederick say?”
“He’s already talked to Aiden—they were worried about it themselves. He’ll be at the house too.”
Callie squinted from the sunlight as she looked up at the bright blue sky, still light in the endless days of summer, trying not to feel the heaviness of the situation with The Beachcomber. She wished she could have her grandmother here to talk to. She needed someone to give her the answers that she just didn’t have on her own. But Gladys had been with them, which was good, yet she didn’t have any way to fix this either.
As she looked around at the vacationers, all sunburned, laughing, eating their yearly dose of local seafood, and enjoying drinks in their souvenir cups, she felt the exhaustion finally wash over her. She was spent—emotionally and physically—unable to enjoy the paradise around her.
“What’s going on?” Callie said as they pulled up behind a team of cars in the drive.
“I don’t know.” Olivia frowned and got out.
There was a racket going on around the back of the house and they looked at each other in confusion. They walked around to see where all the pounding was coming from and Callie gasped in surprise. Enormous floodlights had been set up to combat the darkness that would be arriving soon. There was an entire crew pounding away on the porches, lifting timber, holding levels, hammers, and saws… She gazed from face to face until she found Frederick, smiling hugely as he looked at her.
“You ladies get your painting done,” he called down to them. “We’ve got this!”
Callie wanted to run and hug him, but he’d gone back to hammering.
“Let’s get changed!” Olivia said with excitement as she bounced on her toes. “We’ve got an opening to get ready for!”
After a quick text to Gladys asking her to keep Wyatt over there for the night, Olivia and Callie threw on some old clothes and got to work. They barely spoke as they painted the new drywall, both of them focused wholeheartedly on the task at hand. This was a blessing that had come out of nowhere and Callie couldn’t wait to thank Frederick and Aiden for it, but right now, they had to get the rest finished. Her guess was that with a crew that large, the porches and the rest of the walkway could be done in no time at all. If Callie and Olivia could paint that one wall in the kitchen and get the landscaping laid out and planted, this opening was going to happen!
They painted almost breathlessly, excitement buzzing around them. When they’d finished, both of them went straight outside to start on the walkway. Once they got outside, they decided to find Frederick and Aiden first to thank them. Olivia looked for Aiden and Callie found Frederick.
Callie grabbed him and pulled him aside as she looked up at the porches that were now coming along so nicely, tears of happiness surfacing. She wiped them away. This gesture was more than she could have imagined, and she had many questions about who would foot the bill, and how they’d rounded up a crew of this size. “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said, her gratitude showing in the form of more tears.
Frederick smiled.
“We couldn’t have opened if this hadn’t happened. You and Aiden literally saved us. I don’t know what I’ll ever do to repay you. Where did you find all these people?”
“They’re from the nonprofit I’ve been working with. But Callie,” he said, pulling her attention back to his face, his eyes now serious. “I didn’t do this.” He turned and pointed to a far area of the porch.
Callie searched the large group of workers, trying to figure out what he was showing her when suddenly a couple of people moved and her heart began racing. There, in the far corner, hidden before by the large crowd, was Luke. He wiped his brow and set a piece of wood in place, hammering it down.
“Luke did this,” he said. “He offered to donate double the normal rate for a job of this size to their organization if they’d help him.”
She felt her jaw slacken in surprise and had to consciously close her mouth. “Why?” she asked Frederick.
“Perhaps you should ask him.”
With a dazed nod, she left Frederick and started to make her way down the new porch, forcing herself to acknowledge people along her path as they smiled and greeted her. Her hands tingled with anticipation, her heart feeling like it would burst as she watched him, just waiting for his eyes to fall on her. Then, there it was: He looked up and smiled that smile. She had to will herself to breathe. He set down his hammer and stood up.
“Hi,” he said, a slight apprehension in his face.
“Hello.” She wanted to throw her arms around him and bury her head in his chest but she stood still. “Frederick told me that you’re responsible for all this,” she said over the hammering.
“Take a walk with me?”
She caught her breath as he placed his hand lightly on her back, leading her through the workers as they headed for the stairs down to the beach. The breeze blew around them, the pounding fading into quiet as the sound of the waves took over. Tonight they were lapping softly, slapping the shore in a rhythmic motion. Callie tried to tune in to the rhythm of the sound to slow her beating heart.
When they reached the sand, Luke faced her. “I tried to help sooner, but Aiden said you didn’t want me here,” he said.
Callie frantically shook her head, ready to explain, but Luke kept going.
“I didn’t want to push you. I felt terrible for what I said to you at the Berkeley. I was angry and confused, and I didn’t know whom to blame. It took me a while to realize that there wasn’t anyone to blame really. Not now. And things with my father might never be the same—I’ll have to live with that. But what didn’t take me long to realize was that I missed you. I missed you so much that it hurt. I couldn’t spend another minute without you. I kept asking Frederick how you were, what you were up to, if you were okay.”
He reached up and brushed a tear off her cheek and she noticed that she was shaking. He took her hands in his.