Love Me In The Quiet
Chapter One The Borrowed UmbrellaElena Voss had been driving for six hours when Driftwood Bay finally appeared between two hills like something the map had almost forgotten to mention—a scatter of rooftops, a gray harbor, a lighthouse standing watch over a sky that couldn't decide whether to rain.She pulled over before the welcome sign just to look at it. WELCOME TO DRIFTWOOD BAY, POPULATION 1,842, the sign read, with a smaller, hand-painted line beneath: AND COUNTING. Someone had crossed out an old number and written the new one in slightly different paint, as if the town updated itself one stubborn person at a time.Six months ago, Elena would have laughed at a place like this—too small, too quiet, too far from anything she'd built her life around. Six months ago, she'd had a life. An apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows. A husband who filled every room he walked into, every silence he encountered, every future she tried to imagine, whether it fit him or not.Now she had a hatchback full of boxes, a signed copy of divorce papers she still hadn't fully read, and an address for a cottage she'd rented from a single photograph—because something about its crooked porch had made her chest ache in a way that felt, strangely, like relief.She put the car in drive.The cottage was smaller than the photo had promised and exactly as crooked, tucked at the end of a gravel lane with a view of the water if she stood on her toes at the kitchen window. The landlord, a retired fisherman named Walt who smelled permanently of woodsmoke, handed her the key and told her the heater "worked, mostly," the pipes "knocked, but it was just them settling," and the previous tenant had left "a few books, hope that's alright."It was more than alright. Elena spent her first evening unpacking nothing and instead sitting on the floor with a flashlight, going through a small shelf of paperbacks someone else had loved and left behind. She fell asleep before nine, exhausted in the particular way that only a long drive toward an uncertain life could produce.By Tuesday—her third day in town—she had a list of small errands and an entire afternoon to do them in, which felt, after years of schedules built around someone else's, almost indecent. She mailed her change-of-address forms at the post office, bought stamps she didn't need because the postmaster seemed lonely, and was crossing the street with a box of books from her car—overflow from the cottage shelves, things she wanted to donate—when the sky opened without warning.It wasn't a drizzle. It was the kind of rain that arrived all at once, like the clouds had been holding their breath and finally gave up. Elena made it three steps before her cardigan was soaked through, and the box in her arms, already softened with age, began to sag dangerously at the corners."You're going to lose those," a voice said, close enough to be heard over the rain but not loud.She turned. A man stood a few feet away under a black umbrella, tall, dark canvas jacket, sawdust ghosting the cuffs of his sleeves. He didn't smile—not exactly—but he tilted the umbrella toward her without seeming to think about it, the way some people simply move toward whoever's getting wet."I'm fine," Elena said, the way she said most things lately. Automatic. Untrue."The bookstore's right there." He nodded down the street, to a shop with a faded green awning that looked like it had survived a hundred storms simply by refusing to acknowledge them. "Hartwell's. Covered porch. Better than standing here arguing with the weather."She should have said no. She had spent the better part of a year learning to say no, learning to need nothing from anyone, proving—mostly to herself—that she could carry her own boxes through her own storms, thank you very much. But the rain didn't care about her point, and the box was losing its battle with gravity, and the man was already walking, holding the umbrella over the books more than over her, which she noticed and did not mention.Under the porch awning at Hartwell's, he handed her the umbrella—just like that, as if it weighed nothing, as if the gesture cost him nothing."Keep it," he said. "I'm two doors down. No rush."And then he was gone, ducking back into the downpour without waiting to be thanked, as though kindness were simply another item on a list of errands he hadn't mentioned.Elena stood under the awning, holding a stranger's umbrella, rain dripping from her hair onto a box of books that had survived a marriage, a moving truck, and now, apparently, a Tuesday.Through the window, an older woman with reading glasses pushed up into a halo of gray curls was watching her with open, unapologetic curiosity."You can come in, you know," the woman called. "We don't bite. Mostly."Elena went in. It would be, though she didn't know it yet, the most important decision she'd make all year.Get full book for continuation of chapter one
Get it → ysonsvz.gumroad.com