Christmas By The Shore (A Winter To Remember #1)

Chapter 7

7

“ C rap. The tank is almost empty. We better stop.”

“Already?” Cat leaned over to get a better look at the dash. “How can it already be empty? I just filled up the car last week!” When McKenzie didn’t say anything for a few seconds, Catherine gave her a look. “Kenz, why is the tank empty when I just filled it up five days ago?”

“Right… um… about that. Do you remember when you let me borrow the car on Sunday to run some errands?”

“Yeah…”

“Well… let’s just say I didn’t exactly stay within state lines.”

“Kenz!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling into a gas station only half a mile outside the city. They’d only been on the road for about fifteen minutes. “A lot of stuff is just cheaper in New Hampshire than it is in Massachusetts. Sometimes it’s worth it to drive the extra miles in order to get discounts. But don’t worry, I’ll fill up the tank this time.”

“You better.”

“Will you go in and get us some snacks?” she asked. “I am going to need a soda and something to munch. Salty, not sweet.”

“I know what you like.” Cat got out of the car and headed inside, going straight to the chip aisle. Both she and McKenzie had a weakness for potato chips, but she also picked up some healthy snacks in the form of mixed nuts and an apple. Her arms were full of goodies and cold drinks by the time she was done shopping. She turned to go check out and nearly ran directly into someone who had been approaching her.

“Oh!” she yelped with alarm and then saw who it was. “Oh my god, Chris?”

“Hey, Catherine. I thought that was you.” Her ex-boyfriend casually smiled, like he wasn’t surprised to see her. “I was wondering when we were going to run into each other. You know what people say, Boston is a small town in a big city.”

“Do people say that?” She’d never heard the phrase, but she understood what it was trying to convey. It wasn’t incorrect.

“I might be messing it up,” he admitted, “but it’s something like that. Anyway, it was only a matter of time, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I—uh—I heard you moved back to the city. How do you like being back?”

“I love it. Monica misses a lot of her friends back in Chicago, but I know once the baby comes, she’s going to be happy to be around family.” He winced. “Oh—wait. McKenzie did tell you that Monica was pregnant, right? I didn’t mean to just blurt it out like that, but?—”

“She told me,” Cat assured him. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. It was a bit of a surprise, but a happy one. But hey, what about you?” He reached out and touched her arm like they were old friends, even though they hadn’t seen each other in at least seven or eight years. The last time, which Catherine remembered vividly, was when they crossed paths at a work conference at the Marriott. There were too many people around for them to talk privately, so Cat escaped without having to discuss anything real with him and spent the rest of the weekend avoiding him at all costs. But here he was, acting all jovial and familiar. It was very off-putting.

She forced a laugh. “What about me?”

“McKenzie said that work has been going really well. That’s great.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “I’ve been publishing books left and right. I have a lot of irons in the fire for next year, so that’s exciting as well.”

“Amazing!” He sounded genuine, which made her feel even more uneasy. It wasn’t that she expected he would still have hard feelings over their breakup, but he could at least do her the favor of seeming a little uncomfortable with this unplanned encounter. “I’m so happy for you.” He looked at all the food in her hands. “Are you on your way to your parents for Thanksgiving then?”

“Actually,” she said, standing up a little straighter, “I’m going to be staying in Cape May through the end of the year. My parents are on a cruise, so McKenzie and I offered to watch their house. It’ll be nice to get away from the city, and have a vacation.”

He rocked back on his heels and whistled in a way that gave Cat a sense of pride. She knew this had impressed him. “You’re taking six weeks off from work? Really?”

“I’ll work remotely.”

“Still—that’s a big deal. I know how you feel about remote work.”

“I don’t necessarily feel that way anymore,” Cat said, referring to the fact that she used to think remote work was just an excuse for people to put in about half the effort but get paid the same amount. “A lot of my colleagues stayed remote even after the pandemic, and they’ve been able to keep up with everything, so perhaps it just depends on the person.” She glanced over her shoulder and saw McKenzie sitting in the driver’s seat on her phone. It would appear she was done pumping the gas.

“But, uh, I should really get going,” she said, moving past him and towards the register. “We’re trying to beat the traffic.”

“Of course,” he said. “I won’t keep you. It was good to see you, though. We should get together for coffee sometime when you’re back in the city. I’d love to catch up some more.”

“Sure, yeah,” she said noncommittally. “I’ll contact you.”

“Sounds good!”

She dumped all her stuff on the counter, and the man working the register began to ring up her items. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a blond, pregnant woman standing by the ice machine and talking on the phone. Even from this angle, Cat knew it was Monica. She kept her head down and grabbed the plastic bag the second she paid with her card. On her way out the door, she hung a sharp right and took a strange route around the parked cars to get back to her own without being caught by her ex-boyfriend’s pregnant wife. The second she shut the passenger side door, she could feel McKenzie’s eyes on her.

“Is that?—?”

“Yup. That’s Monica, and Chris is inside.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“For a second.”

“And?”

“And—” Cat pushed her shoulders back into the seat and sighed heavily. “I just want to forget that conversation happened and get on the road. I’ll tell you everything later. For now, I have to distract myself with work and copious amounts of potato chips.”

McKenzie saluted her. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

They were back on the freeway in no time, and Catherine proceeded to spend the next six hours combing through a second draft from one of her more long-winded writers. His prose wasn’t necessarily engaging, but it kept her mind occupied, and that was all she could ask for.

As they drove through Cape May, Catherine ended up closing her laptop and appreciating just how adorable the town was in all its holiday glory. Even though it wasn’t even technically Thanksgiving yet, most of the shops downtown were strung up with friendly, sparkling lights, and half had trees in the window. The coffee shop on the corner offered a plethora of holiday-themed drinks, and a very noticeable sprig of mistletoe hung over the door.

There was a dusting of snow on the ground, but not enough to make the drive treacherous. Cat knew there was likely to be more in the coming weeks, but thankfully, her parents had a big four-wheel-drive SUV that they said Cat and McKenzie could use while they were in town.

The colorful Victorian inns and mansions lining the shore all looked the same as Cat remembered, if not sporting a fresh coat of paint or two. Her parents’ house, in one of the few remaining residential neighborhoods on the coast, was small compared to these homes but still much bigger than her apartment in the city. It wasn’t Cat’s childhood home—that was back in a suburb of Newark—but her parents had lived there for over a decade, so the area felt familiar and welcoming.

On their way out of the main section of town, Catherine rolled down her window a little bit to breathe in the crisp, clean air. It was so quiet. Aside from the sound of the tires crunching on the snow, there wasn’t much else punctuating the small-town silence. She sighed happily as a wave of relaxation washed over her.

“See what I mean about this being a really good place to write?” she asked McKenzie. “I can totally see you finishing your novel out here. It’s like the perfect writer’s getaway.”

“I know that. If you’d taken me here while I was writing my first book, it probably would’ve taken me half the time!”

“Then why are you still having doubts about finishing this third one?”

“It’s funny,” McKenzie said instead of answering Cat’s question. “You’ve worked with writers for most of your career, and yet I still think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how writer’s block actually works. If something as simple as a change of scenery was going to make a difference, I would’ve found that out ages ago.”

“Okay, so what does make a difference?”

“I don’t know! I just have to wait until it goes away.”

“And if it doesn’t go away before your next deadline?”

“You tell me.” She shrugged. “I swear, I’m not trying to make your life any harder, Cat, but the muses just aren’t speaking to me.”

Cat sighed. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying, and I’ll back off. I was just trying to help you talk through it. I thought maybe it would spark something, or we could pinpoint exactly where this block is coming from.”

“Honestly, I think if you’ll just allow me to spend the next few days relaxing here in Cape May, the future of this book will become a lot clearer to me.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Cat stayed true to her word after this and didn’t keep harping on the subject. She settled deeper into her seat and kept looking out the window as McKenzie followed the phone’s instructions and took a left at the next turn. Catherine could’ve navigated from there, but she enjoyed sitting back and not thinking about anything except how pretty the trees looked with their branches covered in a thin layer of white. She wasn’t going to admit it out loud, but McKenzie was right. She felt a million times better just being somewhere like this. The best part was that she knew there wasn’t a chance she would accidentally run into Chris while she was here.

That meant she had six weeks to figure out what she was going to say to him the next time they saw each other or if she wanted to meet up with him at all.

This thought was comforting, and one that served to quell whatever stress she was still carrying with her from the encounter they’d had that morning at the gas station.

“It’s that one up there, right?” McKenzie asked, pointing at the two-story seaside bungalow with a wraparound porch on the upper level. It only had two bedrooms and two baths, but what the house lacked in indoor accommodations, it made up for in patio space and an incredible ocean view.

“Yeah,” Cat said. “I would say you should park on the street, and that way, we can get my mom’s car out of the garage if we have to later on.” As they passed the neighbor’s modest home on the right, Cat noticed a big old truck parked in the driveway and a sign hanging in the window of their garage. “What does that say?” she asked, squinting to make out the letters, but the sunlight was hitting the white of the sign just right so that she struggled to get the whole message.

“Rowland Construction,” McKenzie said, stopping by the curb. “They must operate their business out of their house.”

“I didn’t know the old neighbors very well, but they were getting up there in years. Older than my parents, for sure.”

“Then I doubt they are the ones running the construction business.”

“Probably not.” Cat smiled. “Guess they moved. Hopefully, whoever lives in the house now is nice. I sometimes worry about my parents being here by themselves. I know they take good care of each other, but what if one of them were to, I don’t know, slip on some ice or something? It’s just nice to know that the people in the neighborhood are decent.”

“I get that.” McKenzie put the car in park. “I’m so grateful my mom finally hired a nurse to help her with some of my dad’s medical stuff. The second I found out that she was the one helping him up and down the stairs, all what—one hundred pounds of her—I started to fear the worst. And to think, she kept griping about how she didn’t want some stranger in her house all the time, and now the two of them are peas in a pod. They do everything together.”

Cat laughed. “Parents can be so stubborn sometimes.”

“Yeah, not like us,” McKenzie joked, and they laughed as they spilled out onto the street. Cat shoved all of their trash into the plastic bag from the gas station and grabbed just her work bag for now. She would come back for the rest once she got the heat running inside. They went through the garage, and Catherine punched in her own birthday to silence the alarm that started beeping the second they stepped inside the house.

“Wow, it’s really cold in here!” she remarked, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, only covered in a thin sweater. “Like, freezing cold.”

“I thought your parents only left yesterday morning,” said McKenzie. “How could it have gotten this cold overnight?”

“I have no idea.”

Cat put her bag on the floor in the living room, tossed the trash in the bin, and went to investigate. It was very unlike her parents to accidentally leave a window open or something, especially considering that, at the time they left, they had been under the impression that nobody was going to be staying in their house. This meant her dad would’ve definitely triple-checked that everything was locked down and secure. Not only would he worry about burglaries, but it was also just a terrible idea to leave windows open during the winter out there. Between the snow, the ice-cold sea wind, and the critters looking to escape the freezing temperatures, it was just asking for trouble.

It was so frigid, however, that before Catherine got a chance to look around properly, she had to return to the living room to pull another layer out of her work bag. Luckily, she had a raggedy old flannel tucked inside the large pocket, which she always kept on hand at the office because sometimes the AC was cranked up way too high. Sliding the fabric over her arms, her hands were shaking, her teeth chattering.

“This is insane,” she remarked as McKenzie buttoned up her jacket and started to help her look around. They parted ways in the kitchen, doing their due diligence to find the problem. Cat first checked the thermostat, then put her hand in front of the nearest vent to check if it was broken. But no, it was pumping out hot air, just as it should.

Cat was at the end of the hall, surveying the guest room and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, when McKenzie called down to her from the upper level.

“Uh—Catherine! I think you’re going to want to come see this.”

“What is it?” But from the strain she caught in McKenzie’s voice, Cat could at least ascertain that it wasn’t anything good. She ran through the lower level and took the stairs two at a time on her way up. There wasn’t much besides the master bedroom and bath upstairs, so she didn’t have to guess where her friend was.

“When you were looking at that sign in the neighbor’s window, you didn’t happen to take note of their hours of operation, did you?” McKenzie asked.

“Why?” She hurried through the open door but stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what McKenzie was staring at. “Oh my god.”

McKenzie walked up to the bed in the middle of the floor and carefully plucked a single, snow-covered roof shingle from the pile of soaking wet debris all over the handwoven bedspread.

“I was just thinking it might be a good idea to go ahead and give them a call,” she said with a pained expression. “Or at least knock on their door and ask if they’ve got a couple of heavy duty tarps we could borrow.”

“What—what happened?”

McKenzie looked back at her with sympathetic eyes. “If I had to guess—I would say the roof caved in.”