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Episode One

Chapter One Sneak Peek

Jamie Everette only wanted one thing in the divorce—the beach house.

She did not ask for child support or alimony. After twenty years and eleven novels, some of which actually earned back enough to pay for the therapy it took to write what she knew, she didn’t need his money. She didn’t want the SUV he’d surprised her with one Mother’s Day, despite getting zero input on her preferences for color or interior.

She didn’t even want the suburban paradise they’d built from scratch when the kids were still too young to appreciate the tax bracket she’d married into.

No.

Jamie wanted the faded robin’s egg blue beach house nestled a block away from the Pacific’s chilled touch. She wanted the sand-coated sidewalk out front, the rotting white fence that needed replacing a decade ago. She wanted slow mornings, hot coffee, afternoon walks marked by curled succulents, and the music of dog collars.

He hadn’t given it up easily.

Ben Gibbons never gave up anything without bloodying his knuckles.

She used to love that about him, admiring his ferocious desire to defend and dig in, until she was the one up against his ironclad will.

There were a few weeks where she thought she’d lost the house entirely, judging by the smug twist of his lawyer’s lips during mediation. But that was before her own lawyer, a woman who ate bleach and Pilates for breakfast and kept her coffee cup at a sharp ninety-degrees no matter how animatedly she dressed down the men in the room dropped a thick file on the polished black table in the conference room where they’d slowly untangled two decades’ worth of assets.

She had looked at the content only once. That was more than enough.

Another woman lived within that manila file, one she’d met once or twice, one who left her lipstick at the very beach house at stake.

And that was it.

That was all it took.

Twenty years, two kids, two homes, three vehicles, a dog, and her dignity––up in smoke.

Jamie shook her head, her thick curls so much less manageable that close to the shore. She stood in the middle of the beach house kitchen, her hair rapidly descending into madness as she stared at the coffeemaker.

The red light stared back.

“Come on,” she whispered, her hands clasped around a mug she was certain had simply appeared in the cabinet much in the same way she imagined the beach house materialized from magic.

The light blinked.

She blinked back.

And then it faded out.

“Well, fuck you, too,” she muttered, yanking the plug from the wall. That would not do. She could not tackle that day’s demands without coffee. Jamie set the mug beside the sink and darted upstairs, fishing through her suitcase for a fresh pair of socks. She’d told herself she would unpack last night, but then there was wine and a Housewives franchise to catch up on. She rolled the cotton socks over her ankles, unpleasantly damp.

Everything held onto everything else near the sea.

She picked a set of sneakers her teenage daughter told her looked “very millennial,” whatever the fuck that meant, and snagged the keys from the hook by the front door.

I should change the locks, she thought to herself as she nudged the front gate open with her hip, tugging a baseball cap over her hair. Her SUV—white, when she’d have chosen black—waited just half a block away. She waded through squawking seagulls and expensive strollers jiggling over uneven pavement, wondering if the pristine white tennis shoes the younger moms wore were Gen Z or Millennial in their pedigree.

She was nearly downtown when the screen lit up as a call came in.

“Good morning, darling,” she chirped. “Make it home okay?”

“Yeah,” Chris mumbled. He always mumbled. She tried not to think about what they had spent on speech therapy in his childhood, just for his teenage hormones to dull every sound once more. “Did you make it home?”

Jamie fought a broad grin, as if he could see her. It was home now that the ink had finally dried.

“I did. I got in late last night. On my way to find some coffee now.”

“Go to Helena’s, if it’s still there,” Chris said, something banging in the background. She pictured his long limbs, far longer than she had ever given them permission to grow, as he tossed his shoes at the front door.

“I will. Don’t leave your shoes in the hall. What if—”

“There’s an emergency and someone trips and then there’s a secondary emergency,” Chris muttered, finishing her sentence. That was the problem with children—they were great at memorizing the rules, terrible at following them. “Mom, I’m a literal adult.”

“According to the government. And when have they ever gotten it right?” She cut the wheel over, rounding the small downtown strip, early morning joggers and bike riders dancing between coffee shops, fitness studios, and gift shops.

“Anyway, I just called because there was a package on the porch for you. Assuming I need to ship it to the beach house?”

Jamie searched her mind for what it might be. She’d stopped ordering things to the house weeks before in anticipation of her great big summer away, alone for the first time in two decades.

“Where’s it from?”

Chris was quiet for a moment, shuffling through the kitchen to the island where he’d surely dumped all their mail.

“Emily.”

“Ah,” Jamie sighed. “It’s probably champagne or something. She always sends a bottle after she drops her notes in my inbox as an apology for eviscerating my soul, once more.” Chris snorted on the other end. It was a sound of nurture, not nature. He’d heard his dad make it a few thousand times throughout his childhood. “Feel free to drink it, just not if you’re leaving the house.”

“She’s not like other moms,” Chris chuckled, mocking her.

Jamie returned his laughter. “What, they can draft you but they can’t risk you taking the edge off? Just don’t tell your sister.”

“Deal,” he said.

Jamie stopped the car outside Helena’s emerald awning. “You two still sure you want to stay home all summer? I’m only a six-hour drive.” She knew the answer. But she could not help but ask. It was required of her, as their mother, to offer, even if she desperately needed to focus over the next three months.

Chris cleared his throat. “I, uh, I actually took an internship this summer.”

Jamie knew what “uh” was a placeholder for. Uh, I decided to take the shitty internship at Dad’s firm in a desperate attempt to connect with a man who had wasted zero time moving on after setting their family on fire.

Jamie winced. “And does your dad pay well, at least?”

“It’s decent. Could be better.”

She released a breath, her disappointment settling over the steering wheel. Not with Chris, never with Chris, but with Ben for making him feel like he was only sixty hours of underpaid labor a week away from his approval.

“Alright, honey, but please don’t spend your entire summer working. You’re nearly out of them to enjoy.” She knew he nodded along; she’d said it plenty of times before. “Check in with me later?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you?” she asked, never stating, always hoping to get one back in return. She’d lost the confidence to state it somewhere in his teenaged years, but, as he stepped into his twenties, she got lucky occasionally.

“Love you, Mom.”

A win, and a big one at that. She tapped the red X and let the victory fuel her forward into Helena’s.

The small coffee shop was nestled between some sort of swanky boutique and a gallery she was sure no one ever actually purchased anything from. With every step she took, the scent of over-engineered coffee she’d happily pay eight dollars for permeated the air. The barista greeted her with a tepid smile, one born of muscle memory and obligation, not genuine interest.

That was just as well for Jamie.

“Just a vanilla latte,” she said. “In the biggest receptacle you offer.”

She tapped her phone on the register and stared at the slow-moving currents on the street. Across the way, two men pulled guitar cases and speakers from the back of their van. Maybe they were men. They could have been boys—it was impossible to tell from a distance and without a drop of caffeine to encourage the electrical synapses in her brain to fire.

The morning sun broke through and brushed against the bright red sign over their heads.

The Riot Room.

If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the inside of the club—a mix of Curve and peach Prime Time smoke clinging to bodies like too-tight Manic Panic stained jeans.

“Here ya go,” the barista said, sliding a paper cup stamped with Helena’s signature across the counter.

Jamie murmured, “Thank you,” as she forced her eyes away from the club—only ghosts waited down that alley.

She was not back in Cambria to reopen old wounds.

She was there to find who she was in spite of them.

Chapter Two

Coming soon