By the time I see the ocean, my hands have cramped around the steering wheel.
The highway has given way to two-lane blacktop and then to this—one narrow street that crests like a question mark before dipping toward water and sky. The air changes first, turning sharper, salt cutting through the stale coffee and air freshener trapped in my car. My shoulders ease a fraction. Just a fraction.
Apple and vanilla, I think, like a reflex. Like memory.
Gran’s cottage appears on the right exactly as it did in my childhood drawings: white clapboard, deep blue shutters, a small crooked porch that looks like it’s trying to wink at the sea. Only back then, in my crayon universe, there weren’t boards nailed over half the front windows. There wasn’t a realtor’s signpost cut off at the base, leaving a splintered stump like a pulled tooth.
I pull into the gravel drive, and the sound—the crunch, the tiny rocks protesting my arrival—pops something open in my chest. I put the car in park and just sit there, hands trembling, heart doing that uneven stutter-step it’s perfected over the last chaotic school year.
Three months, Lily, I remind myself. Three months of quiet. Three months without parent emails at midnight, without kids crying in bathroom stalls, without the principal chirping, "You’re such a team player" every time she handed me someone else’s crisis.
Three months to remember who you are when you’re not standing in front of a whiteboard.
I open the door and step out into air so crisp it feels almost rude. The breeze catches my hair and threads through it, fingers cool and insistent. Somewhere down the street, a gull cries. The scent hits me a second later: apples and vanilla and something faintly floral, like old potpourri.
I swallow hard.
"Hey, Gran," I whisper.
The cottage doesn’t answer, obviously, but the wind nudges the hanging chime under the porch eave. It’s rusty, two of the shells missing, but it rattles softly, like a sleepy hello.
I circle around to the back to grab my suitcase and the box of summer school worksheets I brought "just in case" I get bored. Because nothing says vacation like laminated math problems.
"You need a hobby that isn’t grading," Margot had said when I told her about the break. "And no, reorganizing your sticker drawer does not count. Go to the cottage. Sleep. Stare at the ocean. Fall in love with a fisherman or something."
"I don’t like fish," I’d replied.
"Fine. Fall in love with someone who owns a boat. You can close your eyes when you kiss."
I smile at the memory and hook my fingers through the box handles. It’s heavier than I remember. Or I’m more tired than I want to admit. Probably both.
The street is quiet enough that each slam of my trunk sounds like a gunshot. Across the way, directly opposite my cottage, a larger house perches closer to the water. The old Wilker place, if I’m remembering right. Gran used to call it "the blue lady" because the siding is an elegant gray-blue that shifts with the light.
Only… now it’s half wrapped in scaffolding.
There’s a pickup in the drive, doors open, the bed loaded with lumber. Someone is here.
I drag my suitcase toward the porch, the wheels catching on every crack in the path. Halfway up the steps, my sandal catches and my knee smacks the wood. Pain zings up my leg.
