The Girl I Used to Be by Heidi Hostetter (booksvooks .txt) 📗

woke the following morning, her head groggy and her body cramped from the night spent in the back of her car. But she woke with purpose—her only goal was a strong cup of coffee and a completed to-do list. If she’d learned anything from the lost weekends on the couch watching home shows with Ellie, it was that staged houses sold faster than empty ones. Most of the tasks ahead of her would be mindless—piling fluffy towels in the bathrooms or plumping pillows on the guest-room beds. And if she could find them, scented candles on the dining table and a bowl of green apples in the kitchen.

At some point, the master bedroom would need to be addressed, because she couldn’t leave it that way, but she couldn’t face it now. The main job she dreaded was hauling the outdoor furniture down from the storage racks and dragging it up to the deck. Everything was wrapped in plastic and stacked together like Tetris pieces so it would be difficult, physical work. But that was too much to even think about before coffee, so Jill headed back into the house.

She left the garage, entered the house, and froze. She’d forgotten to close the curtains the night before and was rewarded with a magnificent sunrise. A pallet of watercolor pinks and blues washed across the horizon, and soft morning light spilled into the living room. The ocean turned a deep purple-blue as the light changed and the waves calmly rolled toward the shore.

Jill stood rooted to the spot, gazing at the sea, completely captivated.

Someday she would have her own cottage by the ocean, and it would be a modest house like Aunt Sarah and Uncle Barney’s. She’d spend her mornings puttering in the flower garden, with a sassy gray cat by her side. At the end of the day, she’d sit on an Adirondack chair angled toward the sea and watch the light fade. And she’d be happy.

But that dream was years away and might never happen at all if Jill didn’t get to work. So she did. She vacuumed the rugs and mopped the floors, though neither seemed to need it. She made the beds, readied the bathrooms, but left the master for later. By noon, she’d finished folding the last towel and decided it was time for a break. The heavy teak furniture could stay where it was for now. She grabbed a baseball hat and sunglasses and headed for the beach.

At the bottom of the beach stairs, Jill slipped off her shoes and dug her toes into the sand, pushing past the soft surface to find the coolness underneath. She rolled the cuffs of her jeans to her knee and continued to the water, feeling the satisfying give of the sand under her feet. This was a perfect fall day, blue sky and clear sun, a bit colder than it had appeared from inside the house. Though the midday sun shone as brightly as it could, a chilly breeze swept in from the ocean.

Jill slipped on her sunglasses and turned toward the surf. On the off-season, especially this close to Halloween, Jill had expected the beach in this town to be deserted, but she was mistaken. It was true that it was different than it had been in August—the water wasn’t packed with swimmers, and the beach wasn’t strewn with towels or anchored with billowing umbrellas—but there was still activity. Near the water, two men walked along the tideline, one of them with a toddler perched happily on his shoulders. An older couple rested on a bench by the dunes, leaning into each other with a comfortable ease that comes from a long and happy marriage. Further ahead, a dog chased a driftwood stick into the waves, emerging a few minutes later with his prize, dripping and satisfied. And finally, in the tidepool near the jetty, a sandpiper played tag with the incoming tide.

Jill breathed in the heady scent of the ocean and watched the wind lift the water into white caps. She saw a trio of surfers in wetsuits straddle their boards beyond the breaking waves and idly wondered if they were cold.

It really was beautiful here. And while it was true that Jill didn’t like Marc’s house, she hoped that whoever bought it would appreciate the beauty of their surroundings.

She turned to look at the house he’d constructed. One of its features was its unobstructed view of the water from almost every room. It was definitely a selling point and one of the things she planned to highlight at the listing meeting. Staring at the house now, she noticed for the first time how close the structure was to the property line. It hugged the dunes while the houses on either side—and along the beach—remained a respectful distance behind. Startled, Jill saw what the placement of Marc’s house meant for neighbors on either side: while he was rewarded with a sweeping ocean panorama, they were restricted to only a sliver of the ocean and a full view of Marc’s house.

“What a horrible thing to do.” Jill glared at what Marc had created. “What an awful house.”

“I’ll say it is.” The voice came from beside Jill. “Everyone in town hates that house.”

Jill turned to see a woman standing next to her with a glare that matched Jill’s. An older woman, she had an apple-round face with pinked cheeks and was dressed for walking the beach. A brightly printed scarf, secured firmly under her chin, protected her hair from ocean gusts. The woman’s windbreaker pockets were lumpy with beach finds and Jill smiled at a memory. When Jill was younger, she and her cousins had orbited Aunt Sarah on evening beach walks, darting away to gather fragments of shells, slivers of driftwood, or nuggets of sea glass, then running back to share their treasures. No matter what they found, Aunt Sarah would marvel, then fold it into a tissue for safekeeping and slip it into her pocket to bring