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Chapter One

Olivia Harper approached the nondescript coffee shop across the street from her apartment in the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

The place wasn’t necessarily her favorite. The servers could be rude, the food overcooked and the coffee rather bland compared to the place she preferred a few blocks east. The ambiance at the Kozy Kitchen wasn’t particularly cozy -- or “kozy”  either -- featuring cracked vinyl booths and walls that had needed a new coat of paint about a decade earlier. The Kitchen, as those in the neighborhood called it, was too tired and dingy to attract many hipsters, with their laptops and their slouchy knit caps and their carefully groomed facial hair.

Right now, it was perfect for her needs. Olivia stood outside the door, ignoring the drizzle and the pedestrians hurrying past her on their way to somewhere far more interesting and important than this rundown diner.

Every instinct inside her cried out for her to rush back down the street, race up the three flights to her apartment, climb into her bed and yank the covers over her head.

Any normal person would feel the same in her situation, especially after enduring a life-changing event like she had experienced five days earlier.

Her reaction wasn’t out of the ordinary. In the five days since she had witnessed a horrific assault at another diner, the nightmares still haunted her, so vivid she had awakened every morning smelling spilled coffee, blood and fear.

She closed her eyes, still hearing that sharp gunshot, the screams of the barista, the enraged yells of the junkie senselessly attacking her, Olivia’s own harsh, terrified breathing.

She could feel the floor tiles under her knees and the cushions of the booth pressing into her back as she huddled on the floor, trying to make herself disappear.

Until that moment less than a week earlier, Olivia blithely had gone through life with absolutely no idea what a craven coward she was.

If she had ever thought about it, which, quite honestly, she hadn’t, she might have assumed she would be the kind of person always ready to step up in the face of danger. Someone who could yank a child out of the way of a speeding car or dive into a lake to rescue a floundering swimmer or confront a bully tormenting someone smaller than him.

Someone like her beloved father, who had given his life to save others.

Instead, when her moment to stand up and make a difference came along, she had done absolutely nothing to help another human under attack except crouch under a table and call 911, all but paralyzed by her fear.

Shame left a bitter taste, even five days later. She hated remembering that she had done nothing while that junkie had fired a gun in the air then used it to pistol whip the barista again and again.

Olivia had wanted desperately to run out of the coffee shop and find help but she’d been afraid to do even that, not sure if he had more rounds in his weapon.

The attack had seemed to last hours but had only been a moment or two before the barista herself and another customer, a woman approximately the age of Olivia’s mother, had finally to put an end to the horror.

That customer, just walking into the otherwise empty coffee shop, had sized up the situation in an instant and demonstrated a strength and courage that had completely deserted Olivia. Instead of hurrying out of the coffee shop to safety, she had instead run to the  barista’s aid, yelling at the junkie to stop.

Startled, he had paused his relentless, horrifying random attack and had eased away slightly. That had been long enough for the barista, battered and bleeding and crying in pain, to pick up a carafe of coffee and throw it and its piping hot contents at him.

Olivia could still hear his outraged yell and the shouts of a neighborhood police officer who had finally responded to her call, ordering everyone down to the ground.

In five minutes it was over, but Olivia had relived it for days, especially coming face-to-face with the stark realization that she had been weak and afraid.

Steve Harper would have been ashamed of her.

Amazing, the lengths a person could go to deceive herself. All this time, Olivia thought she was strong and decisive and in control.

In certain areas of her life, maybe. Hadn’t she moved away from her hometown in Northern California to go to college twelve years earlier and never looked back? That had taken strength. And she had walked away from a highly lucrative tech job three years earlier to form her own social media marketing company and had built her business from nothing to one where she employed six other people and had clients across the globe.

Professionally and academically, she was willing to take risks.

Personally. That was another story.

She was constantly running from any situation she found emotionally threatening.

“Are you going in?”

A man was holding the door for her, she realized. He was about her age and not bad looking in a slightly rumpled, professor sort of way.

She started to take a step inside after him but fear froze her in place. She couldn’t do it. Not yet.

“I’m waiting for someone,” she lied.

“Here’s a crazy idea. You could always wait inside where it’s dry.”

He smiled, his brown eyes friendly and with a glimmer of interest.

“I’m good,” she mumbled.

He shrugged and let the door between them close with a disappointed sort of look.Dating was another area where she was a coward. Since college, she’d had two serious relationships and Olivia had been the one to break off both of them, afraid to take the next step into a long-term commitment.

So many things could go wrong. A car accident. A plane crash. A heart attack.

A burning building where a man might run inside to save people, despite his daughter begging him not to go.

What if she loved someone passionately, fiercely, and then lost him suddenly, as her mother had her father? Sixteen years later, there were times Juliet still seemed shattered.

Olivia shoved her hands into the pockets of her raincoat against the damp Seattle afternoon. Nothing would take the chill from her bones, though. She knew that. Even five days of huddling in her bed and mindlessly bingeing on cooking shows hadn’t done anything but make her crave cake.

She couldn’t hide away in her apartment forever. Eventually she was going to have re-enter life, which was why she stood outside this coffee shop in a typical spring drizzle with her heart pounding and her stomach in knots.

This was stupid. The odds of anything like that happening to her again were ridiculously small. She couldn’t let one man battling mental illness and drug abuse control the rest of her life.

She could do this.

She reached out to pull the door open but before she could make contact with the metal handle, her cell phone chimed from her pocket.

She knew instantly from the ringtone it was her best friend from high school, who still lived in Cape Sanctuary with her three children.

Talking to Melody was more important than testing her resolve by going into the Kozy Kitchen right now, she told herself. She answered the call, already heading back across the street to her own apartment.

“Mel,” she answered, her voice slightly breathless from the adrenaline still pumping through her and from the stairs she was racing up two at a time. “I’m so glad you called.”

That was an understatement. She really hadn’t wanted to go into that coffee shop. Not yet. Why should she make herself? She had coffee at home and could have groceries delivered when she needed them.

“You know why I’m calling, then?” Melody asked, a strange note in her voice.

“I know it’s amazing to hear from you. You’ve been on my mind.”

She was not only a coward but a lousy friend. She hadn’t checked in with Melody in a few weeks, despite knowing her friend was going through a life upheaval far worse than witnessing an attack on someone else.

As she unlocked her apartment, the cutest little rescue dog in the world, a fluffy cross between a chihuahua and a miniature poodle, gyrated with joy at the sight her.

Yet another reason she didn’t have to leave. If she needed love and attention, she only had to call her dog and Otis would come running.

She scooped him up and let him lick her face, already feeling some of her anxiety calm.

“I was thinking how great it would be if you and the boys could come up and stay with me for a few days when school gets out for the summer. We could take the boys to the Space Needle, maybe hop the ferry up to the San Juan’s and go whale watching. They would love it. What do you think?”

The words seemed to be spilling out of her, too fast. She was babbling, a weird combination of relief that she hadn’t had to face that coffee shop and guilt that she had been wrapped up with her own life that she hadn’t reached out to her friend.

“My apartment isn’t very big,” she went on without waiting for an answer, “But I have an extra bedroom and can pick up some airbeds. They’ve got some comfortable ones these days. I’ve got a friend who says she stayed on one at her sister’s and slept better than she does on her regular mattress. I’ve still got my car, though I hardly drive it in the city, and the boys would love to meet Otis. Maybe we could even drive to Olympic National Park.”

“Liv. Stop.” Melody cut her off. “Though that all sounds amazing and I’m sure the boys would love it, we can talk about that later. You have no idea why I called, do you?”

“I ... why did you call?”

Melody was silent for a few seconds. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” she finally said.

The breath ran out of Olivia like somebody had popped one of those air mattresses with a bread knife.

“Oh no. Is it one of your boys?” Oh please  she prayed. Don’t let it be one of the boys.

Melody had been through enough over the last three months, since her jerk hole husband ran off with one of his high school students.

“No, honey. It’s not my family. It’s yours.”

Her words seemed to come from far away and it took a long moment for them to pierce through.

No. Impossible.

Fear rushed back in, swamping her like a fast-moving tide. She sank blindly onto the sofa.

“Is it Caitlin?”

“It’s not your niece. Stop throwing out guesses and just let me tell you. It’s your mom. Before you freak out, let me just say, first of all, she’s okay, from what I understand. I don’t have all the details but I do know she’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. It could have been much worse, anyway.”

Her mom. Olivia tried to picture Juliet lying in a hospital bed and couldn’t quite do it. Juliet Harper didn’t have time to be in a hospital bed. She was always hurrying somewhere, either next door to Sea Glass Cottage to the garden center Harpers had run in Cape Sanctuary for generations or down the hill to town to help a friend or to one of Caitlin’s school events.

“What happened?”

“She had a bad fall and has several broken bones.”

Olivia’s stomach twisted. “Fell where? Off one of the cliffs near the garden center?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know all the details yet. This just happened this morning and it’s still early for the gossip to make all the rounds around town. I assumed you already knew. I was just calling to see if you needed my help with anything.”

This morning. She glanced at her watch. Her mother been in an accident hours earlier and Olivia was just finding out about it now, in late afternoon.

Someone should have told her, if not Juliet herself then at least Caitlin.

Given their recent history, it wasn’t particularly surprising that her niece, whom Olivia’s mother had raised since she was a baby, hadn’t bothered to call. Olivia wasn’t the teenager’s favorite person. These days during Olivia’s occasional video chats with her mother, Caitlin never popped in to say hi any more. At fifteen, Caitlin was abrasive and moody and didn’t seem to like Olivia much, for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

“I’m sure someone tried to reach me but my phone has been having trouble,” she lied. Her phone never had trouble. She made sure it was always in working order, since so much of her business depended on her clients being able to reach her and on her being able to tweet or post on the fly.

“I’m glad I checked in, then.”

“Same here. Thank you.”

Several bones broken and a long recovery. Oh man. That would be tough on Juliet, especially this time of year when the garden center always saw peak business.

“Thank you for telling me. Is she in the hospital there in Cape Sanctuary or was she taken to one of the bigger cities?”

“I’m not sure. I can call around for you, if you want.”

“I’ll find out. You have enough to worry about.”

“Keep me posted. I’m worried about her. She’s a pretty great lady, that mom of yours.”

Olivia shifted, uncomfortable as she always was when when others spoke about her mother to her. Everyone loved her, with good reason. Juliet was warm, gracious, kind to just about everyone in their beachside community of Cape Sanctuary.

Which made Olivia’s own stiff, awkward relationship with her mother even harder to comprehend.

“Will you be able to come home for a few days?”

Home. How could she go home when she couldn’t even walk into the coffee shop across the street?

“I don’t know. I’ll have to see what’s going on with Juliet.”

How could she possibly travel all the way to Northern California? A complicated mix of emotions seemed to lodge like a tangled ball of yarn in her chest whenever she thought about her hometown, which she loved and hated in equal measures.

The town held so much guilt and pain and sorrow. Her father was buried there and so was her sister. Each room in Sea Glass Cottage stirred like the swirl of dust motes with memories of happier times.

Olivia hadn’t been back in more than a year. She kept meaning to make a trip but something else always seemed to come up. She usually went for the holidays at least but the previous year she’d backed out of even that after work obligations kept her in Seattle until Christmas Eve and a storm had made last-minute travel difficult. She’d spent the holiday with friends instead of with her mother and Caitlin and had felt guilty that she had enjoyed it much more than the previous few when she had gone home to Sea Glass Cottage.

She couldn’t avoid it now, though. A trip back to Cape Sanctuary was long overdue, especially if her mother needed her.

“Thanks again for letting me know.”

“I’m so glad I called. The minute you find out anything about Juliet, let me know.”

“I will. Thanks.”

After she ended the call with Melody, Olivia immediately called her mother’s cell. When there was no answer there, she dialed Caitlin’s and was sent straight to voice mail, almost as if her niece was blocking her.

She glared at the phone. Brat.

Left with few other options, she finally dialed the hospital in Cape Sanctuary. To her relief, after she asked whether her mother was a patient there, she was connected almost instantly to a room.

“Hello?”

Her mother did not sound like herself. Usually Juliet’s voice was firm, confident. She wasn’t exactly brusque, merely self-assured and determined to waste as little time as possible

Today, Juliet’s voice was small, thready, almost ... frightened.

With her own emotions frayed from the week she’d had, Olivia was aware of a connection between them, as unexpected as it was unusual.

“Mom. What’s going on? I just heard you were in an accident.”

“How did you find out?” Juliet asked.

Not from you or from Caitlin, she wanted to answer tartly. The two people who should have told her hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone, had they?

Otis came running over with his favorite toy and sat at her feet, happily chewing.

“Melody called me saying she’d heard bits and pieces and knew you had been injured. Apparently you had a fall. Are you okay? What happened? ”

“It’s the stupidest thing. I’m so embarrassed.”

“I don’t think the word embarrassed needs to enter the conversation here. You’re hurt. You had an accident, you didn’t break a bottle of pickles at the grocery store. Did you fall off the roof?”

Juliet released a breath. “I was up on a ladder, trying to hang some baskets I had just potted to the hooks in one of the greenhouses and ... something went wrong.”

Olivia frowned at that momentary hesitation. “Something?”

“The ladder buckled or it wasn’t set up right in the first place. I don’t know exactly. To be honest, everything’s a bit of a blur. Of course, that might be the pain medicine talking.”

“What were you doing up on a ladder? You’re the boss. Don’t you have people to do that?”

“We’re shorthanded. Don’t get me started.” Juliet’s voice sounded a little stronger. Talking about the garden center she loved must have helped take her mind off the pain and fear.

“I spent three years training Sharon Mortimer to be the assistant manager under me and she decides two weeks ago to take a job running the nursery at a box store in Redding. Can you believe it? Where’s the loyalty?”

She didn’t want to deal with the garden center’s personnel issues right now when her mother was lying in a hospital bed. “What are the doctors saying?”

“You know doctors. They only want to give you bad news.”

“What did they say?”

Juliet sighed. “Apparently I have a concussion. And I broke two ribs and also my right hip and femur. That’s the side I landed on. They were afraid my wrist on that side was broken as well where I tried to brace my landing but it seems to be only sprained.”

How far had she fallen? Good heavens. It sounded horrible. “Oh, Mom.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Juliet assured her. “I was only on the ground for a few minutes before one of my customers found me and called paramedics. And they were there right away. So handsome.”

Juliet seemed to be drifting away again.

“What do the doctors say?” Olivia pressed.

“Dr. Adeno, that nice new orthopedic doctor, was just here and she wants to do surgery tomorrow. I still haven’t decided if I want to go through with it.”

“It’s not like botox, Mom. If  you need orthopedic surgery, you don’t have many options. You can’t decide whether you feel like doing it or not.”

“She says I’ll be in the hospital three to five days and need four to six weeks of recovery. I can’t be away from the garden center that long! The whole place will fall apart, especially without Sharon.”

Everything always came back to the garden center. Why was she so surprised?

Her father’s family had actually opened it as a farm supply back at the turn of the 20th century. Her grandfather Harper had shifted toward supplying local gardeners with their needs and had passed it to his son, Olivia’s father.

After Steve Harper’s tragic death, her mother had stepped up to run the business that supported her family and had surprised everyone -- probably most especially Juliet herself -- by being great at it.

Olivia had tried not to resent her mother’s long hours as she had immersed herself into learning the business.

She had never been gifted with the green thumb of her father, her older sister. Steve and Natalie had bonded over their time in the garden. Nat had loved playing in the dirt while Olivia much preferred digging into a good book.

“This couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” Juliet suddenly sounded close to tears.

“Spring growing season.”

“Right. Our busiest season of the year. And that traitor Sharon deserts us for stock options and a better 401K. What am I going to do? I can’t have surgery tomorrow.”

Again, her mother sounded frightened and Olivia wasn’t sure how to handle it. Juliet was one of the most together people she’d ever known. Hearing this vulnerability in her voice was unsettling.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently, not knowing what else she could say.

“I wish you were here.”

The small, frail-sounding words came out of nowhere, almost as if Juliet didn’t really know she had uttered them.

Olivia stared into space while she felt something odd and sharp tug at her chest.

Her mother needed her. For once, Juliet wasn’t the invincible fifty-three year old widow running a successful business and raising her teenage granddaughter on her own. She was an injured woman who needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it.

In the end, that was all that mattered. Olivia reached for a piece of paper, already mentally going through the list of things she would have to do in order to close up her apartment and leave town.

“I’ll come down for a few days,” she said. “I just need to make the arrangements.”

“Oh. Oh no,” Juliet said quickly, as coming to her senses and realizing what she had said. “I don’t want to be a bother. I know how busy you are, with your accounts and your travel and all your important clients.”

Her mother also knew one of the big advantages to being a social media marketerwas mobility. As long as Olivia had her laptop, her phone and a good Internet connection, she could take care of just about anything that came along.

“I’ll adjust my schedule a little and give some more responsibility to my associates. I can spare a few days.”

“Oh. I hate to be a bother. I feel so stupid.”

“You’re not a bother and you’re not stupid.”

What kind of weird universe had she slipped into where she was the one giving her mother counsel? That wasn’t the natural order of things. Juliet didn’t need Olivia or anybody. After Olivia’s father died, her mother had tried very hard to prove that to the world.

“I’ll get down there soon as I can.”

“I’ll be fine, honey. I promise,” Juliet continued to protest. “Don’t come. Do you hear me?”

Before Olivia could answer, Juliet switched gears. “Oh. I need to go,” she said. “Caitlin just came in.”

Of course her mom needed to go if Olivia’s fifteen-year-old niece was there. She almost insisted her mother hand the phone to Caitlin so Olivia could yell at her for not calling her the instant she found out about Juliet’s injury but she had a feeling Juliet would refuse, ever protective over the daughter of the child she couldn’t save.

“All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

“Don’t come down, honey.” Her mother suddenly sounded far more like herself, her voice brisk and in control. “I mean it. We’ll be fine. I may not be able to get around for a few weeks, but I can supervise operations at the garden center just fine from a wheelchair. I’ll call you later in the week. Bye. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she started to say, but by then, her mother had already hung up the phone.

CaitlinOlivia sat for a moment, her dog happily chewing his toy at her feet and full-on rain splattering the window now.

She was half-tempted to listen to her mother and stay right here in Seattle, especially after Juliet had just bluntly told her not to come.

But then she thought of Juliet’s frightened voice and knew she couldn’t stand by. For once, her mother needed her. If that meant Olivia had to bury her own anxieties and juggle work and clients to make it happen, she could do it.

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