PRESENT DAY
“Mia, come here.” Linnea calls from the corner, hunched over the karaoke machine with her pink toolbox.
After a restless night avoiding sleep while helping Britt shop at Sunset Cove’s twenty-four-hour convenience store, I still haven’t found my mother’s beginning. If it’s not the attic or any of the other rooms I searched at the inn, where does she consider it to be?
Leaving the saltshakers I’m refilling at the counter, I duck through the half-crowded room to where Linnea sits, repairing the machine my mother loved, finally. Its red exterior catches the overhead lights and the sun sliding through the open windows. The posters on the wall all stare at it—especially Tori Rose’s.
I stare along with them. Two microphone chords intertwine and loop toward the steps leading to the Horizon’s stage—the exact ones my mom sang through. Which did she use?
“How’s it going?” I sit on the bottom step, a foot from where Linnea’s polishing the machine.
She wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her flannel. Her white hair is held out of her way by a large clip. “Good, kiddo. I’m about ready for it to be tested.” There’s a meaning beneath her words, something suggestive.
“Oh.”
“I invited Lost Girls over later. Thought you’d get a kick out of them rechristening it.” Her grin is wider than I’ve seen it in a while.
“Oh, yeah of course.” I pick at the rip in my jeans, exposing a small scar on my knee from the time Britt and I thought fencing was a good idea. It’s not even from the sword—it’s from tripping over a rock, distracted, looking at her.
“I just need help moving it back onto the stage. Not as agile as I used to be.” Linnea gestures for me to lift from the other side, and I weave around, bending my knees and getting the best grasp I can on the sleek, boxy machine.
“One, two, three . . .”
We lift, and somehow I end up moving backward up the steps, one step at a time. The karaoke machine trembles in our shared grip, heavy as a memory. I reach behind me for the top step, searching with my right foot as Linnea says, “Just a sec . . .”
It’s not clear who moves at the wrong time or if we both do, but the machine tumbles out of our hands, hitting the hardwood floor with a noise that’s anything but musical.
“Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” I hurry off the stage, crouching beside it. How do I always manage to mess things up when it comes to Tori Rose? Maybe this is a sign.
“Oh, hey, hey, kid, it’s okay.” Linnea rushes over to me, tipping it upright again. “Nothing broke. This thing is solid.” She knocks on the side of it. “It’s outlasted worse, trust me.”
“I’m so sorry, Linnea.”
“Hon, I slipped. What are you sorry for?” She’s watching me so closely, I have to look away, scrubbing at my cheek. “Come on. Help me get it up. Let’s try this one more time.”
Her expression doesn’t leave room for argument, so I do as she says, steadying myself against the stage. But just as I glance at where my hand rests against the planks, I note the subtle carvings next to my thumb, hidden on the edge, almost fully disguised by dust and splinters, something new that I’ve never seen.
TR was here.
The karaoke machine is christened with “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in Lost Girls’s haunting voices. Standing behind the counter, chin in my palm, I watch Britt walk from one side of the stage to the next in her blue jeans and favorite T-shirt—a Taylor Swift concert shirt. Linnea managed to find a third mic somewhere in storage, and Sophie uses it now, arm slung over Amy’s shoulders.
But even as they perform, Britt’s eyes never leave mine, and that’s how I know she picked this song for me.
The second it’s over, notes fading into afternoon chatter, she hops down first, making her way to where I stand next to Linnea who’s wiping away tears. The customers cheer, and two boys in boardshorts—hair still damp from the ocean and wakeboards leaning against their chairs—take the mics next. Sophie and Amy grab a table.
“What did you find?” Britt holds up her phone and the keyboard slam text I’d sent her along with a picture that apparently won’t download.
Linnea looks back and forth between us, so I wrap around the counter, taking the stool next to Britt and spinning closer to her. “You’re going to be a star, you know that, right?”
She shakes her head. “Stars burn out. I want to be my own goddamn galaxy.”
Those words linger, and my gaze falls to her lips before I force it back to her brown eyes.
“Of course,” I say, and she smiles.
“What did you find?” Britt repeats, sitting too as Linnea walks over to Sophie and Amy.
“Initials,” I say. “On the edge of the stage. Like in the lighthouse.”
“So you think she began here,” Britt finishes.
“Well, her adventure kind of did. But I looked around on my shift. There’s nothing behind the frames, nothing beneath any of the planks, and I’m pretty sure Linnea thinks I’m hiding something, which at this point, aren’t I?” It all comes out in a rush.
Britt shrugs. “Or you’re finding something.”
“Or that,” I whisper.
She taps the beat of the song she just finished against the countertop. “Did you check the attic?”
“At the inn? Yeah. It’s the first place I looked.”
“No. The attic here.” She waves in the general direction of above us and twists the charm bracelet around her wrist. There’s a new charm, a fourth one—a little suitcase.
I reach out, tracing over the intricate designs. “What’s this one?”
She blushes. “It’s from Dania and Mile last night. They said not just any suitcase can hold all my dreams.”
My heart pinches at the notion. “I love that . . . There’s an attic here?” How have I worked here for three years and never known that?
Her eyes brighten with the secret, and she waves for me to follow her. “Linnea?” Britt walks over to her.
Linnea looks up from where she sits, grinning and talking with Sophie and Amy. “What’s up? Great song, by the way, hon.”
“Thanks.” I swear Britt glows. “I need to research for another song. This might be my last chance here. Can Mia and I go to the attic?”
Last chance.
“Of course.” Linnea turns back to the two other girls.
With that, Britt beckons for me to follow again, and once more, I do. We wind behind a violet door into the small kitchen with its metal surfaces and plentiful windows. The waves rush on the beach just ahead of this place, caressing the sand.
Can you see the sea with me?
She’s onto something.
Hopping onto the stool by the counter, Britt pulls the beaded string hanging down from the ceiling. The ladder slides to the ground before us, eerily reminiscent of the entrance to the attic from the nursery.
“I’ve never been up here before.” My voice echoes as we climb.
Reaching the top, taking it in with her hands on her hips, Britt says, “Well then it’s your turn.”
“For what?” I join her.
She doesn’t answer—she doesn’t need to—because I step up into the Horizon’s attic and I see for myself. It’s like every person in this town decided to store something here. It’s all the forgotten and misused pieces of Sunset Cove collected in one room. There are abandoned instruments, dust-covered paintings, and bent records all forming a graveyard of the arts. The large back window creates an odd, tenuous glow. When I move toward that glass, I note it’s not stained like the pattern suggests. It’s covered by a layer of old, scratched-up paint.
“I can’t see the sea anymore.” My fingertips trace along the hues of pink and orange.
“You can a little bit.” Britt comes up beside me. “If you really look between those markings in the paint.”
“What are they?” They spread out around us, causing a sort of lit-up pattern to form across the floor.
She takes a step back, and moves toward the boxes, trailing her nails across the dust. “I don’t know. It’s not what I was looking for the first time.”
“How did you know so much was up here?”
She glances my way, and her smirk is wicked. “Where do you think I got the stories for the song I performed at the festival? The night we . . .”
First kissed. Slipup number one.
That evening still whispers across my skin when I envision it no matter how many years pass. It was the summer before freshman year, and we’d been something between friends and crushes for weeks, but that was the day we really blurred the lines.
It was after her music drew me in all over again—after she wove Sunset Cove’s tales into melodies at the summer festival. We snuck away to the quiet cove we’d discovered that May, far from the squealing, cotton candy breezes, whirring rides, flashing lights. With our toes dipped in the sea, our fingers slightly crinkled from the ocean waves, the salt of it in her brown hair, I’d told her, “That was magic.” Because it was, because she was.
I still don’t know who kissed who first.
Neither of us fills the silence, and she lets the memories of what she built on that festival’s stage trail off. For someone so set on getting out of here, she sure knows how to make her mark.
After a long moment, I say, “Well, I guess it’s just a matter of looking for what she wanted us to find.”
Britt doesn’t reply, but we search together. In this place marked by my mom’s beginning, my hunt for another of Tori Rose’s truths starts. I tie my hair up in a scrunchie, clear surfaces, and search through the lost history of Sunset Cove. I imagine her trying to climb through this hurricane-aftermath of a space just to leave a clue for me.
Time passes in silence, and time passes in whispered Look at this’s and Come here’s. It isn’t awkward—not with Britt—but it’s heavy knowing I won’t even have the silence with her, let alone the music, in such a short time.
All I can think of is Lost Girls and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and that night at the piano. I’ve seen what the music can do. I’ve seen how it works. My mother was so brave, so wild-hearted. The music took her away, left my grandmas to cope with no goodbye and unspoken grief.
Focus.
Those strange spots of sunlight from the painted window blur in front of me. I blink them away until they seem like a message too. Even that illumination seems to mock us, to signal yet another place in this town where she rests, and then I realize it does.
It’s letters—not scratches. It’s a message—not a warning.
“We need to clear the floor,” I say.
“Why?” Britt’s got a feather boa looped around her neck and a cowgirl hat pulled low over her head that she tips my way.
This time, my smile’s true, full. The weight lifts, if only momentarily. “Because that’s where the story is.”
I flit from box to box, sliding them aside. There’s a fifty-fifty chance Linnea will ban us for rearranging her mess. She likes to organize, to do everything herself. But that won’t matter. This attic, in each of our visits, has given us both what we needed. If I’m ever allowed back in it after today, though, I’ll ask Linnea why she’s kept these things, why she’s built her own shrine up here to this town that made us all.
It takes another half hour of stacking, carefully arranging the space into something like the lovechild of Tetris and Jenga before the space is clear. Grabbing a broom that was leaning against the corner, I sweep away dust bunnies and unearth the hardwood. My mother’s words are cross-stitched in light. They slip through the painted gaps on the window’s surface and spell out lyrics from the envelope across the floor:
I start and I unravel and I find closure in our end,
But all I really want is that sweet beginning again.
A heart carved out of more sunlight sits next to the lit-up words, right over a loose floorboard where TR was here has been written again.
I lock eyes with Britt and pry the plank up with my fingers. Beneath, nestled in the cleared-out space, is the next chapter of her story.