PRESENT DAY
When I walk Britt home, she pauses on the front porch step, glances back over her shoulder, and waves. My heart twists and twists, but I wave too before she opens the door, and walks inside. As soon as she’s gone, I run.
My purse and the journal within it swing at my side. It’s too far to race, but too close not to, so I weave my way through the Technicolor streets as fairy lights wink along porch rails. Tori Rose’s voice wraps around every bit of Sunset Cove from outdoor speakers that project the radio. Her lyrics are graffitied along buildings.
When I reach the inn, I grab my bike, holding the rose charm tight before I sling one leg over the seat and pedal off. The revelation gives me wings, and I use them to fly down the quiet road, to the one place I know I need to go.
My mother did more than give this town its fame. She began and ended in so many places: at the inn, at the Horizon, at the lighthouse, on the radio, by the sea. She’s touched every inch of this place. Tori Rose is everywhere from the breeze to the monuments in her honor, but it turns out she’s also reached the hearts here. She also cared enough to make real connections, like David Summers, like Linnea. She left and still loved it, she moved on but not completely.
She did both.
She named me for Linnea, for a person she met here. She led me to Linnea’s diner to unearth this. She wanted me to find it. She wanted me to know that in her life, she crossed states and seas, and all the while, Sunset Cove meant something to her too.
Edie’s here early again, behind the bar. I knock, loud and clear on the glass door. I need her answers. I need her side of this story. I will wait from dusk to dawn if that’s what it takes for her to tell me, for her to help me find my mother. I’ve got four days going on three, and I saw the way Lost Girls lived on that stage today, became the song.
Now, more than ever, knowing my mom needed to leave but held this town in her heart, I have to know what she had to say. What would she tell me to do about my summer? Is it possible for me to have the road and keep Sunset Cove, to not lose everything to it?
The sun beats down, the ocean breeze barely carries here, and the lights of the city beyond aren’t far. I stay still, waiting. It’s hours until the doors will burst open beneath the first traces of sunset. But I can wait.
Edie’s eyes flit up from where she’s polishing the shot glasses lining the dark marble counter, and her brows furrow. Taking her time, she wipes her hands on her stained white apron, and makes her way around the bar. She walks across the tile, her steel-toed boots drag, until there’s nothing left to delay. She stands on one side of the glass, and I’m on the other as she unlocks the door.
“I thought I told you I couldn’t help,” she whispers, but there’s not the assertion behind it hours later, just the pain. Her face is clean of makeup, and it softens her.
“You have to.” I clasp my hands behind my back to stop them from shaking. “No one will tell me about her. Or if they will, they don’t know enough. They don’t know her. I don’t know why you’re part of her hunt when you so clearly don’t like me and don’t want me near you but she—”
“You think that’s what this is?” Edie’s jaw loosens, her own clenched hands unravel. She leans against the door. “You actually think that?”
“I . . .” I shrug. What else is there to think?
Edie’s heart is shattering across her features. All my time growing up around grief, and I didn’t know a heart could break that openly.
“The clue you handed me yesterday, it’s not one of the ones I’m supposed to help you with.” Edie’s voice, a new gentleness to it, holds my attention.
She mentioned a clue.
Between my heart’s stumbling beats, I hesitate, not wanting to push her back into her shell. “You know multiple clues? You’re supposed to help with more than one?”
“Two. What happened to the Meet Me in the Lyrics one?” She tugs a hand through her purple bangs and checks from one side of the parking lot to the other. We’ve still got time.
I pull the orange envelope out of my purse, and her gaze lands back on me. “I solved it.”
“How?”
I shrug again because I can play this questions-and-no-answers game too. Edie looks at me deeper, differently than she did before. Today, she’s not trying to place where she knows me like she did in the club. She’s seeing how she doesn’t.
Letting the door close behind her and joining me on the sidewalk, she walks away, around the side of the building.
“Where are you going?” Not again.
Walking backward, she wears the first genuine grin I’ve seen from her. It stops me in my tracks. “You coming?”
I’m coming.
Wrapping around the side of the club, Edie leads me to the fifth door, the room I found my mother’s memorabilia in. She turns her own key in the lock.
“You have a key?” The beer case I used to keep the door open is crumpled but there, kicked to the side.
“Your mom made two keys,” she says, propping the door open with another empty box as her walls fall. She takes in the empty spot in the frame where the pages used to be, nods, and sits crisscross on the floor, continuing, “One for me and . . . one she left for someone else to find. I take it you found it instead?”
The key sitting around my neck burns, and I nod. Who was it meant for? That house by the ocean breeze and rocks and sea—where Britt and I found it hidden under the mat—was empty. Completely. Who did she leave that collage on the wall, those “Remember Me” lyrics for? The same person? Did they see them, answer her? Did she find her way back to them?
“I’m sorry I didn’t help you. That night or morning,” Edie says as I sit across from her and lean against a box of old swag Britt and I already went through.
“Why didn’t you?”
Edie does something I never expected. She tears up, and I’m terrible, empty, aching. Watching her, I know I’m the one who will never know how to grieve my mother properly, like those who can remember her. Every memory I’ve got is stolen, taken, or given by another.
“Your mom . . . Mia,” it’s like she’s testing my name, seeing if she likes it, “she was my best friend. She was my sister and bandmate and she was so fucking alive. She was so determined to be a star that the world fell in love with her ambition. We all did. She set everyone she met ablaze. I met her and we bonded. When our band fell apart, we lost each other for a while and then found each other again. We grew from that.”
I can’t help wondering what happened between Fate’s Travelers that left them with so much talent and only one album, if it had to do with Patrick Rose running away in that last section, if I’ll find that in these pages too, but I hold my tongue. Edie’s a fearful, reluctant storyteller, and I don’t want to scare her off.
She keeps going. “She hated me after everything that happened and then she didn’t, I envied her and then I didn’t. Because the world raises girls to be competitors, not constellations. But we found our way to that place again. She became such a part of me. We would spend every holiday together. Playing with her was magic. It was madness. So when we found out”—Edie’s voice cracks and my heart writhes—“when I found out we were going to have to say goodbye, I couldn’t do it. She told me about the hunt, told me to help you, but seeing you, looking like her, I couldn’t say goodbye again. I didn’t think I could help you find her last words.”
Found out . . . The first tears fall. Edie saw her in me too. Too much, not enough, forever a memory of Tori Rose, but then again, she also saw something different in me today. Something that has her really looking now, talking to me all the same.
“Thank you,” I say rather than any of the other things bubbling up inside me.
Edie wipes at her own eyes with the backs of her hands. “No need to thank me.”
“No, there is.” I pause. “Because that’s the most anyone has ever told me.” Besides Linnea, besides my mom.
Edie sniffs, taking in the room around us and my mother’s poster in the daylight. “Where are you heading for the next clue?”
“I just found the one in the Horizon.”
“With Linnea?” Edie asks and I almost grin. Edie Davis of Fate’s Travelers is here in a storage room with me, talking about the woman whose diner I grew up in.
“Yeah, with Linnea.”
“Your mother did always love your name and that woman. She thought she was special. She thought you were special.”
Scooting closer, I wait for more, hoping there is more, as vain as that seems. My mother thought I was special? Did she believe in me, in the dreams I would one day have? What would she say?
Before I can pry further, Edie says, “Are you ready for the next pages?”