Be My Love (A Walker Island Romance Book 1) (12 page)

Hanna loved each of her sisters, but they’d always related to each other in different ways. Emily had been the one who had told Hanna how to solve her problems, Rachel had once been the slightly wild one who always seemed to have done everything first and had ended up broken from the risks she’d taken, and Paige, while older than Hanna, had never judged anyone’s choices. She’d simply been there to listen, and to talk things through, if Hanna needed to.

“I slept with Joel in Seattle.”

Paige kept sitting there, just listening, the way she’d promised she would.

“Then in the morning, after breakfast, he told me we’d made a mistake by being together. You’re right that Emily and Rachel think he walked away from me because he’s a Peterson, or because it’s what men do.”

“Why do you think he left?”

“We found out that Poppy had worked as a chamber maid at the B&B we stayed at. In 1952.”

“But,” Paige said in clear surprise, “she died in 1951.”

“No,” Hanna confirmed, “she definitely didn’t. And once we learned that she must have escaped the island, and her family, to live a new life, Joel started talking about how people always walk away...and how I was going to do the very same thing as soon as I’d finished the documentary.”

Paige didn’t say anything that time. She’d always been good at not saying things.

“And the truth is,” Hanna said, “I don’t
know
if I was going to. I mean, the graduate film program is what I’ve been working towards since pretty much forever. But I didn’t know I was going to fall in love with Joel. Why couldn’t he have let me have some time to think? To figure things out? Why did he just have to push me out of his life like that?”

Paige put both of her arms around Hanna. “We’re all here for you. Whatever you need. You know that, right?”

Of course, that was right when Hanna’s phone rang. Morgan was calling from New York.

Paige let herself out as Hanna picked up to speak with her sister, who immediately launched in with, “Emily and Rachel called to tell me about your documentary, and how you need it for your grad program acceptance...and also what happened with Joel walking away from you so that you wouldn’t be able to leave him first. Are you okay?”

Hanna appreciated, more than she could ever tell her sister, that Morgan hadn’t simply offered to make some calls to the film program on her behalf. “Thank you for calling to check in on me. It’s so nice to hear your voice. But...” She couldn’t lie and say she was okay. Not when she really, really wasn’t just then.

“You’re amazing, Hanna. Even when we were little kids you always had such vision, and such a knack for telling an engaging story. And you also have one of the biggest, most open and honest hearts of anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t know Joel beyond seeing him at school and around town when we were kids, but I have to believe that way down deep in his heart he must know you would never leave him the way the rest of his family did.” Hanna could hear someone talking to Morgan in the background. “I’m sorry,” her sister said in a low voice, “but I need to go right now or the movie star I’m working with will have a major hissy fit.”

Hanging up the phone, Hanna thought about what Morgan had said, particularly about Hanna’s honesty.

She’d given him everything last night, yet the truth was she’d still been shooting for her place in the masters program. What, she had to ask herself, would have happened if she’d gotten it? Would she just have left Joel behind?

No.
For as much as the program meant to her,
she couldn’t have just left him like that, and why would she when surely there was a compromise they could figure out so that they could be together while both pursuing their dreams.

What’s more, Hanna simply couldn’t believe that Poppy had abandoned her family like that either. Not unless Joel’s great aunt hadn’t had any other choice.

Yet that was what all the evidence seemed to point to, that Poppy had run off to Seattle and let everyone think Ava and William had driven her to suicide, the stigma of it following them around for years.

There was a soft knock on the door before her grandmother stepped inside. “Hanna, darling.”

Of course Grams would be there for her when she was upset, the same way she’d been there for Hanna with every scraped knee and tear in her childhood.

Ava sat down on the bed next to Hanna, holding a small cardboard box. “Your sisters have told me quite a lot of what is going on.” She brushed aside a strand of Hanna’s hair. “Though I’m not quite sure that any of them got the whole story, did they? You do love Joel, don’t you?”

Hanna nodded without hesitation.

“I’d like to tell you what I know of Poppy Peterson now, if you still want me to.”

“I thought you made a promise?”

“I did. And I’ve kept it so long that it’s almost a part of me now. Everyone involved is dead. Even so, I’ve done my best.”

“Then why break it now?”

“Because it was a promise given to spare people pain, yet now you and Joel are both hurting deeply because of it. Poppy wouldn’t have wanted that, Hanna. You’d have liked her if you’d known her. And I know she would have liked you, too.” Ava opened up the box. It was full of old envelopes. “If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen these before, it’s because I kept these in a special place where curious little girls couldn’t find them,” she said with a small smile. Ava reached into one of the envelopes and pulled out a postcard. “William and I received the first one about a week after Poppy left. It just said ‘I’m okay.’ She didn’t sign her name, but we immediately knew it was from her. She always sent them in envelopes where she typed our names and address on the outside, probably so that no one in the post office would recognize her handwriting on the actual postcards. And we never showed them to anyone else, but we kept them all.”

“I don’t understand,” Hanna said as Ava passed her the envelopes and she pulled out postcards one after the other. The first ones were all clearly sent from Seattle, but the others were from different places, seemingly all around the country. “What happened back then, Grams?”

“The first thing you have to understand is that William and Poppy never loved one another. They loved their families, but their families loved their positions on the island as much as they loved their children. Or perhaps I just have harsher memories of that situation than most.”

It was understandable that she would, given how people had treated her after she and William had married and Poppy had disappeared. Hanna didn’t say that though. She just let her grandmother keep telling the story.

“Everybody said what a good match William and Poppy were. Even over in the city, where I was a dancer, the news was of how the marriage between the son of the berry magnates and the daughter of the ship owners would join together two powerful businesses. Always the businesses, mind you, and never a word about love. And when I met William, I knew at once that he didn’t love Poppy. Which was just as well, because I loved him from the very start. It turned out that he loved me too, though he was extremely reluctant to hurt Poppy, because he actually thought she might love him. So we did the sensible thing and met with her in Seattle, on the pretense of a shopping trip, to ask her.”

“She didn’t love him?”

Ava smiled. “It turned out that she didn’t love William any more than he did her. And she didn’t care for the life that had been planned out for her by her family, either. She wanted to be a poet, wanted to be so much more than just a means of joining together two families. Just as your grandfather simply wanted to be a teacher, not a business magnate.”

“So you plotted this between you?”

“Plotted is a strong word,” Ava replied. “But yes, we discussed it. We decided we would be happy. All of us. William and I would be married, presenting his family with a fait accompli, leaving Poppy free to pursue her dreams.”

“But you let people believe she was dead,” Hanna said, her voice rising as everything she’d been feeling came out. “You let them blame you for her suicide.”

“Poppy gave me William. She left me the love of my life. The least I could do was help give her a chance at her dreams.” Putting her hand over Hanna’s, Ava explained, “You have to understand the way it was back then, the way it still often is now. If her family had known she was alive, do you think they would have let her go? The idea was that eventually, once she had made her new life, she would come back strong and able to face her family knowing they couldn’t sway her or pressure her into following their rules, rather than her own.” Ava looked back down at the postcards. “I met with her once or twice afterwards, before she left Seattle. After that, it was only postcards, and even those stopped after a couple of years.”

Hanna sat there staring at the postcards. “What should I do, Grams?”

“That’s for you to decide, darling. Well, you
could
go downstairs and let your sisters decide for you, but trust me, William and I were happier when we made our own choice. I’d like to think that ultimately, so was Poppy. I don’t know for sure how things turned out for her after she stopped sending the postcards. All I know is what she wanted, what she dreamed of. Just the way you’ve always known what you want and have followed your own dreams.”

With that, Ava pressed a kiss to her forehead, then left her alone with the box on her lap.

* * *

Joel guided the mussel boat back into the harbor slowly, piloting it with the skills he’d kept honed throughout his time as the Peterson Shipping Company’s head. Unfortunately, however, it said a lot about how little time he’d been able to get out on the water in recent years when the captain had looked worried as he’d first taken the wheel.

“It might be the company’s boat, sir, but I’d hate for anything to go wrong.”

But Joel had deftly piloted the mussel boat, concentrating to keep it steady. The captain seemed bothered by the way the salt spray got onto his suit, but Joel was simply glad for the chance to pull off his jacket and toss his tie on top of it.

The crew dove for the mussels rather than dredging, just one of the many ways they tried to protect the ocean around the island. They loved the sea too much for anything else.

And they weren’t the only ones who loved it. Joel did, too, from as far back as he could remember.

There was something so simple, so pure about being on the water. Finally, after everything that had happened this week, he was able to think clearly...and, of course, all he thought about was Hanna.

Could he have done something else?

Could he have made a different choice?

Because if she was going to leave the island to pursue her dreams, then what future was there for them? Especially when he cared so much for her that he would never want to be the guy holding her back, trapping her on the island when she should be doing what she loved.

Which reminded him, while he was out here playing with boats, there was plenty of paperwork waiting for him back at the office.

“Anyone can be a captain,”
his father had often told him,
“But there’s only one head of the company. Duty comes first, Joel.”

Duty.

Joel’s sigh came almost at the same moment the mussel boat touched the dock. Everything in his life had been about duty. Duty and seeing things through.

Yet, hadn’t he left one thing unfinished?

One very, very important thing.

The captain of the mussel boat shook Joel’s hand as he hopped down onto the dock. “I’m glad you could come out with us today, Mr. Peterson.”

“Joel, please. Just Joel, not Mr. Peterson.”

“Well, Joel, if you ever feel like coming out again, I’d be glad to have you.” The gray haired man gave him an unexpectedly empathetic look. “And I hope that whatever you were thinking about, that the sea helped you find an answer.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After Ava left, Hanna stared at the postcards for a long time, more evidence that Poppy had left her family behind.

Hanna suddenly pushed the postcards and envelopes away. Everything she’d touched with this documentary was too close, too personal. If it wasn’t hurting Joel by digging up the past, it was upsetting her sisters or making Grams break her promises.

“Show me your heart…that’s the difference between a real documentary maker and everyone else
.”

It hadn’t sounded easy—she’d known better than to assume that it would be—but at the same time, hadn’t she assumed that everything would work out for her the way it always had? She’d barged into the Peterson Shipping offices because she needed access to the archives so that she could make a good enough documentary to get into the master’s program. She’d made Joel show her his aunt’s poems and the police reports because she needed
to follow Poppy’s trail no matter whom it hurt. And she’d pulled him onto a ferry to Seattle with her because she needed
to show him that everyone was wrong about what had happened in 1951.

Thinking back on her childhood, Hanna couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t gotten what she wanted. With four big sisters, not to mention the famous Walker name to fall back on, she’d always had things easy. When she’d fallen as a child, Grams had always been there to pick her up. Emily had helped her with her homework, even making it seem like fun. Rachel had taken her to parties, never complaining about the presence of her little sister. Paige had helped her put together her college application so that she got the place in film school she wanted. Even Morgan, so busy with her own dreams, had helped her pick out prom clothes and given her advice about boys. Truthfully, Hanna could barely think of a moment of her life when her sisters hadn’t been there to make things easier for her.

Even her mother’s death in the island’s horrible flu epidemic two decades ago wasn’t as hard for her as it had been for the others because Hanna had been so young that her sisters had gone out of their way to keep her from the worst of it. Emily, Rachel, Paige and Morgan had put aside their own grief just so that they could make things that little bit better for Hanna.

But when had Hanna last done something that was genuinely difficult? And what was worth stepping out from behind their shield of affection for? Was it all worth the pain she was feeling now?