Life as We Know It: A Treasure Key Novel Read online

  Life as We Know It

  A Treasure Key Novel

  Sarah Bates

  Text Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Bates. All rights reserved. Self-published by Sarah Bates. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, except for brief quotations in written review, without prior permission of the author/publisher.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Bates. All rights reserved.

  *Any and all characters and situations are the sole creations of the writer and are not based on any factual persons or situations. Any resemblances therein are strictly coincidence.

  Also by Sarah Bates

  Stevens Island Series

  For Now and Always

  Choices

  Always and Forever

  Family Ties

  The Ties That Bind

  Someone to Love Me

  The Right Time

  The Very Thought of You

  The First Moment

  What the Heart Wants

  Safe Harbor

  Love Unexpected

  Everything You Want

  Music and Lyrics

  There’s Always Hope

  No Greater Love

  Changing Tides

  A Summer to Remember

  *Tis the Season (a holiday special novella)

  Second Chance

  *The Stevens Island Companion

  Watkins Cove Series

  Emma and August

  Claire and Noah

  Iris and Landon

  Arden and Cooper

  Ivy and Deke

  *1 Volume Collection

  Holden Point Series

  Holden Strong

  Holden Proud

  Treasure Key Series

  Life as We Know It

  A Day in the Life Novelette Series

  A Day in the Life of Ariel

  A Day in the Life of Emma

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  About the Author

  One

  It kind of felt like a dream. A bad, crappy dream, the kind where you think that if you could just wake up, everything will turn out to still be okay.

  The problem was, I knew that no amount of wishing would make it so. Because I was, unfortunately, very much awake, and this was, unfortunately, all really happening.

  Even as I told myself this – again, and probably not for the last time – I stood in the center of my bedroom and stared at the empty space blankly. Was it only a week ago – even three days ago – that it had been filled with all my things? My bed, my dresser, and desk? All my personal clutter?

  It was a shock to the system to have it all change so fast. I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me. Then I glanced down at the polished wood floor and realized that, technically, it had been.

  Along with everything else I personally owned, my area rug was now packed away in one of those portable storage container pods and was, at that very moment, on its way to some unknown location, where it would stay until my mom and I found a new place to live, somewhere far from here.

  A new place, because, according to my parents’ divorce settlement, she and I were no longer allowed to live here, because my dad had gotten the house, along with most everything else, while my mom had gotten her car, a few furnishings and her own personal mementoes, clothes, and jewelry, a hefty alimony payment…and me.

  My chest ached as I remembered the day, only a week ago, when all of that had been made official, and my life as I knew it had been irrevocably changed forever. Thinking back on it, I did my absolute best to fight back the tears that wanted, and were still waiting, to come. It wasn’t easy, but I managed. The burning feeling of anger and resentment in my belly helped, a little.

  At least it got me to turn for the door and gave me the strength to step out into the hall.

  Somewhere in the house – the house I had grown up in, the only home I ever remembered having – I could hear voices droning on.

  I grabbed my tote bag, filled with random bits of my life that were too painful to pack away, and followed the voices down the hall, down the stairs, and to my dad’s home office on the main floor.

  The door was partially opened, so I reached out and pushed it the rest of the way open.

  My dad, talking on the speaker phone, turned and gave me an annoyed look, then reached out and grabbed the handset.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t talk right now. I’ll have to call you back.” As he listened to the reply, my chest ached even more painfully.

  Sweetheart.

  I remembered how, not too long ago, he used to call my mom that. But had he ever said it with that much affection? I honestly couldn’t remember after the past few months.

  “No, no. It shouldn’t take me long. I’ll call you back in ten minutes. I know,” he said, smiling as he looked off into the distance, away from me. It was like I wasn’t even there, or didn’t exist. “I’m looking forward to the furniture shopping, too. It’ll be nice to spruce this place up.”

  Spruce this place up?

  Our house had been remodeled and redecorated just last year.

  “I know. I can’t wait, either. We’ll celebrate tonight. Love you, babe.”

  Babe?

  I didn’t get a chance to contemplate this, as he was hanging up just then, and turning to face me.

  “Chloe.”

  Nothing else. Just my name, in that clipped, annoyed tone he usually reserved for telemarketers.

  “Dad,” I said in return, my voice sounding strained, even to my own ears.

  “I thought you’d already left,” he said, stepping around his desk and gesturing me out of his office.

  “No.” I shook my head as he basically herded me toward the front door.

  “Your mother’s Volvo wasn’t in the driveway when I arrived.”

  I paused at the door, putting my hand on the handle and leaning against it just in case he got the idea in his head to open the door and shove me out. With the one-eighty turn he’d made over the past six months, I wouldn’t have put it past him.

  “As our agreement was that you and your mother would be out of the house by noon,”

  “We are,” I said. When he arched an eyebrow at me, I had to swallow to clear my throat. “I wanted a few more minutes, so she said I could stay while she went to gas up the Volvo.” I lifted my free hand and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I just thought,”

  “We have an agreement,”

  “No, you and Mom have an agreement,” I closed my mouth immediately when he gave me that sharp look of his. The one he’d learned how to wield so successfully in court, when he was questioning criminals on the stand. It was that look that had made him such a good, and frankly scary, lawyer.

  “Semantics. According to the agreement, you and your mother were both supposed to be out of the house when I reclaimed possession of it at noon. It’s twelve-ten, Chloe.”

  My dad had moved out two months ago, when the worst of this mess had finally imploded on my family, and this was the first time he’d been back since the day he’d walked out.

  “I just wanted a few more minutes,” I said. “I wanted to be able to say goodbye,”

  “You can’t say goodbye to a house, Chloe,” he said, impatiently.

  Sure you could, I thought, but didn’t sa
y. Instead, I said, “I meant you.” When he gave me a strange look, I shook my head. “I wanted to say goodbye to you. I don’t know when we’re going to see each other again, and I thought,”

  Before I could say another word, I heard a car pull into the driveway. Thinking it was my mom, I shifted to look out the window next to the door.

  She wasn’t my mother, not even close.

  But, in a way, she kind of proved my dad had a type.

  Average height, slender, willowy build, and blonde.

  It just turned out that, unlike my mom, she was also only five years older than me.

  I heard him let out a hiss of annoyance.

  When I turned to look at him, though, I realized that the annoyance had been aimed at me.

  “This is why you weren’t supposed to be here,” he said, pulling me away from the door. “Candace didn’t want either of you here when she got here. She didn’t want to deal with any of your drama.”

  In my head I had so many things I wanted to say to that. All of them thrown in his face with the drama his new Barbie doll didn’t want to deal with. But at that moment my throat was too tight, too painful, to get any of them out. It was as though my vocal cords had simply frozen up on me, rendering me completely mute.

  As I stood there, screaming at him in my head, I watched him plaster a bright smile on his face as he opened the door. “Welcome home, babe,” he said.

  She all but bounced into the foyer in her Jimmy Choo’s.

  “This is so awesome!” she squealed in a high-pitched voice, clapping her hands like an excited toddler. “I can’t wait to get my interior designer in here and get started…who are you?” she demanded when she finally saw me, her smile fading instantly. She folded her arms at her chest and gave me a very nasty look over. “Paul, who is she?”

  He sighed and shifted. “Candace, this is my daughter, Chloe. Chloe, this is,” he didn’t finish, as Candace and I both made dangerous sounds of warning. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his chinos and cleared his throat.

  “She’s not supposed to be here,” Candace hissed, pointing a long, talon-like-fake-nail-tipped finger at me. “You promised I wouldn’t have to look at her.”

  “I know. I thought she had left. I’m sorry.”

  “What is she doing in our house, Paul?” she demanded.

  I made that sound again, a bit more strangled than before, but it still got the point across, as she turned to look at me, and wisely took a step back.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, nastily.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, my voice very tight and rough as I forced the words out. “I’m leaving.” I yanked the door open and went to go out it, but I paused in the center of the doorway and turned to look at them.

  But again, any pithy comments I may have wanted to say were held hostage by my frozen vocal cords. So, I settled for the next best thing, and simply flipped one of my middle fingers up at them, then turned and started down the steps, careful of the wet patches left over from the rain we’d had earlier.

  I’d reached the foot of the driveway, completely ignoring my father as he shouted at me to come apologize, when my mom pulled up in her Volvo SUV.

  “Chloe,” she said, her expression full of panic as she rolled her window down. “Chloe, sweetie,”

  But I didn’t give her a chance to get out, simply skirting the front of the SUV and getting in the passenger side.

  My dad had followed me halfway down the driveway but had stopped when my mom had pulled up. Neither of them said anything as they stared at each other through her open window for a long moment, then my mom, sniffling, rolled her window back up, and pulled away from the driveway.

  I watched through the rearview mirror as she drove down the street.

  He didn’t even wait and watch us go. He just turned and started back toward the house.

  Wishing it didn’t hurt so much, wondering why this fact somehow made everything else that had happened over the past few months worse, I turned my gaze forward, and silently faced what was ahead of me while my mom quietly wept as she drove us toward her past, and our future.

  ☼

  Neither of us said anything for several hours as she continued to drive us toward the state line.

  When we stopped for dinner, we barely spoke as we ordered our food. A couple hours later, at the hotel we finally stopped at for the night, we remained quiet, though as my mom took her shower, I could hear her crying again.

  It broke my heart to hear her, but I didn’t know what to do to comfort her. Words just seemed so inadequate. Plus, I wasn’t sure I could voice them anyway. So, when she came back out into the room we were sharing, I went into the bathroom to take my shower instead.

  I waited as the hot water sprayed down on me for the tears to come, hoping that when they did, I could finally purge all these awful feelings from inside me. But they didn’t come. Like my words, they were apparently locked away. So, tired despite the fact I’d spent most of the day sitting down, I washed up quickly and retreated out to the room.

  Since my mom was asleep, I slipped into my bed as quietly as possible and reached out to turn the light out. It was then that I noticed that she was clutching a tissue in one of her slender hands.

  The sight of it made me feel like the worst daughter ever, because I didn’t know what I could do to make this better for her.

  Aching with my own ineptitude and sadness, I turned the light out, hoping the new day would prove it had all been a bad dream after all.

  But of course, it didn’t.

  And neither did the next day.

  The only things that changed, really, were the scenery, and our style of clothes as the cooler Northern summer temps gave way to the bone-melting heat and thick humidity of the South.

  By the time we reached the Florida state line I was in a pair of gym shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops, my jeans and sneakers shoved somewhere into the very back of the Volvo, with the rest of the things neither of us had wanted to put into storage.

  Already missing the cold, snow, and ice, that I always looked forward to during the winter months, I blasted the air-conditioner and prayed it wouldn’t be too much longer.

  A day later – seriously, Florida was a ridiculously long state – we arrived in the Florida Keys, and my mom finally drove onto Treasure Key, the island where she’d grown up.

  It was like a completely different world.

  The one where I had grown up was full of mountains and lakes, and snow and muted tones of evergreen and white.

  This new one my mom had decided was the best place for our fresh start was bright and sparkling, the vastness of the clear blue-green ocean stretching out for as far as the eye could see in all directions. The air was heavy with moisture, scented strongly with the sea and a mix of bright, bold tropical flowers.

  Just about every building we drove by was Spanish in style, with their stucco facades and red tiled roofs, those tropical flowers spilling out in riots of color from baskets hung from archways and from flowerbeds, as well as vines trailing up the sides of the houses and palm trees both.

  If not another world, then at the very least a totally different country.

  When I turned my gaze from the window to look at my mom, she seemed to sense me looking at her, and she smiled nervously as she drove down the side streets of a gated neighborhood, heading toward one of my uncles’ houses.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, glancing quickly at me before she looked forward again. Somewhere along the way I had noticed that her sadness was slowly being chipped away by excitement.

  I wish I could say that mine was too, but I was homesick, and still so upset with my dad for everything he’d done, that I couldn’t seem to work up even an inkling of joy.

  I preferred snow to sand.

  Still, she looked so much better than she had that first night, that I didn’t have the heart to ruin this for her. So, I nodded when she chanced another glance at me. “It’s p
retty,” I told her. My voice, used so little over the past few days, had a kind of gravely quality to it, so I cleared my throat, hoping it would help soften the roughness. “It’s very…bright.”

  She chuckled softly. “It is,” she agreed, flipping on her directional light as she slowed down. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

  I made a non-committal sound and shifted in my seat when she pulled into a driveway and parked behind a van. I’d been told that I’d been here before, though I had no memory of it. Still, I’d seen enough pictures of the house to recognize it as my Uncle Jim’s place. The police issue SUV parked beside the van was another giveaway, since I knew my uncle was the chief of police on the island.

  My mom turned the engine off and took a deep breath as she stared at the house.

  Single story with the same beige stucco and red-tiled roof as most every other place I’d seen along the short drive from the bridge to here, it kind of sprawled out, giving way to a bright, tropical garden along the side of the house, and a small courtyard type entrance, complete with more tropical flowers and plants, an iron bistro-style table and chair set, and a stone fountain, the kind you find at your local garden center.

  “So,” she said.

  We stared at each other for a moment, then, suddenly, my mom smiled. The kind of smile I hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. I shifted, following her gaze over my shoulder, and felt my belly churn with butterflies when I saw my uncle hurrying through the courtyard.

  He was grinning ear-to-ear as he hurried over to us, and as soon as my mom climbed out from behind the wheel, he snatched her off her feet and turned them in several quick circles as he hugged her.

  “You’re here,” I heard him say in his big, booming voice. “You’re really here.”

  They both laughed, and my mom pressed a smacking kiss to his cheek as she held him in return.

  “We’re here,” she agreed.

  I watched this whole thing from my spot in the passenger seat, my seatbelt still strapped across me.

  “I’m so glad you finally made it,” he said as he lowered her back to her feet. “Damn, baby sister,” he added when he stepped back and finally got a look at her. “Damn. It’s about time you came home.”