had taken them the better part of three years but the result was a lovely home, filled with laughter and joy.
When they walked in, they found Stella in the kitchen wearing a ruffled apron splotched with huge yellow sunflowers. She was taking a tray of something out of the oven—her famous Oreo cookie mini cheesecakes, by the looks of it.
Her face lit up when she spotted them. “Girls! You’re both here at last!”
She set down the muffin tin on the stovetop, took off her oven mitts and rushed to kiss first Bea as soon as she’d set down the cake, then Daisy.
Daisy hugged her back, so very grateful to this woman who had rescued two lost girls.
“You’re not supposed to be doing anything,” Bea scolded. “We brought dinner for you. That’s what you said you wanted for your birthday gift.”
“You know me. I’m not good at sitting around. These are so easy, though. Mari helped.”
“Where is my child?”
“In here,” Mari called from the room off the kitchen that Stella had always called the library, which functioned as an office, homework station and computer center.
“We were watching a YouTube video one of her friends posted on the computer when my timer went off,” Stella explained as she set the cheesecake bites onto a rack to cool.
Daisy watched her aunt with the same unease she’d been feeling for several weeks now.
Though forty, Stella looked years younger. The three of them could have been sisters, really, as her and Bea’s mother, Jewel, had been ten years older than her only surviving sibling. Stella was only ten years older than Daisy.
Stella had elfin features, high cheekbones and wide green eyes. She was petite, just over five feet two inches tall. Many of her middle school students topped her in height, something they all seemed to find hilarious.
While Stella’s features were familiar and beloved, when Daisy looked deeper, she saw that her aunt still had the guarded, closed, almost furtive look that Daisy had first noticed several weeks ago. Something was up. She didn’t know what it was; she only knew Stella was keeping secrets.
Her aunt was usually an open book, free and spontaneous. She had even been known to tell her life story to strangers she met at the diner in town.
Since about Easter, that had begun to change. She would take phone calls in another room and would often beg off arranged meetings for mysterious reasons.
Was it a new man in her life? About time, if it was. Stella deserved nothing but unicorns and rainbows. She deserved the very best man around. As far as Daisy was concerned, no one would ever be good enough for Stella.
She had often wondered why Stella had never married. She had dated here and there but nothing ever very serious, usually breaking things off right around five or six weeks.
“Do you want us to set the food up here or out in the garden?”
“Oh, it’s a lovely evening. Let’s eat outside.” Stella looked around. “Is Shane meeting you here?”
Bea looked surprised. “You said only family.”
“What do you call Shane? He grew up next door and was in and out of here more than his own house. He lives with you, for heaven’s sake. You should have invited him, poor man.”
“I think he has plans, anyway,” Bea said. If Daisy wasn’t mistaken, her sister looked slightly put out by that, making her wonder what the man’s plans were and why they bothered Bea.
“Shane has plans a lot lately.” Marisol, followed as usual by their little dog, Jojo, came in and swiped one of the cheesecake bites off the cooling rack. “We hung out with him more before he moved into the guesthouse. Hi, Aunt Daisy.”
“Hello, darling niece.” Daisy hugged the girl she adored with all her heart.
“Shane is busy right now,” Beatriz explained. “Sometimes we don’t see him for days. You know how it is. It’s the beginning of the football season. We won’t see him again until January.”
After playing college football and spending several years in the pros, Shane Landry, Bea’s best friend since they moved here to Cape Sanctuary, was in his second year of teaching biology at the high school and coaching the state championship high school football team.
One of these days Bea would get smart and figure out the man was crazy in love with her.
“Do you know of any celebrities staying in the area?” Bea asked their aunt. “We saw this gorgeous guy outside the grocery store tonight in a big SUV limo. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. He only had eyes for Daisy.”
“Do tell!” Stella’s own eyes widened.
Daisy felt herself flush. “He thought he knew me. I told him he was mistaken.”
“You didn’t tell me you talked to him!” Bea exclaimed.
“Apparently, I missed the family rule where I had to tell you everything going on in my life in a twenty-four-hour period.”
“Not everything, just the juicy parts about gorgeous strangers who show up in Cape Sanctuary and act like they know you.”
“Well, that rule is stupid since that has only happened the one time.”
“You’re stupid if you think I wouldn’t want to know you talked to him!” Bea said.
Stella laughed. “We all do. Tell us everything.”
“Nothing to tell. I bumped into him in the toothpaste aisle. Like I said, he thought he knew me. I said he didn’t. We went our separate ways. End of story.”
Bea, she knew, wouldn’t have let that be the end of the story. Bea would have flirted with the man, would have tucked one of those long, luxurious curls behind her ear as she turned her head just so. At the end of sixty seconds of conversation, Beatriz would have had him hanging on her every word.
But Daisy wasn’t her younger sister, she thought as she carried the meal outside to the garden of Three Oaks, with its long pine table and mason jars hanging in the trees, filled with solar-powered candles already beginning to spark to life in the gathering dusk.
She wasn’t her sister by a long shot.
BEATRIZ
“Do you really think Dad is okay?”
Bea tried not to think about those tabloid photos or the man with the blood seeping out of his gut.
“Yes, honey. I do,” she assured her daughter. “He said so himself when he called that first night, and his manager swears he only needed a few days to process what happened before he returns to his regular activities.”
“Where do you think he might be?” In the rearview mirror, she caught Mari’s frown in the back seat of her SUV.
That one was harder to answer. “I’m not sure. Maybe with his extended relatives down in Mexico or at the island he likes off Panama. He’ll be in touch.”
“He should be answering his phone. It’s irresponsible of him not to. He has to know I’ll worry about him.”
Sometimes she thought Mari was born sounding about Stella’s age.
“You know he’ll be in touch as soon as he can, honey.”
She was annoyed all over again at Cruz for not considering the impact on his daughter of the highly publicized attack against him. How hard would it be for him to make a freaking phone call to assure their child he was okay?
Then again, he had never been