EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE from THE OTHER SIDE OF STARTING OVER by Mara Williams, courtesy of Lake Union Publishing

When I fling the door open, I expect the scent of home to hit me like an unsealed memory capsule—wood varnish, leather, dusty pages, and Dad. Instead, the store smells surprisingly clean, with an unfamiliar note of citrus.

“Bea.” Dad’s voice booms through the shop, rattling a mid-century cherry cabinet filled with Wedgwood dinnerware as he meets us by the counter. He wraps me in a hug, and I wish it would fix everything. But his arms aren’t quite as strong as they once were, and my problems aren’t nearly as simple.

“I thought I’d start a day early and shadow you this afternoon.” It’s been a while, but not much has changed, which is exactly why they need me. I took Jake’s business from a hustle to our meal ticket, without changing the family-owned charm. I plan to do that here, too.

“Tuesdays are slow. We were about to head out.” Dad holds my shoulders in his hands. I sense him scanning me for emotional wounds, and I smile and let him because he won’t find any. My mask is impenetrable.

“Is that my darling Bumblebee?”

I turn to catch Gigi padding toward me, her cane banging against the parquet floor.

She gathers me to her and pats my cheeks with smooth palms, drawing my focus down to her shrinking frame. She’s swimming in a Giants jersey, her face hidden under a matching baseball cap.

“I didn’t know you’d be here.” I draw her into a gentle hug, but she puts her whole body into it, knocking me off balance.

“They do let me out sometimes. It’s assisted living, not prison,” Gigi grumbles. “Besides, the boys are playing at five.”

By the boys, I’m assuming she means baseball. The Giants moved to San Francisco from New York the same year Gigi married my grandfather and moved out west. A year later, my grandparents opened this shop on opening day of the Giants’ first season in California. She calls the team her kindred spirit; a good season is a harbinger of blessings to come, a bad season a warning of calamity. They won the World Series the year the twins were born, and again a few years later, but they haven’t been good in a while.

“She likes to watch the games at our house,” Mom says.

“She gets in trouble for swearing at the television in the common room,” Dad says.

“Those old people are a bunch of squeamish little ninnies,” says Gigi.

“Be careful with that foul mouth. There are kids living at Mom and Dad’s now,” I tease.

“Ah.” Gigi waves her hand in the air. “It’ll be good for them to expand their vocabularies. Every kid needs some good curse words to vanquish their bullies.”

It certainly was her approach when I was a kid. I’m not sure it turned out great for me when I was sent to the principal’s office for calling Shane Weasley “Shitnugget Weaseldick” before punching him in the nose. But the bully who’d made fourth grade a living hell never bothered me again.

My gaze catches on a large figure emerging from our warehouse, dressed in black and crouching through a narrow aisle. I turn toward him, on alert, even though Suncrest is too sleepy for a burglary in broad daylight.

“Hello?” I step out of Gigi’s arms and bypass a Chesterfield sofa before making a beeline toward the oil paintings in the far alcove. “Hello?” I call out again before pulling up short when I witness Mom, Dad, and Gigi staring at me in confusion.

I panic that I might be hallucinating again before the man appears above a row of crystal, standing to his full height and propelling me backward. He looks like a villain from an action flick, menacing and muscular, with deep-set dark eyes and a thick head of black hair. I bump into a display of silver tea sets, and the metallic clang finally attracts his attention. He removes an AirPod and blinks once.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Can I help you?”

Ma’am? At least I know I’m not imagining him, because I would never conjure that ageist slur on purpose.

“Bea.” Mom comes to my side, rebalancing the silver. “This is Simon. Remember, we told you about him? And, Simon, this is our daughter, Beatrice.”

When Mom and Dad mentioned they hired Simon to help with the shop last year, I didn’t picture this beast of a man. Simon is an old and new-again name, so I assumed he was an elderly gentleman with wire-framed glasses and narrow shoulders, or a studious teen who wanted to earn some extra cash. Nobody with a name like Simon should look like he could hoist that Chesterfield sofa onto his shoulders and trample me in the process.

“Simon.” I taste the sound on my tongue. “I’ve never met anyone in our generation named Simon.”

“Can’t say I’ve met a Beatrice of any generation.” He doesn’t look at me. Instead, he places a pencil between his teeth and holds a clipboard aloft before turning a vase upside down, squinting at the tag. Maybe he needs a pair of wire-rimmed glasses after all, although they’d look ridiculous on his broad face.

“I’ll be starting here full-time tomorrow.” I watch that pencil as if it’s being violated, Simon’s incisors holding it steady while his full bottom lip protrudes outward in a little pout.

“Paul mentioned that,” he mumbles around the pencil before pulling it out and marking something on his clipboard. “I set some time aside to show you around.”

Show me around? I grew up in this shop. I held a lemonade stand outside the storefront, played hide-and-seek in the aisles, greeted customers by name before I could spell my own, and spent every summer sweating behind the front desk before we had air-conditioning installed.

“That won’t be necessary,” I say.

Simon shrugs and ducks, sorting through a collection of cut glass bowls. He furrows his thick brows and bites on the pencil again, this time with both rows of teeth piercing the soft wood. His black hair flops onto his forehead before he flicks it aside.

Dad appears on my right, fiddling with the catch on a curio cabinet storing porcelain figurines. “Simon has a good eye.”

Gigi slides in beside me and says, “He’s not too bad on the eyes either.”

“Mother,” Dad scolds her, “you may not be able to hear us, but everyone can hear you.”

“Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” Gigi says. “Besides, I could have said something about his nice posterior, but I didn’t.”

This is why I didn’t expect Gigi to be here. My parents have limited her access to customers since her already-meager filter disintegrated to dust sometime in her eighth decade. At ninety-two, she now has zero fucks left to give, but many fucks left to say in polite company.

Simon doesn’t even flinch. He’s tuning us out and focusing on his project, not even offering a polite smile to my grandmother. To be fair, she is objectifying him, but most men find the attention of my little old granny charming. Simon, however, doesn’t seem to know what charm is. I watch his reflection, refracted through the glass shelves. He’s traveling the length of the aisle in a deep squat like a baseball catcher, even though his knees should have aged out of that position. Mine sure have.

My dad points to a pristine mahogany piece set along the far wall, uncluttered by knickknacks.

“Simon found that Hepplewhite sideboard at a garage sale we visited last spring. Paid next to nothing for it, and it’s worth thirty thousand dollars.”

“Wow.” I hope they have it insured.

“He’s taken on most of the buying,” Mom adds.

This raises my antennae. When I volunteered to move home to take over, Dad confessed that business hasn’t been great for a while. The last thing they should be doing is outsourcing inventory to a stranger. Is that why the finances are in the red—Simon’s good eye, or worse, sticky fingers? It wouldn’t be the first time my parents trusted the wrong employee.

But that’s a sore subject none of us want to revisit.

“We’re going to head home if you’ve got it handled here, Simon,” Dad says.

“I’ll wait for the kids with Bea,” says Mom.

But I sense an opportunity. “No, head home with Dad and Gigi. I’ll round up the kids and be right behind you.”

“Are you sure?” Mom looks tired. She doesn’t have the stamina she used to, which makes me even more suspicious of Simon, who happened to show up with an eye for antiques as Mom and Dad began to lose theirs.

I slide on the I’m fine smile I’ve practiced for months. “Absolutely.”

After another round of are you sures and instructions, they shuffle off toward the back.

Gigi points her cane toward Simon and cups her other hand beside her mouth. “Keep your eye on this one, Bumblebee,” she stage-whispers as she exits.

What on earth does that mean?

I wait until they’re all out of earshot before I close the distance between Simon and me. “Remind me how long you’ve been working here?”

“About a year.” Simon doesn’t look up, and it feels like a dismissal.

“What were you doing before that? What’s your background?”

“I’m from Seattle.”

“Your background in antiques,” I clarify, but I sense he intentionally misunderstood the question.

He rises to his full height, peering at me from an altitude I’ll never visit. I’m not short, but I feel miniature now. He removes the pencil from his mouth. He really looks at me for the first time, and I notice his eyes are almost black, like the depths of an oil well, and the contrast is shocking against the long flare of his lashes, the only soft thing about him. There’s something kinetic about the way his gaze bores into me, assessing his opponent, crafting his strategy.

“You want my résumé?”

It’s not a question; it’s a challenge. But I’ve worked with enough male egos to handle him. After ten years in tech and another five managing Jake’s landscaping company, I know bro culture of the white- and blue-collar variety.

“Since I’m taking over here, it would be helpful to know a bit about your skill set, yes.”

Simon stares, skipping a few blinks before he speaks again. “Paul and Linea didn’t say anything about you taking over.” He folds his arms across his chest. “They said you’d be helping out.”

I smile, and this one is genuine, or as close to genuine as my professional smile has ever been. “Helping out by taking over.”

“Funny, they didn’t mention you having a background in antiques.”

“Business is business. I’ve worked in tech and managed a landscaping company.”

Simon raises an eyebrow, and the judgmental gesture tells me all I need to know about him. I wonder whether his disapproval has more to do with my gender than my expertise. If I had PhDs in art history and antiquities, I bet he’d still underestimate me.

“Are you suggesting that makes me unqualified?”

He glances around the store. “I don’t see any computers or flower beds in here.”

The nerve of this asshole. “I grew up in this store and worked every afternoon and summer before I left for college, where I was a double major in business and marketing and then earned my MBA.”

His stare is like the sun through a magnifying glass, and I’m an insect getting fried. “Good to know, but I wasn’t the one asking for your résumé.” When he drops his gaze to return to his earlier task, my body temperature drops, too.

“It sure sounded like you were.”

He makes a haphazard mark on the clipboard before inspecting a bronze tray and setting it aside, but the relief of his retreat is short lived because he drags his oil well eyes back to mine. His expression is impassive. “I don’t care what your degrees are in. All I care about is running this shop efficiently and keeping this business open, and that’s not going to be easy if I have to work for a nepo baby without relevant expertise.”

I release an incredulous laugh. Nepo baby? Of a struggling antiques store in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Who the hell is this guy? “You care about keeping this business open but not about being polite enough to keep your job?”

He shrugs. “If I can’t be honest, we probably can’t work together anyway.”

“In my experience, what some people call honesty is actually a lack of tact.”

“In my experience, what some people call tact is actually insincerity.”

The bell above the door chimes, breaking our standoff. I turn as a group of middle-aged women, animated and mid-conversation, enter the shop. Grateful for the interruption, I head toward the front to greet them. But my attention snags on a figure behind them, leaning against a column outside the store, hands in his pockets, head lowered, shaggy hair falling onto his forehead.

Jake. In the baseball cap and Levi’s. Jake.

I hover there, caught between one footstep and the next, studying his gestures like plots on a treasure map that can lead me back to my old life. I’m afraid if I speak or move, he’ll disappear again. I’m afraid if I fixate too long, I’ll freeze in this ephemeral state between heaven and earth. Between reality and insanity.

Jake pushes off the column and is almost out of sight when I return to my body. I take off to follow him. I think Simon says something behind me, but I don’t wait around to find out what, and I emerge onto the street as Jake passes the diner. Without the glass to obscure him, he seems solid, whole, and more than a mirage. His stride is longer, his pace faster, so I speedwalk, dodging a little kid on his bike, a teen walking her dog. But still he outpaces me, and it feels like that nightmare I have sometimes, when the kids are in danger but I’m running in place, unable to save them.

He gets to the end of the short drag of Main Street, and I’m only one storefront behind, so I take off on a jog.

I’m a few feet away, almost close enough to reach out and touch him, when I slam directly into someone leaving Genevieve’s and lose my footing.

“What the . . .” Miles grabs my arms, steadying me.

“You’re so dramatic,” Tess says. “We were barely two minutes late. You didn’t have to chase us down like a bear after her cubs.”

“It’s not like anything could happen to us in Suncrest,” Miles says. “It’s too small to get lost here.”

“And too boring to get into trouble,” Tess says.

When I step out of Miles’s grip and peer down the street, I’ve lost Jake—and likely my mind.

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