The Second Chance Read online

  I set the papers aside and launched a blank document on my laptop. I couldn’t tolerate the old dinosaur desktop Lance had set up, and I was having high speed internet installed immediately—not that the paper could afford it, but I needed decent internet if I was going to do this.

  I typed out a quick list of potential news articles, including an interview with Mayor Harrison Ashford about the plans for this year’s fall festival and his future plans for Superiore Bay, a feature on local businesses, and a tell all with Selena and Conner about their joint venture with the Orchard Hill Farm expansion project. If I had the chance to dig into their relationship a little more, the gossip mongers of the bay would eat it up.

  Just as I was trying to figure out an angle on the Ellison’s maybe baby “story,” I realized I wasn’t alone. “Hi.” I stared at the tiny blond girl sitting across from me. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, you can start by telling me who you are?” The girl scowled at me. “And what did you do to my office?”

  “Your office?” I tried to conceal my smile behind my coffee cup.

  “And what’s that smell?” She wrinkled her freckled nose at me.

  “Uh. Clean?”

  “I don’t like it.” She folded her arms over her chest and glared at me through an enormous pair of glasses.

  “I’m Harper Chapman,” I offered. “And you are …”

  “Stevie. Stevie Osbourne.” Big brown eyes blinked at me.

  “And you … work here?” I pressed.

  “Assistant to Editor Lance Marner. Now, it’s your turn.” She stared at me with open curiosity. “Wait, no. I know you. You’re Harper Chapman from the Boston Globe. You do those silly puff pieces about seals and the Boston Marathon winners.”

  I nodded with a sad sigh. My career wrapped up in a nutshell from the words of a twelve-year-old who should be in school. “That’s me.”

  I turned back to my computer, adding a few more ideas to my list for some harder-hitting newsworthy articles. I would have to ease the townspeople back into real journalism. After a steady diet of juicy gossip, it wouldn’t do well to change things on them too quickly.

  “How old are you, Stevie.” I turned back to her.

  “I’m fifteen, and I work here as an intern for school credit. I come to the office around noon every day during the summer, after my mornings at the rec center.”

  “And what duties do you perform?”

  Stevie gave a disgusted snort at that. “Lance doesn’t let me do anything useful. I send the final layouts to the printer, pick up the proof copies so he can do final edits, and then I pick up the mail here a few times a week and run his errands. It’s a bunch of crap work, but it’s something to put on my college résumé. I want to be a journalist. A real journalist.” She looked down her narrow nose at me, as if to say I didn’t count as a real journalist in her book. Mine either, kid. This wasn’t what I set out to become when I left college with big dreams and high hopes.

  “Are you sure you’re fifteen?” I leaned forward, my mind spinning with all the jobs I could give her if she was serious about this internship.

  “I’m small, okay? Deal with it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I grinned. I liked this kid already. “So.” I leaned back in my chair. “Lance basically told me if I thought I could do a better job, I could have this paper and run with it. And I intend to do just that.”

  “Okay.” Stevie shoved her glasses back up on her face. “What does that mean for me? I need this internship, lady.”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what kind of jobs you’d like to do? Wow me with your ideas and we’ll go from there.”

  “Are you for real?” Stevie scowled at me, but she leaned forward eagerly. She was hungry for this, and that was something I could work with.

  “Totally.”

  “I’d start with the crappy website. The thing’s prehistoric and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt with an infrastructure that allows people to submit tips anonymously and watch a live feed of all the gossip they can stand.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work.” And a lot of money.

  “I can build it. At least a basic platform we can grow with, but I need decent internet to do it here.”

  “Now, that could be doable. I’m upgrading the internet here as soon as possible. I like the way you think, Stevie. What else you got?” I tapped my pencil against my coffee cup, curious to see what she’d come up with on the fly.

  “We need actual news, not just an auto-feed of crap gossip. We need to dig into what’s really happening in this town and deliver the news like responsible journalists.” She slapped her fist into the palm of her hand and gave me a feisty look.

  “Agreed. How are your writing skills?” I started typing notes, adding a second list of things for my new sidekick to handle.

  “Writing skills?” Her voice came out sounding more like the fifteen year old she was.

  “You want to stand behind the scenes, picking up my dry-cleaning, or do you want to be a journalist?”

  “Journalist.” Stevie nodded, her head bouncing like a bobble-head toy. “I have tons of ideas for articles and ways to offer freelance opportunities for local writers. Oh, and a weekly column about what’s going on at Superiore Bay High. Kind of like the gossip stuff, but more life or death kind of stuff. The huge carbon footprint the school system here is leaving, the sub-par supervision for irresponsible students with off-campus internships they don’t actually have, the crap job the school superintendent is doing with our outdated textbooks. Did you know we’re using history books printed in the eighties? There’s nothing of recent history in our curriculums.”

  I held up my hand to stall her. “That all sounds great, and I love your idea for a column. Bring me six hundred words for next week’s edition on the carbon footprint thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Stevie shoved her glasses up again. “Want me to work on the website too?”

  “You know what, kid, run with it. As long as it has the basic information of who we are and where we’re located and links to the archives, then consider it your baby.”

  Stevie snatched her phone up and started making a list of her own.

  “How long do I have you each day?” I went back to my own notes. One of her ideas had sparked one of my own.

  “From noon to four, but I’m usually around till five most days.” She kept typing, her thumbs flying over her keyboard.

  “Perfect. You’ll leave at four on the dot from now on. I don’t want you overextending yourself. School is your number one priority.”

  “Fine. As long as we’re actually working, we’ll get more done than Lance does in most weeks. Granted, he has a regular job too, so I guess he did the best he could.”

  “Well, we’re going to do better.” I reached across my desk to offer her my hand. “Deal?”

  “Deal.” Stevie grinned and shook my hand like a used car salesman.

  “Now, go home and do some brainstorming. We’ll meet back here at noon tomorrow.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Stevie shot out of her seat, grabbing her backpack.

  “I just have one rule, Stevie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t call me ma’am. I’m just plain old Harper.”

  “Okay. Bye, Harper.” Her smile transformed her face as she darted out of the office and retrieved her bike from the sidewalk.

  “It’s like looking at myself a million years ago.” I shook my head with a matching smile of my own. It was so strange, sitting here in this crappy office with the horrible furniture and scary bathroom. But it was more fun than I’d had in a long time.

  I crossed the small room to the Keurig to make another cup of coffee. I had some serious work to do today. With Stevie on board, I made the snap decision to put out a new edition of the Weekly Wine next week. That gave me about ten days to write the articles and layout the issue, figure out how the anonymous gossip tips came in, and get it edited and to the printer. Easy, ri
ght?

  Nerves churned in my stomach. The good kind. I grabbed a marker and headed to the dry erase board. Sketching out an ambitious twelve-page layout, I started planning my first edition.

  The Weekly Wine might not be the Boston Globe, but I hadn’t felt this excited about work in years. For most of my professional career, I’d had Garret hanging over my head, pushing me to be better—just not better than him. He’d molded me into the perfect work-wife turned wife-wife. The career girl who worked along side her husband, taking all the insignificant stories while he chased the real ones. That left me free to keep his life in order, his suits dry-cleaned, and food in the fridge.

  It had been ages since I’d had an assignment I could get excited about. So what if it wasn’t a major newspaper? So what if it didn’t pay anything? The Weekly Wine was like a lump of fresh clay, and I could mold it into whatever I wanted it to be. It was … liberating.

  Chapter Ten

  I had a secret. Well, there were no such things as secrets in this town, but my family was oblivious, as they always were when it came to me.

  I volunteered at the community center. During the summers, they ran camps for kids and teens of all sorts and relied on volunteers to help make it affordable for every family in Superiore Bay.

  And I kind of loved it. Okay, no “kind of” about it. I lived for the community center, for the hours when no one looked at me like a disappointment. Some of these kids idolized me, most of them respected me, and that was rare in my world.

  I walked through the double glass doors that led into the lobby of the building that had been paid for with donations. It was a wonderful place for the kids of this town, somewhere they could stay out of trouble and just have fun.

  “Hey, Delia.” I rapped my knuckles on the reception desk on my way by.

  The middle-aged brunette looked up with a smile on her face. “You’re—“

  “Late, I know.”

  “Someone needs to buy you a watch, boy.”

  I grinned back over my shoulder at her as I kept walking. “It’s called a phone, and I couldn’t find it this morning.” It was probably dead and stuck under the seats in my car. Something I hadn’t noticed until no alarm went off this morning.

  It wasn’t a new phenomenon for me.

  The kids were already breaking off into their groups when I walked in. A few of them jumped for high fives from me, and I joined my cousin Harrison in the center of the room. He ran the program and only gave me a shake of his head.

  I shrugged. “I’m here, okay. Only a bit late.”

  “Sure, sure.” He looked down at his clipboard, but I knew it was just so I couldn’t see him roll his eyes at me. I couldn’t rag on him too much. He’d never told my brothers or my father about my time here. They wouldn’t understand doing something when there was no money in it.

  Harrison was the do-gooder mayor though, and I knew he lived for this as much as I did. “I’m putting you in the writing class today.”

  I snapped my eyes to his. “Me?” We offered different classes for the teenagers to sign up for in two-week rotations, and creative writing had always been popular.

  “You’re late, you get the last assignment.”

  “Can’t I go play dodgeball with the kids or something? They adore me.”

  Harrison chuckled. “Next time, try being on time.” With that, he walked toward the kids standing around a bag of dodgeball balls and waiting to go into the gym. Traitor.

  I sighed and headed toward a classroom near the back. My favorite kid in the program scowled at me as I walked in. Stevie had attitude, and I absolutely loved it. She hated that I thought she was cool.

  She raised her hand but didn’t wait for me to call on her before speaking. “Is anyone else concerned that Carter is our teacher today?”

  There was murmured assent among the approximately ten other students.

  “Thanks for the intro, Stevie.” I met her hard stare, not backing down. “It’s going to be fun teaching all of you.”

  She crossed her arms. “Like you could teach us anything. Besides, writing isn’t supposed to be fun for the writer, only the reader.”

  I perched on the edge of the desk at the front of the room and scanned the group. “Well, that’s not right. Why is something worth doing if it’s not fun?”

  Stevie sighed. “I may as well just head to the Weekly Wine for my internship early.”

  “You’re working with Harper?” The woman I still needed to apologize to. I smiled despite my guilt. I bet she loved Stevie.

  She didn’t answer me, and I studied the room with its boring white walls, rigid desks, and uptight teenagers. This wasn’t what summer was supposed to be like. “Everyone stand up.” They reluctantly obeyed. “We’re going on a field trip.”

  Stevie let out a snort of disgust. “Will we learn about writing there?”

  “You learn how to write various kinds of literature and papers in your classes during the school year. And I’ll admit, that’s not my forté. But we can do something better. To be a good writer, you need to be able to open your mind, to see every part of something. Let’s go.”

  I walked out the door, praying they were following me. Delia gave me a confused frown, but I didn’t stop. When I reached the doors to the outside, I stopped and turned back to the class, relieved to find them all there. “Summer shouldn’t be spent inside.”

  It wasn’t a particularly sunny day. In fact, the sky looked downright angry. But it wasn’t raining, so we headed down the sidewalk to the community center gardens. I stopped when I reached the edge of the path that meandered through flowering bushes and gorgeous trees.

  “Stevie, can you describe this garden for me.”

  “I’m going to be a reporter; I don’t need to describe things.” At least her scowl was gone.

  I didn’t press. “David, how about you?”

  David stepped forward and studied the garden for a moment. “There are flowers. And a few trees.”

  “You can do better than that,” I said. “Tell me about the colors, the smells. Are the flowers buds or have they bloomed? Where are they in relation to the path? Do the trees change the garden’s look?”

  We spent the next hour in the garden taking turns describing various elements, and I even caught a few smiles. We’d gone on too long, and it was almost time to rotate to their physical activity. A raindrop hit my cheek, and I looked up in time to see the skies open.

  My students screamed and scrambled back toward the building, thunder on their heels. I followed at a slower pace, water soaking into my hair, my clothes. I laughed when I walked inside to find the group standing by the reception desk, water dripping off them. Some of them looked angry, but a few had wide grins stretching their faces.

  One of the latter was Stevie. She stepped toward me. “Okay, that class was pretty cool.”

  I held a hand over my heart. “Stevie thinks I’m cool. I can die a happy man now.”

  She shoved me, and I stumbled back with a laugh.

  Harrison walked in from the gym and froze. “What happened to you?”

  I patted his shoulder on my way past. “Writing, man. It’s dangerous.” To my group, I yelled, “Who wants to play some basketball?”

  Tomorrow, Harrison would probably put me with the little kids playing dodgeball after this.

  It was about noon when I walked out, my clothing still a bit damp and my hair a mess. I always left the community center feeling better than when I’d walked in. It was one of the many reasons I kept going back.

  I stopped by the deli and picked up a couple apology sandwiches. There was someone I needed to see before I went home to shower.

  I knocked on the office door, half expecting to find it empty, but before I could second-guess myself, Harper opened the door looking like she hadn’t slept since I’d seen her a few days ago.

  I walked in and shut the door. “Hey, are you okay?” Without thinking, I touched her cheek.

  She pulled back, and my hand
dropped. “Just busy. What are you doing here?”

  I held up the bag of sandwiches. “Figured you could use some sustenance.”

  “Oh good, I’m starving.” She dropped into her chair, and I took the seat on the other side of the desk before digging into the bag and handing her a wrapped sandwich.

  “Chicken salad.” She smiled. “You remembered.”

  “Everything.” I shifted my eyes away. I definitely hadn’t meant to let that slip.

  An awkward silence spread between us as we ate until I couldn’t take it anymore. “Harper … I’m sorry.”

  She paused with her sandwich halfway to her mouth. Her head cocked to the side. “For what?”

  “The other day. I was rude, and then I just ran out of here.”

  She set the sandwich down. “It’s okay. I get it. This is all a little weird, being here with you. I can forgive you for being a dork.”

  “A dork, eh?” I grinned. “No one calls me a dork anymore.” It had been her favorite insult, but it always sounded more like an endearment coming from her lips.

  We shared a smile. “Well, maybe because you’re not nearly as gangly and awkward anymore.”

  “I was never gangly and awkward.”

  Her eyes met mine in challenge. “So you think.”

  “Fine.” If she wanted fighting words … “You were a know-it-all.”

  A laugh barked out of her. “Carter, did you ever wonder if that was because I actually did know it all?”

  “You had chicken legs.”

  She gasped. “Well, your hair had this weird swirl in the back.” A swirl she’d loved playing with as we lay on a blanket under the stars on hot summer nights.

  We both chewed the rest of our food, determined looks on our faces. We’d faced off like this many times, seeing who’d break first. Usually, it was me. She’d say something adorable that was supposed to be an insult, and I’d lean forward, swallowing the words in a kiss. But I couldn’t do that this time, and the realization that I wanted to was like a bucket of ice water washing over me.