Page 2 of First Street (Harbor View Cozy Fantasy #1)

Chapter One

Skye

It had been winter. Sleet and ice and snow all mixed.

And cold. A car crumpled around the base of that very sign.

A ten-year-old girl, wide-eyed and shivering, crawling from the wreckage and planting herself on a bank of wet, grainy brown snow.

Breathless and dazed, but somehow less afraid than she’d been an hour before impact.

Funny how life works. Sometimes, a crash isn’t the scariest thing in a young girl’s life.

That’s how Clare and I met. She’d scooped me up from the side of the road like a lost kitten, depositing me in the warmth of her car while the world around us swarmed with flashing lights and loud voices.

Firetrucks, ambulances, hard-faced road crews.

All working to pry my mother’s body from the wreckage.

She was dead. I knew it before I even crawled out through the shattered window.

Her unseeing eyes, the blood splattered across the dashboard, the unsettling calm on her face that almost seemed to whisper, Safe.

Finally safe . It was a look that I have yet to make peace with, considering she was leaving me behind.

Then, the barrage of questions from people in uniform. And my answers, when they came, were blunt, hollow, stripped of emotion. Stunned, I guess.

No one to call.

I don’t have a father.

No family.

No, I don’t know where we were going.

We live in my mother’s car. That’s our home.

Yes, for a long time. That’s all we have. Had.

And now, even that was gone.

Through it all, my fingers clung to Clare’s hand. And she never let go. Not once. She was the first person who held onto me and promised she would never let go. And she kept that promise.

Sort of a miracle she’d been driving by that day.

Definitely a miracle that she stopped. When no one else would take me in, she did.

First as an unofficial foster kid, then as her own when she adopted me.

A single woman in her forties, she had no patience for nonsense and even less for the complications that came with a homeless, malnourished child who lacked education, manners, and everything in between.

But she never gave up. She fought for me, stood by me.

And as I got older, she weathered every moody storm of my teen rebellion with patience and grace.

She was there through every turning point—graduations, heartbreaks, career changes, late-night phone calls when life felt too heavy.

Even when I thought I didn’t need her, she showed up for me.

With wisdom. With laughter. With unconditional love.

Clare Randall. Thinking of her now, tears blurred my vision. My mother. Headstrong, stubborn, ornery. She tried to hide it, but she had a heart of gold.

Regret churned in my stomach as I thought of all the times in the past decade I hadn’t seen her enough, hadn’t called her enough.

The bond we had once forged had faded into nothing more than once-a-month calls, birthdays, and occasional holiday visits.

But it was always Clare who made the effort.

She booked flights to California, came when I needed her, and reminded me, over and over, that I was still hers.

Even as my life spun faster and faster, and sometimes out of control, she remained my anchor.

My marriage to Rhys turned an already turbulent life into a full-blown hurricane.

Deadlines. Unpaid bills. The constant hustle to keep us afloat.

Rhys was an actor—always chasing the next audition, the next small role, the next ‘maybe.’ That’s how the industry worked.

Every callback held the promise of a breakthrough.

Every ‘no’ felt like starting over. Feast or famine, but mostly famine.

Then we had a baby.

I tried to do it all. Wear every hat. Be everything for everyone. As a freelance writer, I was barely scraping together a living. It was just a different kind of famine.

I never wanted to burden Clare with our mess, so I kept putting off calling her. Told myself I’d do it tomorrow. Next week. That the next visit would make up for the last short one. I kept promising myself, and her, that we’d spend the summer in Harbor View. But time slipped away.

And now Clare, the woman who had fought so hard to hold on to me, was gone.

“Mom, don’t miss the exit.”

Ocean’s voice yanked me back to reality, away from the ghosts of the past. The rental car hugged the curve as we flew onto the exit.

“You’ve got those red patches on your face again.”

I glanced in the mirror. Stress always brought on hives. “You’re right. I look diseased.”

“You don’t look diseased. You just look...sad. Grieving. Or whatever.” She paused. “I miss her too.”

She was right. As usual. There hadn’t been enough time to process any of it.

First came the phone call from Arthur, the bookstore owner across the street. Clare’s only friend. The news had blindsided me. Guilt would follow later.

I’m so sorry, Skye. There’s been a freak accident...

A rainy night. Late. Clare had been poking around in her antique store, the Salt Box, her pride and joy. A slip, a fall, the unforgiving edge of a marble tabletop. The EMTs said she’d died instantly.

That was it. My mother was gone.

Arthur’s voice had been gentle but firm. “How soon can you get back here?”

I’d told him I’d be there in a couple of days. It had turned into ten days.

Even that had been a scramble. Juggling deadlines, asking for extensions, getting through Ocean’s last week of school, crossing off the endless list of things that had to happen before we could hit the road. It was overwhelming, but somehow we pulled it off.

“It’s okay to cry, Mom. Grief’s not like some to-do list where you can just check things off and move on.”

I glanced at her, one eyebrow raised. “What TikTok therapist did you steal that from?”

She rolled her eyes. “Wow. Some credit, for once. That was all me.”

I shook my head.

Ocean shrugged. “Like you always say. Fifteen going on thirty.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

Motherhood was a lot of things—exhausting, frustrating, a never-ending cycle of negotiating screen time, debating skirt lengths, and putting my foot down about piercings and tattoos.

It meant sleepless nights, eye rolls, slammed doors, and so many moments of second-guessing myself.

But right now, hearing the quiet concern in her voice, feeling the way her words reached out to steady me, I felt something else.

Love. The warm, swelling kind that spread through my chest like sunlight breaking through a storm cloud.

The kind that reminded me we were still tethered, mother and daughter, even in all the chaos.

And this past spring, chaos didn’t just come from thin finances.

My marriage was crumbling.

Rhys had finally landed his big break. A supporting role in a feature film shooting in New Mexico. He’d already been gone a month, with production expected to stretch into fall.

He came home for one weekend, just before I got the call about Clare. Filming had been shut down temporarily due to a safety issue.

That weekend was a disaster.

We fought. Sharp words. Deep cuts. The kind you don’t come back from easily.

He said it was his time now. That he’d sacrificed too much to let this opportunity pass him by. He needed space. Freedom to give everything to his career.

As if I hadn’t given him everything already.

While he’d chased auditions, I worked. While he’d partied late into the night, I paid the bills. I held our lives together while he waited for his shot. And now, with his dream finally within reach, he expected more from me.

What did wanting space mean? Was he asking for a divorce? I asked him that directly. But he said no.

I was exhausted. Drained by the excuses. Done begging for time, for presence, for partnership. Long-distance wasn’t working.

When he suggested Ocean and I join him for the summer, it made sense. School would be out. My work was remote. That was the plan.

Then the call came. Clare had died.

I was shattered. Rhys, on the other hand, insisted we stick to the plan.

“Fly to the East Coast for the funeral, hire a lawyer, get a real estate agent to handle everything,” he said. “You can wrap it up in a couple of days.”

I couldn’t do it. I’d already stolen time from my mother when she was alive. I wasn’t about to do the same in her death.

Wrap it up. Clare deserved better.

Ocean stuck her head out the window, letting the wind tangle her curls. She looked back at me and grinned.

“You know, I’m totally lit about checking out your old turf.” She pushed the sunglasses up on top of her head. “It’ll be fun. Just the two of us .”

I stole a glance at my daughter. The way she emphasized the words ‘two of us’ scratched at a scab on my conscience.

I appreciated what she was saying, but I didn’t want her to give up on her father.

My roots, my family—if I had any—were important.

Not knowing where I came from before that car crash was maddening.

From the nights I’d spent curled up in the backseat of my mother’s car, listening to the rain pound down on the roof, to the years when I found refuge with Clare in her house, the idea of having a father had always been just that...an idea. A dream. Something distant. A fairy tale.

No, I wasn’t going to take that away from Ocean. Not when she was moving through the toughest years of life. As mature as she was, teenage years were no picnic.

I’d always worked to give her something stable, something solid. I’d worked hard to provide the kind of life I had only dreamed of, a two-parent family I’d once only been able to imagine. I wouldn’t be the one to tear that life apart.

Our life wasn’t picture-perfect, that’s for sure. And Ocean was old enough to see the cracks, alert enough to hear the stones Rhys and I pelted at each other.

Ocean needed her father. I needed to know if my marriage was worth saving.

Rhys and I had settled on two weeks.

Two weeks to plan a memorial and a burial.

Two weeks to sort through a lifetime in the barn, sell off the antiques, and get the house ready for market.

Two weeks to say goodbye.

My fingers tightened around the wheel as the ‘Welcome to Harbor View Borough’ sign loomed into view.

Two weeks. That’s all we had.