Page 22 of First Street (Harbor View Cozy Fantasy #1)

Chapter Eighteen

Ocean

Locking the doors had been total overkill.

Ocean realized that the second she watched her mom and Arthur pull the barn door open.

A minute later, when the so-called intruder stepped out, Ocean felt kind of ridiculous for freaking out.

The woman was old. Like, fifties or sixties.

Or whatever counted as old here. Either way, she didn’t exactly scream danger.

Ocean didn’t bother unlocking the doors. While the three of them started talking in the driveway, she bolted upstairs two at a time. She’d get the scoop when they were done out there.

Right now, she was buzzing. Like, full-on electric. Jo had shown herself. For real this time. Not just a weird breeze or a window opening or the smell of lavender, but her, standing there, talking, hugging her. Real.

She didn’t think she’d felt this kind of rush before. Not even when she caught a wave next to a dolphin off Malibu last summer.

For half a second, Ocean thought about calling Ivy. She wanted to, super bad. But no. There was way too much riding on this. What if Jo didn’t like it? What if she vanished again?

And seriously, how would she even explain it?

Hey, there’s a ghost living in my grandma’s house, and she cried when she hugged me.

Yeah. Ivy would totally think she’d lost it. One hundred percent.

Ocean was relieved to see Jo waiting for her in the bedroom. She was reading one of the letters and put it down on the desk when Ocean walked in.

“Who was it?” she asked.

“A woman. An old one,” Ocean said, still catching her breath.

“What was she doing in there?”

“I have no idea.”

Jo had been the one to warn her. One second she was hugging Ocean, like, an actual hug, and the next, she was moving to the window, peering out and saying, “Call your mother. Someone’s in the barn.”

Ocean had no clue how Jo knew. Could she be in two places at once? Did she have ghost-hearing or something?

Oh my god. Ocean had a million questions.

She jumped onto her bed, sat cross-legged, and beamed at Jo.

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for showing yourself to me.”

Jo gave her a crooked smile. “Don’t tell your mother. She’ll kill me.”

Ocean blinked. “Aren’t you already dead?”

“Yes. Dead, dead, dead,” Jo said dryly. “But I’ve known Skye a lot longer than you have. And trust me, sugar, she’d make my afterlife so miserable, I’d be ready to disappear forever.”

“I get that.” Ocean giggled, then leaned forward. “How long have you known my mom?”

“Since the day Clare brought her to this house and warned me not to show myself to her.”

Ocean thought about that. Skye had been adopted when she was ten. Ocean knew that part. But anything before? Total mystery. Like, a black hole level of silence. Her mom never talked about it. Ever.

Ocean remembered one time in third grade, when she had to make a family tree. She’d asked a simple question—like, barely a question—and everything had exploded. No yelling. Just…cold. Shut down. That was the day Ocean learned, don’t go digging.

Looking back, it was so obvious. Her mom didn’t just avoid the past. She'd erased it. No grandparents other than Clare. No baby pictures. No old stories. And definitely no dad. Just that same clipped line, every time: You can say Clare is my mother. That’s all they need.

If someone at school has a problem with that, I’ll handle it.

Ocean glanced up now, heart ticking. “But you did show yourself to her.”

Jo gave a half-smile and shrugged. “I’m terrible at following rules. Even ghost ones.”

There was something weirdly young about Jo. Like she was way closer to Ocean’s age than her mom’s. It was in how she talked, how she moved, like she still remembered what it felt like to be fifteen.

Right now, Jo was perched on the edge of the bed like she totally belonged there, knees tucked primly, even though she was…you know. A ghost. Ocean sat cross-legged across from her so their faces were level, eye to eye.

“How old are you?” Ocean asked, half-expecting some cryptic, spirit-world answer.

Jo tilted her head, eyes twinkling. “Do you mean my real age? Or my ghost age, as in, Oh no, I’m so ancient my teeth are falling out and my skin’s about to peel off in strips ?”

Ocean cracked up. “Okay, ew. Definitely not the zombie version.”

“Nineteen,” Jo said simply.

“No way.” It flew out of her mouth before she could reel it in.

Nineteen. That was practically nothing. Four years from now. Less than a driver’s license and a couple AP classes away.

Her thoughts spiraled. Nineteen meant…no college. No late-night drives with music too loud. No dumb mistakes with cute boys. No figuring stuff out at two in the morning with your best friend at the park. None of it.

Jo had died before all that.

Ocean swallowed. That realization hit harder than she expected.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. “That’s so sad. When did you die? How did you die?”

“October of 1918,” Jo said gently. “Spanish flu.”

“You died from the flu?” Ocean blinked. “Didn’t they have doctors back then? Meds or something?”

Jo gave a faint, sad smile. “They had doctors. But not much they could do. Folks didn’t really understand how it spread.”

This reminded Ocean of COVID. No one in her family got sick, but she still remembered the lockdowns, school shutting down, masks and being stuck at home for months.

She’d liked the break at first. More time to read and hang online.

But that was also when she started noticing how much her parents bickered.

How tense things got. How maybe they didn’t even like each other that much.

“One day you were feeling fine,” Jo went on. “The next…you weren’t. I took ill in the afternoon and didn’t live to see the morning. No doctor came to see me. And even if one had come, it wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

Ocean shook her head.

“Later on, I heard that in New England alone, close to fifty thousand people died in just a few months,” Jo said quietly.

“Whole families gone. Schools shut down, churches turned into makeshift hospitals. Folks were too scared to touch the people they loved. You coughed and doors closed in your face.”

“But you were so young.”

“It didn’t matter. Sometimes being young and strong only made it worse. Your body fought too hard, and that’s what did you in.”

Ocean hesitated. “So…were you living in this house? Is that why you’re still here?”

“It’s because I died here.” Jo shook her head. “I didn’t live here. I was staying with my friend Esme, Clare’s grandmother. She was twenty then, a year older than me. But the truth is, I wasn’t just visiting. I’d run away from home.”

“You ran away at nineteen? Why? Pregnant?”

Jo laughed. “No! Henry was off fighting in Europe. That would’ve been quite the miracle.”

Ocean sat up straight, wide-eyed. “Who’s Henry?”

Jo’s eyes got sad and she glanced over at the letters. “Henry is…was… my intended. The man I wanted to marry. But that wasn’t going to happen. My parents had other ideas. They never approved of him.”

“Why?”

“Money. Status.” She frowned. “In New York, families like mine only wanted their daughters to marry with their own kind. Old money, well-connected, the right last name. Love didn’t matter so much.”

“That’s so sad.”

“It gets worse, I’m afraid. With the war on and Henry overseas, my parents took advantage of him being gone.

They arranged a match with a dreadful, older man I barely knew.

Without telling me. He met all the requirements: wealthy, respectable, a New York pedigree going back to the Revolution.

It was all about status and appearances for them.

When I found out, I told them it wasn’t going to happen.

But it didn’t matter how much I said I wouldn’t do it.

They just ignored me and forged ahead with their plans.

So, the night of the engagement party, I went out the back door, took the train from New York to Harbor View, and walked from the station to Esme’s house.

To this house. My parents had no idea where I’d gone. ”

“Wait. You lived in New York, and Esme lived here?” Ocean frowned, thinking of how easy it was for her and Ivy to text back and forth every day. But back in 1918? “How did you two even know each other?”

“My family had a summer house here. On Fourth Street. Esme and I had been friends since we were knee-high. Every summer, we were thick as thieves. She was the one person I could count on. I knew she’d never turn me away.”

“So, was Henry from New York?”

“No. He lived right across the street.”

“Above the bookstore? Where Arthur lives?”

“Exactly, but there was no bookstore then. It was the Stewart’s family home.

” Jo smiled wistfully and glanced at the window.

“Henry was a couple of years older than Esme and me. When we were little, he used to tease us something awful. But as we got older, he stopped being a nuisance and somehow became part of our little crew. And then…well, the two of us went and fell in love.”

All of a sudden, Ocean had one of those ‘aha’ moments. Jo’s words echoed in her mind. Not just what she said, but how she said it. She still loved Henry. That love was still alive.

Ocean thought of the strange things she’d noticed in the bookstore. Little things that didn’t make sense until now.

Still, like piecing together a puzzle, she needed to start with the corners.

“What happened to Henry?”

Jo’s smile faded entirely. “He was wounded in the Argonne Forest in France right around the same time I died.”

“That’s horrible. Did he die there?”

“No. He survived the fighting somehow, but he needed to convalesce in France for a long time. The funny thing was that at the time neither of us knew what was happening to the other. That’s when he wrote those letters to me.

From the hospital there.” She gestured toward the desk, where the thin blue pages lay.

“But I never got them. Never saw them until today. I was already gone.”

Ocean didn’t say anything. She just listened, trying to ignore the knot that had formed in her chest.

“He was sent home after the war,” Jo went on. “Back here. To the house across the street.”

“And then?”

“Before he got here, Henry’s parents died, as well. The epidemic surged again the following summer. It took them both,” Jo said gently. “When he came back, the only one left in his family was his younger brother.”

Ocean thought of all the sadness and suffering of that time. The war. A deadly flu. “Did...did Henry ever marry?”

Jo shook her head. “No. And then, not long after, he died too. ”

“Died? But he must’ve been young!”

“He was twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four?” Ocean stared. “Did that flu get him too?”

“No. An accident.”

Ocean let out a slow breath. “That’s crazy. It’s like, Romeo and Juliet stuff.”

Seriously. After more than a hundred years, Jo was still obviously pining for him. That had to be real love.

“I always thought that when people died, they…I don’t know, crossed over. Moved on. But you...you stayed behind.” A thought occurred to Ocean. “Do you think he knew? When he came back, I mean. Did he know that you were right here, a ghost?”

“At that time, only Esme knew,” Jo said quietly. “She told him once, and he came over to the house. But he couldn’t see me. Couldn’t hear me. And when she told him I was still here, I think he didn’t believe her. Or maybe he did. But I think it just added to his pain. It was just too much for him.”

She paused, her voice catching, barely more than a whisper.

“That was the only time—after I died, I mean—that we were in the same house. He was just a few steps away, and he never knew for sure that I was there, watching, aching to reach out and touch him. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even say goodbye.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”

Ocean glanced toward the front of the house, toward Arthur’s bookstore across the street. Now that she knew ghosts were real, she had to ask.

“Did Henry stay behind too?” she asked. “Like you?”

Jo nodded slowly. “Of course, he did. I think our love is the reason we’re both still here. Because neither of us could let go. Not while the other was still holding on.”