The Cafe at Beach End: A Summer Beach Read

by RaeAnne Thayne

Genres: Women's Fiction; Clean & Wholesome Romance

Synopsis

"[Thayne] engages the reader’s heart and emotions, inspiring hope and the belief that miracles are possible." —Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

For fans of Debbie Macomber and Susan Wiggs, an emotional story of starting over and reclaiming happiness.

When Meredith Collins was a child, the little beach town of Cape Sanctuary lived up to its name. Spending summers there with her grandmother, Meredith finally felt safe and loved.

Now she’s returning in disgrace. Her late ex-husband swindled investors out of millions of dollars and made Meredith a figure of scorn—though she knew nothing about his scheme. But she still has the beach cottage she inherited from her grandmother and half ownership of the local café. It’s a place to work and earn a little money. That’s if her cousin, Tori, will let her through the door. Once, Tori and Meredith were as close as sisters—until Meredith chose her neglectful parents’ expectations over their bond. Now widowed with a teenage daughter, Tori isn’t setting out a welcome mat for the woman who let her down so badly.

While Meredith tries to make a fresh start, she is drawn to a mysterious writer renting the cottage next door. Liam Byrne’s kindness is a balm, though she worries he might not be so friendly if he knew who she was. But Liam has his own secret and a mission that will help Meredith confront her past—and maybe, claim a surprising future…

“This compelling tale of family and community will please Thayne’s legions of fans as well as readers of Susan Mallery and Robyn Carr.” – Booklist on The Café at Beach End

Get lost in Cape Sanctuary with these other heartwarming reads:

• Summer at the Cape
• The Path to Sunshine Cove
• The Sea Glass Cottage
• The Cliff House

 

Read more

Release date: June 13, 2023

Publisher: Canary Street Press

Print pages: 333

Sample

1Meredith

The sky wept the day Meredith Rowland returned to Cape Sanctuary.

As the charming northern California town came into view, she did her best to peer through the heavily beating wipers of her car fighting a losing battle against sheets of rain.

Of course it was raining. It seemed only right, especially considering the dark, sinister cloud that had been following her for the past eighteen months.

As her tires splattered up rain from the wet road, Meredith checked the gas gauge of the ten-year-old compact car she had purchased with the last of her savings, after her beloved Mercedes was sold at auction.

The gauge read below the empty line, but she kept her fingers crossed that she could make it to the café before it ran out of gas.

The car sputtered a little. “Come on, Posy,” she said, using the nickname she had given it somewhere in Nebraska, not for a sweet-smelling floral arrangement but because the first three letters of POS made a particularly pungent acronym that described the car’s general quality.

The engine chugged and Meredith held her breath. “You’ve made it this far. Come on. Only another few miles to go. We’re almost there, baby. You’ve got this.”

Though she knew it was irrational, even delusional, she thought the car seemed to pick up a little energy, like an old horse that smelled the familiar stable of home. A moment later, Meredith chugged onto Main Street on fumes and prayer.

Miraculously, she found a parking space not far from the historic brick building that housed the Beach End Café.

As she gazed at the building, with its cupola and planters spilling over with red and purple flowers, a flood of memories washed over her. Most of them were good, but a few made her throat ache and her eyes burn.

She had adored this place, once upon a time. During her childhood, the café had been her happy place. Whenever she had been feeling lonely or sad or frightened, she would come here in her mind.

Here, she had found love and acceptance. Her grandmother hadn’t cared if she had a B in French literature or if she couldn’t remember how to conjugate “to plunder.” Frances and Tori had loved her just as she was.

If she closed her eyes, she could still picture herself and her cousin as they had been back then. One blond and fair, the other dark, but with the same hazel eyes they had inherited from Frances through their respective parents.

They had been as close as sisters. Closer, even. Sharing laughter and dreams and secrets during those halcyon summer months when Meredith would stay with her grandmother.

She could picture them now in a time-lapse age-progression that played across her mind. They were young girls, stopping at the candy store down the street to fill their pockets with sweets purchased using Meredith’s spending money. Then preteens, riding cruiser bikes through town and giggling at all the cute boys hanging out at the skate park at Driftwood Beach. Then teenagers, sitting around a bonfire and talking and laughing with those same cute boys while stars glittered overhead and the sea murmured its endless song.

Had that really been her? The memories seemed vague and undefined. Hazy and not quite real, as if it had all happened to someone else.

Probably because it had. Meredith was a different person than that lonely girl, yearning for affection.

She once had a nanny who used to tell her that all the cells in her body replaced themselves every three months, so she really did become a new person, like a snake shedding its skin.

She had learned as an adult that wasn’t wholly true—that some cells regenerated every few days, others had much longer life spans into the decades and

 others never regenerated. Still, so many moments in her life had that ethereal, distant feeling, as if they had happened to someone else.

Certainly the past eighteen months seemed a nightmare from which she couldn’t quite wake up.

All of those things had happened to her, though. She couldn’t wish away her history.

She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel as she finished parking and turned off the engine.

Like it or not, she owned it and would have to figure out now how to take the broken pieces of that history and rebuild herself into something better.

Reaching beside her for her umbrella, Meredith climbed out of the car and extended it, every muscle in her body aching from the long drive and the uncomfortable seat that offered zero lumbar support.

Sharp yearning washed over her for the leather luxury of her Mercedes, complete with both heating and cooling properties. She pushed it away. That was part of her Before life. This was her Now.

With rain clicking against the nylon of the umbrella, she arched her back and inhaled a few deep breaths, for courage as well as calm.

The mingled scent of sea and storm washed through her, smells that immediately took her back to long rainy afternoons in Frances’s old cottage on Starfish Beach, playing board games and watching old movies.

Even in the rain, Cape Sanctuary seemed warm and welcoming, with flowers hanging from streetlamps and more in baskets in windows. Outside the café, a bench with peeling red paint beckoned visitors and their tired feet to stop and enjoy the view.

Did it also apply to those with tired spirits? Because her spirit was at low ebb right about now.

Other disheartened travelers might be welcome to rest here. Not her. Meredith knew she would not be greeted with the typical warmth and comfort the café usually exuded.

The people inside would not be thrilled to see her. Or at least one person wouldn’t be, anyway. Her cousin and once best friend, Tori Ayala, would probably slam the door in her face and send her straight back out into the rain.

Grow a spine, she chided herself.

Tori couldn’t send her packing. Not when Meredith owned half of the café.

She walked to the front door, lowering her umbrella once she was under the shelter of the entry. Heart pounding, she pulled open the door.

At the chime of bells from the front door, the low hum of conversation and clink of glasses inside seemed to die away and everyone turned to see the newcomer.

It was midafternoon, past the busiest hour of lunch. Still, the café seemed to be enjoying a healthy business, more than Meredith might have expected for the off-hour.

“Be with you in a moment,” a cheerful voice rang out. Nerves fluttered through Meredith. She knew that voice, entirely too well.

That voice had once been on the other end of all those secrets, sharing her own and taking Meredith’s too.

The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with Tori the moment she rolled into town, but she knew this one was unavoidable.

She straightened, hitching her last designer purse a little more securely on her shoulder. All she had left was a wreck of a vehicle and the three hundred dollars contained in a Louis Vuitton bag worth about six times that much.

Conscious of the patrons of the restaurant giving her sidelong, curious looks, Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fighting with everything inside her against the urge to grab her bag tightly, push her way out the door and flee back into the rain.

And then what?

She couldn’t leave. Not when she had nowhere else to go.

A moment later, the person she most dreaded seeing came out of the kitchen. Her cousin Tori wore a trim black apron with the Beach End Café embroidered across the front in white, and her arms competently hefted a tray of at least three or four orders.

Her brown hair was caught atop her head in a messy bun, and she had a pencil tucked behind one ear.

She looked as beautiful as ever, bright and vibrant and so dear that the sight of her made emotions rise up in Meredith’s throat.

The sentiment was obviously not reciprocated. As Meredith might have predicted, Tori stopped dead the moment she spotted her. The tray in her arms wobbled slightly, but she maintained control with the ease of long practice.

Meredith’s stomach rumbled as the smell of sizzling meat mingled with coffee and fried potatoes, scents she would forever associate with the café.

Meredith suddenly remembered she hadn’t eaten since a hurried meal the night before, an inexpensive frozen dinner she had bought at the convenience store next to her questionable hotel in Sacramento and cooked in the microwave of her room.

She pushed away the hunger pangs as something to deal with later. Which was becoming the mantra of her life.

“Hello,” she said, not sure what else to say.

Her tentative greeting was met by a wall of fury that seemed as tangible as those storm-tossed waves at Driftwood Park.

“Get out,” Tori snarled. “Get the hell out.”

Meredith could feel herself shrink. She hated confrontation. It made her want to

disappear, to curl up around herself in the fetal position with her hands over her head.

At the anger in Tori’s voice, Meredith wanted to slink out the door, climb back into her car and drive away through the rain-spattered streets.

She couldn’t do that. She had come too far, literally and figuratively, to give up now.

She drew in a deep, café-scented breath and faced her cousin. “You want me to leave my own café? Why would I do that?”

“It is not your café,” Tori snapped, flushing.

“Not all of it. But half of it is.”

Tori’s mouth tightened and she hefted her tray higher. “Forty-nine percent. I’m still the controlling owner.”

“I know that,” Meredith said quietly.

She felt lucky to have any stake at all in the café, especially when she didn’t deserve so much as a box of straws.

Frances had clearly stipulated in her will that Tori would always have final say in all the café operations, given that she had spent her entire life working here whereas Meredith had only spent a few weeks every summer.

“I don’t have time for this right now,” Tori hissed. “I have customers. Some of us work for a living instead of existing on money we stole from gullible senior citizens.”

As she no doubt intended, her words cut deeper than any chef’s knife.

Before Meredith could muster a response, Tori gripped her tray and headed for a table in the corner where a group that looked like construction workers must have decided to take a break, probably because of the rain.

They, like everyone else in the café, were giving her surreptitious looks. Meredith wanted to disappear. Instead, she again straightened her spine.

She should be used to the whispers and stares by now. She was, in Chicago, but she had hoped for some respite here in Cape Sanctuary, thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime.

She stood gripping her damp umbrella, not sure what to do.

She had faced worse than this, she reminded herself. Tori couldn’t kick her out, and she couldn’t call the police on her. Meredith had as much right to be here as her cousin did.

When Tori was done delivering the meals, she headed back with the empty tray. The polite smile she had donned for the customers slid back into a glare.

“I thought you were leaving,” she snapped. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Or do let it hit you. I don’t care either way, as long as you go.”

Meredith let out a breath, wishing she could find amid the animosity some trace of the cousin who had once been her dearest friend in the world, the one she knew she could always count on. The one who invariably cried when Meredith had to leave every summer to

return to her real life.

She knew she wouldn’t find what she wanted here. She had burned that relationship to the ground long ago.

“I’m afraid I’m not leaving,” she said, fighting for calm. “Not this time. Grandma Frances left me half of the café—yes, I know, forty-nine percent. The only way I’ll leave is if you can buy me out.”

She had hoped they could have politeness between them, if nothing else, but she didn’t blame Tori for her anger. Meredith knew she had earned all of it and more.

“Can you?”

Her cousin’s features tightened. “Buy you out? You know I can’t.”

Meredith shrugged, trying for a placating smile. “Then I’m afraid you’re stuck with me until I figure out what to do next.”

“What do you mean, stuck with you?”

She shrugged. “I might only have a half stake in the café, but Frances left me all of Spindrift Cottage. I’ll stay there while I start to learn the ropes of things here.”

“Learn the ropes,” Tori echoed, as if she couldn’t quite make sense of the words.

“Yes. I’ll move into the cottage today and then report for duty tomorrow.”

Tori made a low sound of frustration in her throat. “So typical. You show up out of the blue and expect the whole world to start revolving around you.”

“I’m sorry you see it that way,” Meredith said with a calmness she didn’t feel. “I only want to help. Since Frances died, I’ve left the entire burden of running the café to you, which isn’t fair. I’m here to do my part now. I would have come earlier but I had...a few things going on.”

Meredith was aware her fingers were trembling, and she had to hope Tori couldn’t see.

“You’re not welcome here,” her cousin snapped again.

The impulse to escape overwhelmed her. She could always live in her car, since that was about all the shelter she could afford now.

When had she become such a coward?

She unfortunately knew the answer to that entirely too well.

As much as she didn’t like confrontation, she couldn’t avoid this one. Tori couldn’t make her leave. Despite everything, even though Meredith knew how little she deserved it, Frances had loved her. Her grandmother had given her a cherished legacy, part of the café Frances had loved as well as ownership of a small two-bedroom cottage on the beach.

That cottage was hers. No angry creditors could take it away.

“Do you have the key to Spindrift Cottage, or would you prefer I reach out to the attorney handling Frances’s estate?”

“I hate to break it to you but Spindrift Cottage is a mess. It’s barely habitable. The previous tenants trashed it before their lease expired last fall and th

n the roof leaked during the winter. I had it fixed, which I’ll bill you for, but I haven’t done anything else to it.”

Meredith swallowed, feeling vaguely queasy. Maybe she would end up sleeping in Posy after all.

“Thank you for that, anyway.”

“I was too busy to do anything more, even if I were so inclined, since I had to clean out Frances’s cottage entirely on my own.”

Tori, Meredith knew, had inherited their grandmother’s house, Seafoam Cottage. She also lived in a third cottage, Sandpiper Cottage, on the same strip of beach, one that Tori and her late husband had purchased from Frances and remodeled shortly after they married.

All of the houses were small clapboard beach cottages built at the same time. Her grandmother had inherited them from her own father and used to live in one and rent the other two out, until Tori and Javier bought Sandpiper Cottage from her.

Meredith fought her growing dismay. Tori was probably only trying to scare her away. How bad could the house really be?

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I don’t need much.”

Tori’s huff of disbelief and disdain burned.

“Is it furnished, at least?”

“Technically, yes. There’s a bed, a sofa and a kitchen table with one chair. Certainly not up to your usual gold-coated standards.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said again, with a confidence she was far from feeling. Even if it was a tent in the middle of a swamp, she wouldn’t say a word to Tori.

No matter what shape Spindrift Cottage might be, it couldn’t be worthless. It was on the beach, after all, and this was California, where the real estate market was one of the most expensive in the country.

This would work. It had to. She would fix up her legacy, sell the cottage and use the proceeds to rebuild her life somewhere far away.

She wasn’t serious about Tori buying out her share of the café. It had been a total bluff, though she wasn’t about to admit that to her cousin.

Once she sold the cottage, she planned to deed her share of the café over to Tori. It would be small recompense for all that Meredith had put Frances—and by default Tori—through, but something was better than nothing.

Meredith had exactly three hundred dollars to her name, which was hardly enough to even buy paint to spruce up the cottage. The bald truth was, she needed cash and the most obvious source of cash to help her flip the cottage would have to come from working at the Beach End Café.

“What time should I be here tomorrow? I saw the Help Wanted sign out front. I was thinking

 I could fill that opening.”

Tori gave her a disbelieving look. “You want to bus tables for the morning shift.”

Bus tables. That seemed about right for her skill level, when it came to working in a restaurant.

“Sounds perfect. So what time would that be?”

“We open at six thirty. The crew arrives at six.”

Six a.m. Meredith gave an inward shudder.

“I’ll be here. Go ahead and take the sign down.”

Tori gave her a look that plainly told Meredith exactly what her cousin would like to do with the sign. Meredith chose to ignore that as well.

“Where can I find the key to Spindrift Cottage? Do you have it or do I need to find that attorney?”

Tori gazed at her wordlessly for a long moment, then reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a ring of several keys attached together with a purple carabiner and extracted one. She held it out.

Half afraid Tori would change her mind and shove it back into her pocket, Meredith snatched it up. Her fingers closed around the cold metal and she pulled it into her own pocket.

Her stomach rumbled again, loud enough that Tori must have heard. While Meredith would have liked nothing more than to slide into one of those dearly familiar booths and order one of the famous Beach End burgers—or at least a slice of Dutch apple pie to go—she decided she had better not press her luck.

“Thanks. I guess I’ll see you in the morning. If not before, since we’ll be living on the same beach.”

She gripped the key like a lifeline and hurried out of the café. In her haste, she forgot all about the rain and the umbrella she still held in her hand. She opened it too late, after she was already drenched.

Surely there was some kind of metaphor in that to describe the mess of her life, but she had neither the energy nor the creative juices to figure it out.

She was here, in Cape Sanctuary. She had a place to sleep and a job. It might not be the ideal situation, but Meredith was desperate enough that she didn’t care.

 

2Tori

The door to the café shut with its customary chime of bells, a cheery, musical sound at odds with Tori’s suddenly sour mood.

Meredith. Here.

Her day had been going so well too.

The café had been busy since they opened, all deliveries had come on time and the cooks were both relatively cheerful, which didn’t always happen.

She had been thrilled to wake up to rain pounding the roof of the cottage, rain that the area desperately needed. The air had smelled delicious, damp with growth and spring, and everything had looked clean and new in the saturated light.

For the past three or four days, Tori hadn’t been able to shake the strange feeling that something wonderful was headed her way. She couldn’t have put her finger on why, she just had a little niggle of anticipation between her shoulder blades.

Boy, that was the last time she trusted her own intuition.

Could she have been more wrong?

Meredith. Here.

What did she want? She surely couldn’t expect to be welcomed back with open arms. If she did, she was in for a rude awakening. Tori would have liked to greet her with a head-spinning roundhouse kick to the chest instead.

And wouldn’t that have gone over well in a café full of customers? Not to mention get her arrested. Good thing she wasn’t a violent person, though having Meredith living on Starfish Beach might just turn her into one.

“Who’s the princess?” Ty Kemp, one of the two line cooks, looked curiously out the window, where Meredith walked through the rain toward a car parked down the street.

Princess was an accurate description. Meredith had been the spoiled, pampered child of ridiculously wealthy parents. Even dripping wet, she walked like she balanced a stack of books on her head, with a smooth, graceful glide.

“My cousin. No one important,” Tori answered shortly.

She returned to the empty booth in the corner she had been using as a makeshift office while she caught up on paperwork in between her other responsibilities.

Try as she might, she couldn’t focus. She kept seeing Meredith, thin, almost fragile, dressed in a jacket that seemed a size too large.

Why did she have to come back to Cape Sanctuary?

After everything that had happened the past few years—okay, more like the past fifteen—Meredith couldn’t seriously expect Tori to be thrilled to see her.

Could she be either arrogant or obtuse enough to think she could waltz in, announce what she wanted, and Tori would simply smile and hand her an apron?

Yes. That was probably exactly what she expected.

She did own half of the café and one of the cottages, thanks to Frances. Their grandmother had loved Meredith up to the end, despite everything.

“None of what’s happened is Meri’s fault, honey,” Tori could remember Frances saying in her soft voice, frail and breathless after her heart began to fail. “How can I blame her for her husband’s mistakes?”

“She had to know,” Tori had argued. “Meredith is not a stupid woman. How could she not know Carter was stealing from his clients to fund his own lifestyle?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know what went on between them. I know she’s had a hard time of it and needs our understanding.”

“She’s not getting mine,” Tori had snapped.

“I only know that I certainly don’t want to be on the hook for everything your grandfather  did before he died. ...