Lily stared at her. Char was in her late fifties and trim with lovely chestnut-colored hair and warm chocolate-brown eyes that matched Aidan’s. She walked with a cane, but otherwise seemed fine. “They think you’re feeble?”

Char laughed. “Well, to be fair to them, you’re seeing me on a good day. I’ve had some hip trouble again. Took a fall and needed surgery. But I’m on the mend. Unless you ask Aidan and Gray. I tripped last week and they nearly sent for an ambulance. They worry like a couple of grannies. Baby,” she said to Jonathan, “would you mind if Lily fixed me up today?”

“Not even a little,” Jonathan said.

Lily smiled as she went to work on Char’s hair even as a part of her ached. The Kincaids stuck together through thick and thin. For the last ten years she’d been independent. On her own. No one counted on her, and she didn’t count on anyone either.

It was best that way.

Or so she’d told herself. But she couldn’t deny just a little bit of envy at what the Kincaids had in one another. “They worry because they love you and want you to be happy and safe,” she said.

Char nodded. “I know, and of course I feel the same way. It’s just that it’s all amping up again—the resort, the past, and I can’t stop it or help them. I worry, too, about them.”

Lily met Char’s gaze in the mirror. “What’s amping up again?”

“Oh, never mind my ramblings.” Char waved her words off like she regretted uttering them in the first place. “It’s just me being silly. You’re doing a great job on my hair, honey.”

Lily took in Char’s expression, carefully blank now. Clearly she’d said more than she’d wanted. Lily wanted to push, wanted to … what? Help? She could barely help herself.

And then there was Aidan.

She didn’t need to know what was going on in his life. She was here to earn some money until a real job came through.

That was it.

She was not here to reminisce or daydream about Aidan. Besides, if she was going to think about him at all, it was to hope that he’d taken one look at her and was even now pining away for what he could’ve had all those years ago.

Later, when Char left, Lily took a walk-in customer. She was finishing up the cut when the door opened again, to another woman.

“The special please,” she said, waving a coupon from the week’s paper. “The young rejuvenating facial. I want to look thirty.”

“Mom,” Jonathan said. “It’s a facial, not a magic wand.”