Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Eternal Sunshine
If current Harper had told pre-Spencer Harper that she would spend a month and half not working, living by the sea, she would have laughed in her face.
Welcome To Maine, The Way Life Should Be
The sign greeted her when she first drove to her Dad's.
And for a while, it was, exactly how life should be. Harper would wake up with the sun, spending the morning collecting sea shells along the water as sand collected in the ends of her white pants. She sat with her coffee and listened to the soft waves as she wrote. She wrote so much that she'd gone through two of her beloved brown-bound notebooks within the first three weeks. It felt right to be writing without an audience like she was rediscovering what had led her to her career in the first place.
So much had happened since that first fateful interview at the BAU that Harper had never really processed. Shooting a man, getting kidnapped, losing Spencer. It hit her now, but instead of feeling like she was drowning in the memories she felt like she was learning to swim again. She spent so much of her day not speaking now, she felt like her words held more gravity.
I think it's less about the words we say, and more about what it says between those words.
She finished writing in her journal, closing the book and tucking it into her bag.
It was a Wednesday, which meant her Dad would be waiting for her at the local fishmongers. He would have already ordered her a lobster roll, her favourite, and would be deep in conversation with whoever would listen.
Harper stood, shaking the sand off her blue sweater and walking back into the town centre. She'd already fallen into a rhythm, despite the lack of responsibilities she had here she did almost the same thing every week. She wished Spencer was here to see how the sun set every night, how she would watch it from her Dad's balcony on his little house by the water.
But he wasn't here, and she was trying to spend less of her day thinking about him.
"Hey Perry!"
It was a stupid nickname that only her dad ever used for her. She smiled at him. Her dad, Ted, was entering his 70s and absolutely, undeniably happy. He'd retired from psychology ten years ago, and after an amicable divorce from Harper's mom moved here to Maine, where essentially all he did was get more tan and talk to everyone in town.
"Hey Dad," Harper greeted him, sliding her notebook onto the table and hanging her tote bag off the back of the chair. She was right, he had already ordered her lobster roll and rosé. It was comfortingly familiar, if not a little too predictable.
Ted brushed away the waitress that he'd no doubt been discussing his entire life story with and turned back to his daughter, folding his hands on the table and grinning.
