Quiet Ones

Mari thought that coming home to a ghost town was bad. It turns out it's worse having to attend her estranged father's wedding and letting her childhood best friend break down the walls she carefully built.

*****
Mari Chasey's life is suspended.

She returns to her hometown in a cold November day following her mother's death, after years of studying abroad in Europe. Pinewood is sleepy in the bitter cold, the deserted shoreline stretching further than she can reach, but that's okay. Mari is good with temporary things and at not lingering. She's not planning to stay for long, just enough to sort out her mother's affairs without poking at open wounds.

Then her father returns. Jack Chasey, former renowned superstar, absent for most of her childhood, is getting married to a woman Mari hardly knows. He gets to begin again, build something new, while Mari grapples with a fractured life and all the scattered pieces of herself. Her mother was supposed to live forever; Jack was mercurial and always at arm's length. But now he's here to stay.

Enter Kinney St. James. Once Mari's closest friend, then another person that passed by like a comet, she still knows Mari and all the shards of her. Even the sharper ones.

In the stillness of winter, Mari reconnects with the quiet life Jack always wanted for her, the softer parts of her that only Kinney can tap into, and what it truly means to be her mother's daughter.
*****
Open Novella Contest -- prompts 24, 29, 46, & 77

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