Spotlight & Giveaway: The Way We Weren’t by Phoebe Fox

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Phoebe Fox’s new release: The Way We Weren’t

An unlikely friendship between a septuagenarian and a younger woman becomes a story of broken trust, lost love, and the unexpected blooming of hope against the longest odds.

Marcie Malone didn’t think she was either, but when she drives from Georgia to the southwestern shore of Florida without a plan and wakes up in a stranger’s home, she doesn’t seem to know anymore. Despondent and heartbroken over an unexpected loss and the man she thought she could count on, Marcie leaves him behind, along with her job and her whole life, and finds she has nowhere to go.

Herman Flint has seen just about everything in his seventy years living in a fading, blue-collar Florida town, but the body collapsed on the beach outside his window is something new. The woman is clearly in some kind of trouble and Flint wants no part of it—he’s learned to live on his own just fine, without the hassle of worrying about others. But against his better judgment he takes Marcie in and lets her stay until she’s on her feet on the condition she keeps out of his way.

As the unlikely pair slowly copes with the damage life has wrought, Marcie and Flint have to decide whether to face up to the past they’ve each been running from, and find a way to move forward with the people they care about most.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Way We Weren’t 

Marcie
Her head hurt. It wasn’t the least of her discomfort, but it was the one Marcie concentrated on as she squeezed her eyes tight, not wanting to open them yet. She could reach out and ring the little silver bell, ask Will to get her an ibuprofen.
But he would hover, smothering her with solicitousness, and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep, and that was the only thing she wanted.
Her mouth felt pasted shut, dry and rank, her tongue too big inside it. Her face was tight and hot. Did she have a fever?
“You trying to kill yourself, or are you just stupid?”
Marcie’s eyes shot open at the raspy voice of a stranger.
She wasn’t in her bedroom. Instead of their heavy damask bedspread (a compromise for the impractical linen she’d wanted), an age-worn blue blanket covered her where she lay on a sofa. An old man sat in a green velvet armchair across from her in an unfamiliar room, staring at her with no expression. His hair was wiry and gray, his face rough and sun-beaten and pulled into a myriad of furrows.
She should get up, something registered in her brain as memory seeped back in. She should shoot to her feet and into a defensive stance. That was what you did when you found yourself in a strange place, a strange situation, maybe a dangerous one. You prepared to fight or flee. But it seemed like a convention from another world—meaningless in this one. This one where she could just curl up on this ratty old sofa and go back to sleep. Let the man do whatever it was he planned to do.
“The hell did you take?” the man barked, forcing her eyes open again.
“Take?” It came out only with an effort.
“What were you on,” he said. “Do you know?”
She shook her head, wanting to say she wasn’t on the kind of drugs he was talking about—wasn’t on any kind of drugs at the moment, unfortunately. She’d started dry-swallowing ibuprofen somewhere around Valdosta and again past Port Charlotte with another dose of the hydrocodone, the hours in the car finally bringing on the cramping and pain Dr. Wilkins had promised. But they had clearly long since worn off, and she’d tossed the bottles back into her purse. Which was where? She couldn’t remember what she’d done with it and it seemed like too much effort to sit up and look around.
Or to explain to this forbidding old man how she got here. Wherever “here” was.
What would she say even if she did? Instead of going in to work today I drove straight down I-75 for absolutely no reason. And when I realized I needed gas in Lake City, I thought that as long as I was in Florida I might as well go to the beach, so I kept driving till I wound up . . . Where? What town had she ended up in? There had been a sign that sounded like somewhere pretty . . . Something Key? She couldn’t remember now—by then she’d just wanted to get to the ocean while the sun was still out, so she’d exited and followed the signs hoping for a beach—somewhere she could just sit and think.
The road had narrowed from six lanes to four and then funneled her onto a dated concrete bridge, and the Gulf of Mexico spanned out before her gray, flat, and featureless—just one more disappointment. With a dirty bank of clouds shifting over the sun, the sea didn’t shimmer with diamond light so much as glint like the glass from a broken car window in the reflected illumination of a streetlight. The bridge dumped her onto a sole potholed road running along the little spit of land studded with run-down businesses and weathered cracker-box houses, a few midrise hotels popping up among them like acne, tiny public-beach access areas tucked away here and there. Marcie had parked the Acura in a vacant space in one of them, turning off the engine and sitting in anticlimactic silence in the car till it grew suffocatingly hot. Well. Might as well see it.
She’d walked along the beach for a while in her skirt and blouse, the sleeves rolled up against the stifling moist heat and her work pumps dangling from her fingers, the sand scratching her bare feet like a cat’s tongue. The blanket of humidity stole her energy, making her a little dizzy, and when her legs wore out from pushing into the soft sand she sat in the scant shade of some palm trees clustered about fifty feet from the shore, watching the lackluster tide go out, the water gradually seeping away as if down a clogged drain.
As the water started to turn golden and then orange she realized, surprised, how late it was. Will would be home any minute. She’d texted him when she stopped to gas up in Lake City, but all she’d said was that she’d be home tomorrow—it wouldn’t be the first time she’d stayed at the hotel after working late—right before she’d texted Chuck, I’m not coming in today after all, and then turned her cell phone off to avoid his frantic phone calls that were sure to follow.
Now she remembered leaving the phone in the trunk of the car with her purse for safekeeping. She’d thought to just rest on the cool sand where she sat for a few minutes—it was still and quiet, the first time she’d felt peaceful in weeks, and she’d wandered farther than she realized and was so tired. When she caught her breath she’d walk back to the car and call Will. Explain . . . what? That she’d just been having a really bad day? What had she been thinking? She’d find a decent hotel and call him, then head back tomorrow, though she hadn’t brought an overnight bag or even a change of clothes.
That was the last thing she remembered before waking up here, in this beat-up living room.
A loose, sickening fluttering began behind her rib cage, into her stomach. People didn’t just leave like that, with no notice, no plan. They didn’t pull a spontaneous no-show at work and drive aimlessly till they finally curled up on a beach and woke up in an unfamiliar room with a hostile stranger. That wasn’t normal.
The old man looked disgusted. “That’s great. Just looking for a thrill, I guess. Aren’t you thrilled?” He shook his head. “You got a car, or you want me to call a cab for you? You should probably go to the hospital, but I’m guessing you won’t.”
“No . . . hospital,” Marcie managed, her voice peculiar in her ears. How long had she been passed out on that beach?
“Yeah. Okay.” He looked at her for a few moments more, then spoke again. “You can use the phone, you want to, you got someone to call. Otherwise, this isn’t a hotel.”
Oh, God. She had to call Will. He must be worried . . . probably thinking she’d lost her mind. She pushed back the blanket to sit up, her head feeling unanchored, as if it might spin away off her body.
Glancing at the ancient rotary-dial phone on the table beside the worn armchair, she couldn’t fathom using it to call her husband in front of the disdainful old man who sat inches away. Couldn’t imagine him hearing her sheepishly confessing to Will this stupid, impulsive thing she’d done—confirming the man’s contemptuous dismissal of her.
She should ask where she was, though. Who he was. Some remnant of politeness told her she should at least thank him for apparently helping her out. But it all seemed like so much effort, and he didn’t seem eager to make any further conversation.
Her keys were on the plain wooden trunk in front of her. She picked them up and pushed her feet into her practical low heels on the floor beneath them. When she stood, darkness swirled over her vision, and for a second she thought she’d fall down. But she held herself still until her sight cleared and she could see the man still sitting motionless in his chair; then she let herself out the battered screen door next to the sofa.

Excerpt. ©Phoebe Fox. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Giveaway: One print copy of The Way We Weren’t by Phoebe Fox (U.S. only)  

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Meet the Author:

Phoebe Fox is the author of the Breakup Doctor series (The Breakup Doctor, Bedside Manners, Heart Conditions, Out of Practice) and has been a contributor or regular columnist for a number of national, regional, and local publications, including the Huffington Post, Elite Daily, and SheKnows. A former actor on stage and screen, Phoebe has been dangled from wires as a mall fairy; was accidentally concussed by a blank gun; and hosted a short-lived game show. She has been a relationship columnist; a movie, theater, and book reviewer; and a radio personality, and currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two excellent dogs.

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