The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (inspirational books for women TXT) 📕

this story with such confidence and grace that readers will find themselves fully invested in—and emotionally braced for—the unfolding tragedy.”

—Atlanta magazine

“Readers will want simultaneously to hug Daisy and give her a good shake when she goes off the rails. . . . Highly recommended for laugh-out-loud fans and the tearjerker set.”

—Library Journal

“It’s impossible not to feel Daisy’s pain, confusion, and sadness as she thinks about what life will be like after she’s gone. . . . This emotional novel will make readers laugh through their tears.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Oakley expertly tugs at the heartstrings with well-rounded characters and a liberal dose of gallows humor.”

—Publishers Weekly

Titles by Colleen Oakley

The Invisible Husband of Frick Island

You Were There Too

Close Enough to Touch

Before I Go

BERKLEY

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2021 by Colleen Oakley

Readers Guide copyright © 2021 by Colleen Oakley

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Oakley, Colleen, author.

Title: The invisible husband of Frick Island / Colleen Oakley.

Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020040641 (print) | LCCN 2020040642 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984806482 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984806499 (ebook)

Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.

Classification: LCC PS3615.A345 I58 2021 (print) | LCC PS3615.A345 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040641

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040642

First Edition: May 2021

Cover art and design by Vi-An Nguyen

Book design by Katy Riegel, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

Map by Lindsay Champanis

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Henry, Sorella, Olivia, and Everett, the four greatest joys of my life.

And for my grandparents Hugh and Marion, who showed me the world and all the stories it contains.

Contents

Cover

Praise for Colleen Oakley

Titles by Colleen Oakley

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map of Frick Island

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Readers Guide

About the Author

Life seen without illusion is a ghastly affair.

—Virginia Woolf

Chapter 1

The Storm

At first, when Piper scanned the docks and didn’t see the familiar rickety white-pine-and-fir fisherman’s trawler, she thought nothing of it. Tom, like most Chesapeake Bay watermen, tried to beat the sun’s rays onto the water every morning during crab season, squeezing in every minute of the government-allotted eight hours of crabbing per day. That put him back in the harbor just after lunch most afternoons, with plenty of time for his onshore duties—icing his catch, checking his floats, tending to the boat. But inevitably some mornings there was a delay—a net needing mending, the buy boat running late. On those days, Tom’s deadrise would come puffing into the harbor later than the others, when the sun was halfway down the other side of the sky. But whether it was two, three, or four in the afternoon, it didn’t much matter. Time on Frick Island had always been more of a theoretical concept measured in jiffies or awhiles or later ons.

Still, even though there was no telling on any given day when Tom would return, every afternoon when the Blue Point market closed at three, Piper flew through her closing responsibilities moving the packaged deli meats, cheeses, and any unsold fresh crab cakes from the display cooler to the back refrigerator, mopping the cracked linoleum floors, hanging up her apron on the hook in the office, and slipping her card in the punch time clock (even though she had never seen Mr. Garrison so much as look at them)—and rushed over to the docks.

Most days Tom was already there, helping tie off boats or diagnosing an outboard engine problem or simply standing around with other watermen, grumbling about the day’s haul or the sharp drop in the market price of oysters.

And sometimes, on those days, the breath would catch in Piper’s throat. And she’d stop and stare at him for a beat in wide wonder that of all the places in the world, God had found it fitting to put Tom Parrish on the same tiny spit of land that she, too, inhabited. And even more miraculous, that though he could have had his pick of mainland girls at the high school they once ferried over to before the sun woke every weekday, Tom chose her.

Fire. That was what Piper remembered when she thought of those early days on the ferry with Tom. There was a heat to those mornings, even in the dead of winter, when they could see their breath float out into the cold air in great big puffs, as if they were exhaling cigarette smoke. She’d never forget the way the clouds would suddenly blush pink at the first kiss of sunlight and how her face followed suit whenever she caught Tom looking at her. Or the way when Tom, two years her senior, first sat next to her on the boat when there were at least ten other empty spots he could have chosen, and his thigh burned so hot against hers, even through their jeans, that it