“My garden and I need to go to therapy. It’s too needy…too clingy.”
He chuckled and made his way to the kitchen when the back door clicked, and my father shuffled in with the posture ofan English Bulldog pretending not to be an English Bulldog. He was back in human form, wearing a blue flannel, hair sticking up like he’d been out arguing with the moon.
“Hey, kid,” my dad said, eyes doing that soft-dog thing before he remembered dignity and tried to look less huggable. “You did good work at the Hollows, but you also look like you wrestled with an alligator and lost.”
I chuckled, and he sniffed the air like a bloodhound, being careful not to be insulting. He took a seat next to me.
“Is Keegan mixing garlic and butter, or are my senses drunk?”
“Both,” Keegan said, not looking up. “You’ll live. I’m trying to harvest what’s left of your daughter’s garden.”
The front door swung open, and my mom came inside, looking relieved the moment her eyes fell to mine.
She sat on the bench by the window like a woman perched on the edge of a cliff who keeps deciding not to throw the paperwork over. She had a stack of papers in her lap and the particular tightness at the mouth.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked up, and her face did that familiar rearrangement it did with me—sternness softening, then snapping back into place so nobody had to guess how she actually felt.
“I was served,” she said, shaking her head once like she could dislodge the absurdity. “Can you believe it?”
Shock skittered down my arms and fizzed at my fingertips.
“He served you—” I thought blankly for a second, and the word arrived with a rude little thud— “divorce papers?”
She nodded, a tiny, disbelieving dip. “Apparently, he takes his cruising seriously.”
Keegan coughed in the kitchen so violently that Miora handed him a towel without looking.
“Cruising,” I repeated, because sometimes the human brain needed to hear the stupid thing twice to be sure it deserved the eye roll. “As in his midlife crisis with a bar tab and a buffet?”
“As in two-for-one daiquiris and a woman named Saffron,” my mother replied. “He boarded a ship and decided marriage is too terrestrial.”
My dad made a sound in the category of canine smug. He lurked in the corner like a gloating gargoyle.
“Told you he was a boiled noodle,” he said. “Salted and floppy, definitely not al dente.”
“Frank,” Miora said mildly. “No kicking the man when he’s run away on a floating mall.”
“I’m not kicking,” Frank said, failing to hide his grin. “I’m observing.”
I sat beside my mom and slid the stack of papers off her lap and onto mine because sometimes the most magical thing you can do is carry the weight of bureaucracy for someone you love. The papers were thick, heavy and, full of the sharp edges of other people’s decisions.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said, then winced. “Well. I am. I’m sorry I didn’t leave first.”
There are a thousand I-told-you-so’s available in a moment like that, and not one of them is worth the breath. I bumped her shoulder with mine.
“Do you want me to conjure a wind that blows all cruise ships off course when he boards, or how about a latrine that overflows because someone put toilet paper down it?”
“Tempting,” she said, a laugh cracking like a thaw in her voice. “But I think karma with a sunburn will do.”
“Garlic bread,” Keegan announced, sliding a tray onto the table. The cottage filled with the smell of hope. “And soup in five. I found the potatoes that were auditioning for a new life.”
Miora levered herself up with a little more effort than the chair deserved to require and crossed to the kitchen.
I shuffled the papers into a neat stack.
