We don’t know if she’ll give him first aid either, but she knows it.
Sloane technically left him in capable hands.
When I hit the top of Cooper’s driveway, I roll my window down and tell the security woman there that I need to park in the garage.
She doesn’t blink, and five minutes later, I’m following Sloane through Cooper’s laundry room and into his open living area, a box of history and confessions and life-altering details in hand.
Cooper, Waverly, Annika, and Tillie Jean are all chilling in Cooper’s four massage chairs. Grady’s cutting what looks like grapes and cucumbers. Max is entertaining the two toddlers on a rug in front of the massage chairs.
Ah.
Toddler snack time.
For toddlers with normal appetites.
And probably also for the goat standing outside the back door, staring in forlornly.
It will never not amuse me that Grady has a one-horned pet goat. A male goat. Named Sue.
Truly, no wonder Sloane loves it here so much.
Never dull in Shipwreck.
Tillie Jean spots me first.
Or, rather, she spots the box first.
She tries to pop up out of the massage chair, but it must be in one of those cycles where it’s squeezing her legs because she trips and takes a header toward the kids on the rug, legs still attached to the chair.
“Aack!”
“No more head injuries!” Sloane shrieks.
It’s the first thing she’s said since we climbed into the SUV.
And that—even more than what I have to do right now—is what has my heart in a knot.
A knot that I’m refusing to acknowledge.
A knot that tells me she’s far more to me than just a partner in a treasure hunt who needs a fake groom tomorrow, and I have to let her go.
I don’t want to.
Even telling myself she’ll be okay—that she’s strong, she’s capable, she has all of these people here as family—it’s not enough.
Iwant to be her family.
And I don’t know if I’m brave enough to do what I need to do to prove it to her.
“What’s that?” Cooper says to me. “What the actual you-know-what is that?”
Waverly opens her eyes and glances at him, then at me.
She squeaks.
Tillie Jean straightens, pulls herself out of the massage chair, and she squeaks again too.
“You gonna live?” Max asks her.
