“Sorry about that. Again.”
“No, no! Don’t be sorry. She’s so happy now. Don’t ever be sorry someone’s happy. Did she send you pictures from her last trip? Look. How fun is this?”
Giselle did, indeed, take a vacation after we found the treasure.
She went home and fell in love.
Nobody saw it coming, probably least of all her.
But it means she didn’t come back.
And now Levi’s straightening.
I look out over the square too, find Hudson—he’s turning eight this summer—and I see what’s about to play out the split second before it happens.
One minute, Hudson’s bending over to pull a string he’s just dug up from the ground, and the next?—
“No!” Sloane shrieks.
“Oh, fuck,” Levi mutters.
“Cussing jar, Dad,” Zoe, their oldest, says without removing her nose from a book at the next table.
And glitter explodes all over Hudson and his sister Piper beside him.
“Rawk! Contraband glitter! Rawk!” Long Beak Silver crows.
“Stinky Booty, you are dead when I get my hands on you,” Tillie Jean yells beneath us.
“Cooper’s here?” Levi asks.
“No,” Sloane says. “At least, not physically. Clearly he is in spirit. But the Fireballs are in LA right now.”
“Rawk! Stinky Booty goes to the slammer! Rawk!”
“I love that bird,” Levi says.
“No,” Ingrid says as Zoe flips her book shut and says, “Really? Can we get a bird? I want a parrot. We should get a parrot. Mom, wouldn’t it be awesome? We could train it to tell us when Hudson’s trying to sneak out of his room and onto the roof again.”
“No,” Ingrid repeats.
“Taking Mom’s side,” Levi says. “We can visit the bird.”
I scoot closer to Sloane, watching her watch them with a soft smile. “Your dad’s right,” she says to Zoe. “I’ll introduce you to Pop. He owns Long Beak Silver, and I’m sure he’d be happy to let you visit anytime you’re in town. The first time you get parrot poop on you, you’ll change your mind about wanting your own. Or the first time he steals your car keys and puts them on a roof.”
Levi and Ingrid’s security crew is pulling Hudson and Piper to the side to wipe them off.
The rest of the digging has paused while Tillie Jean stalks into the middle of the square. “Do not pull any strings that you find, people. Not if you don’t want to get glittered.”
“Did Cooper really invest in biodegradable glitter?” Ingrid asks Sloane.
“Yes,” I answer for her. “He wants to change the world one prank at a time.”
“And it’s truly biodegradable?”
“Confirmed with lab work.”
“Huh.” Ingrid leans back again and looks down on Shipwreck. “How’s the museum doing?”
