“I was worse,” I say.
“We’ll talk at the facility in three days,” he decides. “Bring your proposal. Bring your conditions.”
“I’ll bring scones,” I say, and hang up.
Bailey steps out with two paperbacks and Holly Golightly sunglasses, which she wears only when she’s feeling chaotic. “How’d it go?”
“They want me,” I say. “I want me, too. We’re negotiating.”
She hands me a book.The Art of Slow Miracles.“Homework.”
“Fair.” I tap the other paperback. “That one for me, too?”
“No,” she says sweetly. “That one’s to prop the door.”
Afternoon softens into the kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph you keep on your fridge with a dumb magnet. Kids come in for popsicle-bright picture books.
At five, a delivery I didn’t order arrives: a new sign for the shop, hand-carved, gilt edges, elegant script. A note:From anonymous donors who think your door should shine as stubbornly as your light.Bailey runs her fingers over the letters like braille. “We can accept this,” she decides, “because sometimes strings are just ribbon.”
“Sometimes,” I agree, and don’t tell her I know exactly which billionaire and which pop star paid for it, because the point is that they did it quietly.
Dusk finds us on the dock with takeout in boxes and bare feet on wood still warm from the sun. The water has turned the color of a good bruise. The lighthouse beam ticks its metronome. The town is a murmur behind us.
“We’re winding down,” Bailey says, like a promise she’s testing out loud.
“Soon,” I say. “Not tonight.”
She tips her head onto my shoulder. “One more storm?”
“Probably,” I say. “One more negotiation, one more hearing, one more man who thinks he can narrate us better than we can.”
“And then?”
“And then ordinary,” I say, like it’s the fanciest thing I’ve ever ordered. “Porch dinners. Friday night games, even if I’m on the sideline. You pretending you don’t need help with inventory, and me pretending I don’t love being asked. Goat invasions. Ivy’s songs. Lila’s lists. The cat hating me with dignity. Us, tired in good ways.”
She’s quiet long enough to make me nervous. Then she says, “Make me a list.”
“Of?”
“Ordinary.”
So I do, whispering it into the bay like a vow. “You in that cardigan with the elbow patch you refuse to fix. Me fixing it just to make you mad. Waking up to your hair trying to fight the pillowcase and losing. You reading to me on storm nights. Me reading to you when your voice is tired. Soup on the stove that ruins the wooden spoon. Your grandfather asleep in his chair and snoring like a tractor, and we love him more for it. A porch swing that doesn’t squeak because I got it right the second time. The lantern room staying dry because we did the roof and because I learned how to say ‘we’ without choking. A kid from town showing up with a football and a question and me saying yes. You handing me a paperback and saying, ‘This one will hurt, but in a useful way.’”
Her hand finds mine and squeezes once, then twice. Morse we invented for ourselves.Yes. Yes.
We eat. We laugh. We behave indecently for a minute when the moon climbs, and the pier is empty, and the wind covers our sighs. It’s heat and implication and the sweet feeling of her tucked against me, breath in my neck, my palm spread over her stomach like a promise. I tuck her under my arm and stare at the black ribbon of the horizon and think of the boy I was who thought legacy was a stadium, and the man I am, who knows it’s a porch light and a stubborn bookstore and a womanwho kept a note that once made her small and turned it into a lighthouse.
“Tomorrow,” she whispers.
“Tomorrow,” I echo, and for the first time in a long time, it sounds like a place instead of a delay.
On the walk back, my phone pings with a calendar alert I forgot I set months ago:Nashville – Report to camp.I stop under the streetlamp and stare at it. Bailey watches me watch it.
“You can say no,” she says.
“I can saynot like that,” I answer, and swipe away the alert. “I can sayI’ll come, but I will not leave.”
She links our fingers. “That’s a very Coral Bell Cove kind of sentence.”
