Pretending I don’t want to kiss you in a coffee shop,I say in my head. Out loud, I reply, “Chores. Rehab homework. Avoiding my agent.”
“Busy.” She steps up when Kelly calls her name and receives a cup labeled BOOK WITCH in bubble letters that will haunt me. We stand shoulder to shoulder while a retired couple behind us argues about oat milk.
“Tonight?” The word is out before I agree. She arches a brow at my lack of finesse. “Lighthouse,” I clarify. “After close.”
“Tea,” she says.
“Honest questions.”
“Science,” she returns, eyes bright, and we are such children we walk out before we kiss in front of Kelly and traumatize the oat milk couple.
“Don’t get hit by a gull,” she tosses over her shoulder.
“Don’t fall off your roof,” I fire back.
“Bring better lines,” she says, not turning. “You’re rusty.”
Mom ambushes me at home with cornbread and prophecy. “Your face is at a thirty percent less sulk factor,” she says, sliding a pan on the counter. “Who do we thank? The Lord? The lighthouse? The girl you’ve been in love with since she corrected your grammar in tenth grade?”
“I’m leaving,” I say, already eating with my hands like a man who never owned a fork.
“She was mean about it,” Mom continues dreamily. “It’s whom, Crew.Half the kitchen giggled. You looked at her like she’d invented air.”
“I’m moving,” I say. “New name. New life.” I’m smiling. I can feel it. It feels like breaking a rule and getting away with it.
“Second chances aren’t miracles,” Mom says, softer now. “They’re work. Do the work.”
“I am.”
“Do it with your whole chest,” she adds, tapping the center of me with two fingers. “Not with your helmet on.”
“Please stop speaking in metaphors.”
“Never.” She kisses my cheek. “Tell Bailey I said hi.”
“I’m not—”
“Bye,” she sings, already at the sink, smirking.
I do chores like I’m getting paid by the thought, not the hour. Fence line. Feed. A loose hinge. A tarp that needs a better tie-down. My brother is enjoying having me home and making good use of me.
My shoulder cooperates, mostly. Sweat is good. It makes the body honest. I check the time every ten minutes and pretend I’m not. I shower, do the thing where I stare at the mirror and give speeches I’ll never admit to, pull on the navy Henley Lila calls “the bay during a murder plot” (rude), and the boots that make me taller when I don’t need to be.
The lighthouse appears exactly where it always is and somehow closer. The bay looks like a sheet of slate on which someone wrote secrets. Her porch light is on. The shop glows behind the glass. I park, breathe, do a shoulder roll to keep the tremor away, and walk like this isn’t the most consequential small distance of my adult life.
“Hi,” she says at the door, and it hits me in the spine.
“Hi,” I say, because apparently that’s our entire vocabulary when it matters.
“You brought tea?” She eyes the thermos.
“Damn, I forgot.”
“On brand,” she teases, flipping the sign to CLOSED. “Come on.”
We climb—spiral, breath, hand on rail. My palm hovers behind her back and never touches because restraint is religion tonight. The lantern room greets us the way an old dog greets a child—tail thumping, polite, hopeful. Her rug is a dare. She sits cross-legged, and I swear my pulse calibrates to the length of her exhale. We pour. We drink. The air smells like fall and storms that haven’t decided yet.
“Honest questions,” she says, and it isn’t the news. It’s the law.
