"I did not make Evan cry," Tim said without looking up. "I gave him constructive feedback about his corn-shucking technique and he had an emotional response."
"He called it 'an act of violence against the corn,'" Evan muttered from behind a cooler, where he appeared to be hiding.
Sarah arrived next, dragging Nate behind her with one hand and carrying a massive bowl of pasta salad with the other. "I made food! Well, Nate made food. I supervised."
"She ate half the cherry tomatoes before they went in the bowl," Nate said. He was tall, quiet, and had the gentle bewilderment of a man who was still adjusting to his girlfriend's volume.
"Quality control," Sarah corrected. "That's supervision."
Ben and Tyler brought wine—"a nice Sancerre because lobster deserves respect"—and staked out the best spot on the beach like they'd scouted it in advance. Blanket, glasses, cheese board. These two did not mess around.
"You have a dedicated wine opener in your beach bag," Jack observed.
"You don't?" Tyler looked genuinely confused.
"He's a carpenter," Ben said, adjusting his glasses. "He probably opens wine with a chisel."
"I've opened wine with a screw and a pair of pliers," Jack admitted. "Once."
"Horrifying," Tyler said. "Clara, your boyfriend is a barbarian."
Clara, who was helping Tim adjust the seaweed layer, went pink atboyfriendbut didn't correct it. Jack caught the flush and felt something warm expand in his chest.
Boyfriend. Was that what he was? They hadn't defined it. Hadn't had the conversation with labels and expectations and all the things that made Jack's flight instinct twitch.
But Clara hadn't corrected it.
And Jack didn't want her to.
Dale materialized at some point—nobody saw him arrive, he was simply there, sitting on a rock at the edge of the gathering like he'd grown out of it.
Jack caught Dale's eye. The older man held his gaze for a beat, then went back to his lobster without comment. From Dale, that was practically a hug.
The food was, predictably, incredible. Tim served the lobster bake on newspaper spread across driftwood planks, and for twenty minutes nobody talked because their mouths were full of butter-drenched lobster and sweet corn and clams that tasted like the ocean had personally seasoned them.
Jack sat in the sand with Clara's legs draped across his lap, a beer in one hand and a destroyed lobster carcass in front of him, and listened to these people who'd become—somehow, without his permission—his people.
Tyler was arguing with Tim about whether drawn butter was superior to clarified butter, a debate that had apparently been running for three years with no resolution. Lena was sketching Evan while he wasn't looking, capturing his permanent state of drowsy detachment with a few precise lines. Sarah was telling a story about a third-grader who'd brought a live crab to show-and-tell that had ended in an evacuation of the classroom, and Ben was laughing so quietly you could only tell by the way his shoulders shook.
This was what he'd missed. Not just a town, not just a place, but people who showed up on a beach on a weekday because someone got a deal on lobster and texted the group chat. People who argued about butter and sketched each other and told stories that got funnier with every retelling.
People who knew him. Not Jack-passing-through. Not Jack-the-carpenter-who'd-be-gone-by-fall. Just Jack.
"What are you thinking about?" Clara asked, bumping his shoulder.
"Nothing."
"Liar. You had a face."
"I always have a face. It came standard."
"You know what I mean." She studied him with those green eyes that missed nothing. "Good thoughts or bad thoughts?"
Jack looked at the group. At Dale on his rock. At Tim wielding tongs like a scepter over his pit. At the sun going orange over the water and the steam rising from seaweed and the sound of people he cared about laughing at a story about a rogue crab.
"Good thoughts," he said. "Really good."
Clara smiled and leaned into him, and Jack let himselfbe present in this moment without qualifying it or calculating its expiration date.
