“Trent and I decided to move in together,” she said. “So, I’ll be living here at Mallor’s Landing from now on. I even got my landlord to let me out of my lease.” She spoke so fast she could barely breathe. But she always did that when she was nervous, and the real news made her want to go find Dolly and roll in the mud with her.
Her mother looked over her shoulder at the moat. Then at the dock. Then, at the cypress trees that closed in on three sides of the property in the dark.
"With the alligators," Stanley said.
"With Trent," Dove said. "The alligators come with the property."
“I’m starting to think she likes the gators more than me,” Trent said. “Same with the land.”
“Maybe,” Dove said, and she meant it in a way that surprised her every time she thought about it. She'd moved to Calusa Cove for a job, for a change, for the practical reason that Buddy needed someone and she needed somewhere to be. She hadn't expected to find something that felt like hers. She hadn't expected to find Trent. To fall in love. To become all domesticated in a way that made her mother want to knit booties. “I can't imagine being anywhere else."
Her mother looked at her for a long moment—the way mothers looked at a daughter when they were trying to figure out if there was more meaning beneath the surface. If there was something else to be said.
Dove’s throat grew dry. She snagged her water and took a sip.
"Well," her mother said. "It's beautiful, and you two seem very happy.”
"It is, and we are,” Dove agreed.
“I don’t mean to ask a weird question, but where exactly will Jack be?" Stanley asked.
“I’m fixing up the old house my parents used to live in,” Jack said. “Back corner of the property. Far enough that I won't hear things I'm not supposed to hear." He took a long pull of his beer. "Close enough to annoy everyone regularly."
"That sounds about right," Trent said. “I loved having my grandparents so close, but I remember mom complaining every time Grandma showed up in her kitchen.”
“It was my mom’s kitchen before your mother’s,” Jack said. “We all tried living in that house together until you were two. It was great when you were born. We loved the help, but it was a lot. So, your grandfather turned the old garage where he used to keep his boat, the Margaret, the one he named after your grandmother, into a lovely little home for them.”
“I remember that damn boat. It was a beater, that’s for sure,” Trent said.
“The hull rotted out when you were maybe four, and we replaced it.” Jack looked at the property the way Dove had noticed him looking at it when he often thought of his late wife, like a man reading a book he'd been missing for a long time. "I'm looking forward to being here when the grandchildren come around."
Dove coughed. There was no way Jack could’ve known. She hadn’t even told Trent yet, and she’d only confirmed it with the doctor yesterday.
Trent cleared his throat. "On that note.” He dropped his feet from the railing and sat forward. He looked at her in the way he looked at her when it was just the two of them and the rest of the world had stopped being relevant. "I've been trying to figure out the right time to do this for a week,” he said. "But I've come to understand that with you, there isn't a right time. There's just—now, or not yet, and I'm done with not yet."
Dove stared at him with her heart in her throat.
He reached into his pocket.
Her mother made a sound.
“What are you doing?” Dove asked.
“I’m getting to that.” He held up one hand. "I've spent most of my life believing that the things worth having were the things I'd already fought for. This land. These animals. The people in this town who know me well enough and still like me anyway." He took her hand. "Then you showed up and hated my moat, and argued with everything I said, and somehow that turned into the best thing that ever happened to me."
"I didn't hate the moat," she said.
"You called it a ditch with ambition."
"That isn't a lie."
“I’m not having that conversation again—not when I’m trying to ask you if you’ll marry me?"
The ring sat in his palm—simple, nothing like what she would have picked out for herself and somehow exactly right.
Her mother made the sound again, louder.
Her father put down his beer.
