Grace walks down the dune barefoot, her flip-flops—as usual—left with the few pairs piled up at the top. The breeze is warm but no longer hot, a welcome feeling after sitting outside in the heat reading all day. Out on the beach, the lifeguards are gone, their white stands empty. A few families linger near umbrellas while their children skim-board through the shallow sheet of surf. Once she’s on the sand, rather than taking a seat, she walks south past neighboring Dune Street to a part of the beach where the waves have always had a habit of rolling in just right.
She doesn’t bother with a chair this time. Instead, she just carries down an old striped towel from the shed. Grace rolls it out, takes a seat near someone’s small pile of belongings, cups warm sand in her palms, scans the water, then just watches and waits.
Even though he’s far off in the distance—well past the buoys meant to keep everyone at safe depths—she knows it’s him. The ways his arms move. The shape of his body. He’s just a speck out there, a single figure in the water—a body on a surfboard, floating and waiting for just the right crest to form and carry him back in.
Grace used to love sitting here, watching him floating. He wasn’t hers, and vice versa, their feelings for each other strong, though apparently not strong enough for them to ever take the next step to formal titles. Still, there was always something, even in moments like these when there was distance between them—whole bodies of water—that made them feel connected.
Now she turns away from the waves as something up the shore catches her eye. A blur of fur running along the wet sand and chasing a flock of seagulls like they’re her old friends.Hooper. The dog spots Grace just as the birds fly away. She runs over, tail wagging, her body wet and sandy.
“Hey, girl,” Grace whispers, patting Hooper’s head as she playfully licks and jumps, inadvertently rumpling the towel. “It’s good to see you again.”
After a minute, Hooper settles, curling up next to Grace and resting her snout in her lap. Together, they watch Ray catch a wave. Her heart both flutters and calms—like old times—while she watches as he pulls himself up to standing. Her eyes, nearly against her will, track his body like it’s the only thing here. He cuts a clean line through the surf and rides it until the swell runs its course and goes flat again. When he looks up at the beach, Grace gives him a timid wave. Slowly, he makes his way out of the water, his board tucked under his arm. This late in the season, the ocean’s far too warm to require a wetsuit. Instead, he wears his bathing suit and nothing else. Water beads on his body—shoulders, chest, all tanned and tight. She looks down, aware now that she’s staring. Still, her cheeks flush, the image of him that way imprinted in her mind.
“Hey,” Ray says as he moves up the sand. Hooper, loyal as ever, springs up and runs to him as if she hasn’t seen him in years. “I thought that was you.” He drops his board, grabs a towel from his small pile of belongings, then shakes out his hair, the movement somehow both nostalgic and new all at once. “You’re still here.”
“You sound surprised,” Grace says, proceeding carefully as she tries not to read too deeply into his words.Why? Were you out there looking for me?“Like maybe you hoped I wouldn’t be.”
He rubs the towel over his head, then ties it around his hips, the motion casual but familiar enough to make a knot form in her stomach. “I never said that, Grace.”
On the shoreline, an older couple walks through the ankle-deep water, hand in hand. Hooper, ears perked, runs off in pursuit of more gulls.
“Why did you say that about my mother the other night?” Grace asks, not in a demanding or angry way. Just flat. Straightforward. Direct. “You said Birdie told you I’d be here—in Sea Drift, at the house, this week.” A breeze picks up, blowing around sand. “Did you mean that literally? Or, like, you had a dream or—”
“Is that why you walked down here?” he asks, his tone reaching for tension despite the way he looks at her. “To ask me about your mom?”
I love when you come here to watch me,he told her so many times.Knowing I have the water and you there, it’s like there’s nothing else in the world I want or need.
“Maybe,” she says, not entirely sure. “I don’t really know.”
“Look, I’m sorry your life hasn’t quite worked out the way you’d hoped,” Ray states, not directly answering her question. “Really, I am.” A swoop of wet hair hangs over his forehead—one that in the past she would have reached out and touched. “Trust me, I know firsthand that it’s not fun when things don’t go the way you planned.” He runs a finger over his head, brushing the strand back. “But I have my own life now.” Ray looks down, trying to figure something out. When he tilts his face back up, his posture shifts, like something inside him aches. “Whatever’s going on between you and Birdie, I think it’s best that I don’t get involved.”
A feeling rises in her, a sour, burning sensation that makes her mouth watery.
“What is it you think you know about my life?” Her eyes swell with tears that don’t fall.
Ray takes a step, suddenly close enough that she can almost feel the warmth of his solid frame. For a beat, she can’t tell if he’ll move again, continue to close the space that still separates them. Whether she wants him to. Either way, he doesn’t.
“Enough to know that you’re not happy,” Ray says instead.
Near the water, Hooper runs too far down the coastline. Ray shouts for her to come back.
“Why’d you keep it?” she asks hesitantly, while her fingers trace circles in the sand. “The ring. All these years later. You never got rid of it.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. Still, the burn of whatever he’s thinking shows on his face. “Just in case, I guess.”
See you next year, Porter,he always said on their final day, riding his beach cruiser over to their block and giving her and Birdie one last big wave.In the meantime, don’t change too much, all right?he’d joke as the Jeep pulled onto the boulevard and away.
Except for the year Grace turned twenty-five. She never gave him a chance.
“Why do you keep bringing up my mom?” Grace asks, shifting their conversation backward by a few degrees. “I don’t understand.” The coastal air, as well as the topic, casts her skin in goose bumps.
“Why are you asking me, Grace? Just ask her.” He gestures toward the dunes and all that exists beyond them. “I’ve walked past your house every night this week, and each time, her Jeep’s been sitting in the driveway.” He runs his hands through his thick hair, like she used to love to do when he emerged from the water soaking wet. “Knowing Birdie, I’m sure she’s sitting out back right now, drinking an iced tea and reading a book or something.”
It hits her now. The fact that Ray’s words are not part of some game he’s playing. He simply doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. Meg hadn’t talked to Ray about Grace. Caleb doesn’t even know him; plus, even if he did, he’d have had no reason to tell him anything.
“I can’t ask her, Ray.”
Grace forces herself to swallow the sick feeling that creeps with increasing speed up her throat. She doesn’t want to say it. Doesn’t want to have to admit it for the thousandth time. She closes her eyes, like a child too young to understand the rules of hide-and-seek, wishing that by shutting her lids, she could just disappear. That the whole story she’s about to tell by way of only a few brief words would disappear, too. The fact forms in her mind, like a sign she’d like to speed past. These last six months, she’s told so many people. Her mother’s teaching colleagues. The teller at Birdie’s bank. Mr. Sam.
