“I know.” She looks exasperated—the bright grin she’s worn during all their previous encounters currently extinguished. “He stopped by our rental the other night after he saw you down at the beach.” Beyond her shoulder, Emma and Quinn—their antibiotics having apparently kicked in—chase each other near the fence. “We sat on the porch together, talking for a while,” she explains. “He told me he gave you back the ring from that night out on the pier.”
At the take-out window, the teenage employee calls out some other person’s order.
“I should have told you,” Meg says. “Especially when you told me about Birdie at dinner. I should have told you I’d lost someone, too.” She absently picks at her hamburger bun. “But the truth is, I just didn’t want to say it again. It’s easier sometimes to pretend with people Idon’t regularly see, you know? To let myself imagine, just for a minute, that I actually got the life I thought I was building instead of the one I really have.”
It’d be easy for Grace to tell her. Tell her, yes, of course, she understands. Tell her, no, her current life isn’t the one she thought she’d have, either. But sometimes silence says more than words do, a sort of camaraderie that blooms in quiet. For a few minutes, each of them privately seeming to understand this fact, they both just sit in it.
“Ray knows something about my mom, Meg,” Grace says then, just as the preteens erupt in another round of applause. “And I need to figure out what it is. Do you know where I can find him? Today, preferably. I’ve looked everywhere.”
Meg sighs while a piece of strawberry hair blows around her face. She understands what it means. To get one last message. To have one final answer solved. To feel like maybe there’s one more conversation you can still have with the person you’ve lost.
“You’re not going to find him anywhere around here today, Grace,” she states. “He left the island hours ago.”
“Left the island?” Grace asks, confused. “What do you mean? I thought your whole family was going to the Dive tonight for a celebration for him.”
“We were,” Meg states as Emma and Quinn, their faces flushed, barrel toward the table. “Until last night. He showed up at our rental after his shift to say something came up and he needed to get away. That his manager was going to cover things at the bar for the rest of the week. He hasn’t answered our calls since.”
Grace’s chest tightens. “Wh-where do you think he went?”
Meg shrugs. “No idea. He didn’t give us much detail about anything.” She rises to standing and gathers her things. “Grace?”
The way she says it makes Grace’s breath shorten. “Yeah, Meg?”
“Am I right to assume that something happened between you and Ray last night?” Meg asks. “That you spoke or saw each other or something of the sort?”
Grace’s thoughts pulse with an image. The Beachcomber’s bar. The untouched beer. The way he looked at her, there with Adam. The stories his mind must have been creating.
“I mean, I saw him,” Grace stammers. “Just for a minute. At dinner. I was at the Beachcomber. My ex showed up on the island kind of out of nowhere, and I saw Ray across the dining room, and then—”
“And then he left,” Meg says.
Twenty-Eight
He’s gone,” Jenny announces.
Grace, still at the doorway of the beach house, takes another step inside, the screen door slapping closed behind her. She blinks away a series of sunspots that swirl in her line of vision and fully views the scene. Jenny sits on the couch, Grace’s copy ofThe Tideson her lap, as well as a plate full of snacks. The TV is turned on, right on the station where Grace last left it, another silly Hallmark movie filling the space with white noise and made-up stories about love.
“How do you already know?” Grace asks, thinking she’s referring to Ray.
Jenny sets the book and her plate on the coffee table, moves into the kitchen, and gets Grace a can of seltzer from the fridge. “Adam,” she clarifies, suddenly realizing this is necessary, then encourages Grace to sit down and drink. “He stopped by about an hour ago, said he didn’t want to call you. We talked for a minute. He just wanted you to know he was leaving.”
Her body more exhausted and lethargic than she can ever remember, Grace chugs a few significant gulps from the can, then nearly collapses onto the sofa.
“Grace?” Jenny sidles up beside her. “Are you okay?” A look of concern stretches over her face. “No offense, but you don’t look so great.”
“Ray left, too,” Grace says, which is not an answer, but an explanation. “Apparently after he saw Adam and me at dinner last night, he leftthe island. So as far as whatever my mother was doing here last summer, it doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards for me to find out.”
She reaches into her shorts pocket, pulls out the crinkled-up lease agreement, and sets it on the coffee table with all the other oddities she’s collected since arriving here last weekend. She picks up each item, feeling it in her fingers, then places it back down, trying to remember how she got here. Not just to Sea Drift or this week but to this whole part of her life. The one where the script isn’t working and nearly everyone she’s ever loved is gone, as is the person Grace believed—thatallthe past versions of herself once believed—she’d be by now.
Jenny just sits, watching her, a sense of maternal patience practically radiating off her. While she does, Grace sifts through more items, her fingers ultimately landing on her book. She thumbs through the pages. They flutter like a deck of cards in a magician’s hands. And maybe that’s what writing was, too. A form of magic. A story you knew wasn’t real but that you wanted to be so badly that your heart found a way to bring it to life on the page.
“I haven’t written a word.” Grace’s eyes remain on the book, the one she once felt inside every cell in her body and that she only now truly realizes a quiet part of her privately hoped might someday—somehow—come true. “For my new novel. Not since I turned in the original draft back in January.”
“You don’t mean that.” Jenny scoots closer. “You’re just always so hard on yourself. Every line has to be perfect before you’ll—”
“No,” Grace admits, the first time she’s really said it out loud. “That’s not it this time.” She closes her copy ofThe Tides, effectively closing the story—the real one that once inspired it—too. “There’s not a single salvageable sentence there.”
For the first time in days, she reaches for her laptop—still on the coffee table from the other night—and opens it. The screen illuminates. Without a word, Grace scrolls through her document, past the “Book Three” title page, then the few pages of bullet points and jumbled notes.
