“What about dinner service?” Anna finally asked.
Meg took in a deep breath. “Customers will find a sign that says “‘closed for family event’.”
“Well—” Anna started.
Meg held up her hand and shook her head. “Tonight the girls don’t work,” she said. “Bea does homework. Stella does homework. Joey goes to his study group. Am I clear?”
“Clear,” Anna said.
“Clear,” Tyler said.
Meg picked up the lemon bag and walked it to the walk-in. She put the lemons in the produce drawer and stood in the cold for a moment, breathing, because the walk-in was the only place in the building where nobody could see her face.
She pressed her hands flat against the cold shelf and breathed.
Then she came out, tied on an apron—not her old apron, just the nearest one—and started closing the register.
“Go home,” she said. “Both of you. I’ll close.”
“You don’t know the?—”
“I ran this restaurant for months. I can handle the register.” She looked at Tyler. “Take the camera bag.”
Tyler picked it up. Slung it over his shoulder.
“Take it home. Shoot something. Remember who you are when you’re not poaching eggs.”
Tyler left. Anna stood by the door, produce box forgotten on the counter.
“Anna.”
“Yeah?”
“We’ll fix this. That’s what we do.”
“Is it?”
“It’s a Walsh family tradition. Go home.”
Anna went. Meg stood behind the register in her family’s restaurant and counted the drawer and wiped the counter — once, not three times—and thought about Bea’s deadline and Stella’s grades and the fourteen chair companies and the florist she still hadn’t called and the hollandaise she’d been making every morning like it was enough.
It wasn’t enough. She knew that now.
She finished closing, locked the door, and drove home to Luke. He was on the porch with a cup of coffee.
“How was the Shack?” he asked.
“Tyler was asleep on a cutting board.”
Luke set down the beer. “Oh.”
“Family meeting tonight. Five-thirty. You’re taking notes.”
“On it.”
She sat beside him on the porch and looked at the ocean and didn’t say anything for a while, and Luke—who had waited twenty years and never once rushed—just sat there beside her and let the silence do its work.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
