“Tyler.”
“Yeah.”
“The flannel’s good. You should wear it more.”
“I didn’t even think about it this morning.”
“I know.” She smiled. “That’s why it’s good.”
She headed for the door. “I’ll walk. It’s three blocks.”
“I can drive you?—”
“Three blocks, Tyler. And it’s nice out. But thank you.”
She walked out and turned left, bag over her shoulder, unhurried. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to.
He drove to the school. Stella was waiting on the steps, camera bag over her shoulder.
“How was coffee?” she asked, climbing in.
“Good.”
“Good like fine or good like?—”
“Good like good.” He pulled out of the lot. “She straightened my collar.”
Stella looked at him. “She touched your collar.”
“She straightened it. It was crooked.”
“Your collar was fine.”
“I know.”
Stella settled into the seat and looked out the window and didn’t say anything for three blocks, which was a record. When she finally spoke, her voice was different—softer, less teasing.
“You look different,” she said.
“Different how?”
“Quieter. Like someone turned something down.” She glanced at him. “In a good way.”
Tyler drove home with the window down and the October air and his daughter beside him and something in his chest that was settling into a shape he was starting to recognize.
For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t rushing toward the next thing. He was just here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The patio had never looked like this.
Anna stood at the kitchen window and watched the last of the sunset light catch the easels she’d set up along the railing—twelve of her own, borrowed from her teaching supplies, and more that she’d borrowed from the community center, each one holding a blank canvas angled toward the ocean. The paint station ran along the back wall—acrylics in squeeze bottles, brushes in mason jars, palettes she’d made from paper plates because she didn’t have enough real ones and paper plates were three dollars for fifty.
She’d done it alone. No Tyler, no Meg, no family committee. She’d moved the tables herself, set up the stations, run an extension cord for the string lights she’d found in the Shack’s storage room — the ones Margo used for holiday parties, tangled in a box with ornaments from 2019. She’d hung them along the patio railing until the whole space glowed warm against the fading sky.
Her hands were shaking again. Not the exhaustion tremor from the expanded hours — this was different. This was the Florence Method tremor. The poetry corner tremor. The “Anna has another idea and the family is going to find out” tremor.
Twenty-three people had signed up. She’d posted about it three days ago—a photo of the patio at sunset, Stella’s work, with the caption “Paint the Sunset. $35. Wednesday at the Beach Shack.” Twenty-three RSVPs in forty-eight hours. She’d had to cap it at the number of easels she could get her hands on.
