“For the focaccia?”
“For all of it.”
He leaned down and kissed her. Gentle. Brief. The patio and the moonlight and his hands that had held a guitar and a pen and now held her face like it was the most precise thing he’d ever measured.
Anna kissed him back. And for the first time in a long time, she didn’t think about what it meant or where it was going or what anyone would say. She just stood in it.
The ocean moved. The string lights hummed. The Shack held them the way it had held everyone, for fifty years.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Margo watched from her chair.
She’d been watching all evening—the ceremony, the wine, the dancing. Fifty years of this building and she’d never seen it hold this much. This much light. This much noise. This much love taking up space in a room built for grilled cheese.
The stray cat was eating a piece of grilled cheese under the corner table. He’d found a plate someone had left and was working through it as he’d been waiting for this opportunity his entire feral life. Margo respected his commitment.
Michael’s painting hung behind the register. She could see it from her chair—the Shack painted by a man who held a brush like it was a pen. It was not a good painting. It was the best painting in the building, including hers, because it was honest.
Meg and Luke were on the dance floor—if you could call the cleared section of patio a dance floor. Meg was still dancing barefoot, which was something the Meg of six months ago would not have done. Luke held her like she was the only solid thing in the room. They looked like they’d been dancing together for thirty years, which in a way they had.
Tyler and Lindsey were at a table, their chairs pulled close, talking in the low voices of people who had forgotten there were other people in the room. Lindsey’s hand was on Tyler’s collar. Tyler’s ears were pink. Some things never changed.
Anna and Michael stood at the railing, looking at the ocean. Not touching. Close. The moonlight caught the water and turned everything silver and they stood in it without saying anything.
Stella moved through it all with her camera. Click. Click. The girl from Sydney who’d landed in this family six months ago and become its memory. Its witness. Its eyes.
Bea sat at the far end of the patio with her phone, texting someone—probably Stella, who was ten feet away, because that was how teenagers communicated even at weddings. She looked up from her phone and caught Margo watching and gave a small wave. Not a big one. A wave that said “I’m here and it’s okay.”
Margo waved back.
The DJ played something old. Sinatra, maybe. The kind of song that belonged at a wedding and a beach and a November night when the world was being generous with its beauty.
“Margo.”
She looked up. Bernie stood beside her chair. He wore a jacket she’d never seen before—dark, well-cut, the kind of thing a man keeps in the back of his closet for the day he finally needs it. No tablet. No phone. Just Bernie, standing with his weight shifted off the bad knee, balanced, careful.
He held out his hand.
“Dance with me.”
Margo looked at his hand. At his knee. At his face—steady, warm.
“Your knee,” she said.
“My knee can manage one dance.”
She looked at him. This man. His bad knee and his corner chair and the walk that had happened once and the phonecalls that happened daily and the fifty years of sitting in her restaurant watching everything and saying exactly enough and never too much.
She took his hand and stood.
They swayed. It wasn’t really dancing—his knee wouldn’t allow it. It was two people holding each other and moving slowly in the string lights with the ocean beyond the railing. His hand was warm on her back. Her hand was on his shoulder. They fit the way things fit when they’ve been next to each other long enough.
Stella’s camera. Click. Margo heard it and didn’t look. Let the girl take the photo. Let someone remember this.
The song ended. Bernie stepped back. The shift in weight to the bad knee was visible — the cost of one dance, paid without complaint.
“Thank you,” Margo said.
