“There’s nothing to tell about the shirt.”
“Grandma Hensley said you two stood on the dock for thirty seconds without moving. She timed it.”
“Grandma Hensley hadbinoculars.”
“I know. Harold keeps them for birdwatching. There was a pelican.” She pauses. “Emma. I’ve known Paul for years. That man hasn’t let anyone close since Holly died. He barely lets his own brother past his defenses. And yesterday he jumped into the ocean for your kid’s stuffed elephant without stopping to take off his work boots.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re treating this like a complication instead of a gift.”
I look at my hands. At the sun deck. At the water sparkling around us.
“Matt’s coming next week,” I say.
“Lottie told me.”
“The kids are excited. Aidan’s made a list.”
“I heard.”
“And every time I start to feel something for Paul, I think about what happens if it doesn’t work. If he decides my life is too complicated. If he wakes up one day and realizes three kids and a leaky houseboat aren’t what he wants. Because Matt did that. Matt woke up one day and decided his trains were more interesting than his family, and I can’t —” My voice cracks. “I can’t put my kids through that again.”
Delilah is quiet for a long moment. The yacht rocks gently. A seagull calls somewhere overhead.
“Paul isn’t Matt,” she says.
“So people keep telling me.”
“You say that, but I don’t think you believe it yet.”
I don’t. Not fully. Because believing it means trusting my own judgment, and my judgment picked Matt. My judgment saidthis man is safe, this man is steady, this man will stay.And he stayed—in the garage, with the trains, behind a closed door.
“Give yourself permission to want this,” Delilah says. “That’s all. You don’t have to have it figured out. Just let yourself want it.”
From below deck, a crash. Then Olson’s voice: “That was already broken!”
Justin’s voice: “Nothing on this yacht was broken until you threecame aboard.”
Lottie’s voice: “Define ‘broken.’”
Delilah and I look at each other. She starts laughing. I start laughing. And for a second, sitting on the sun deck of a mega yacht with the ocean around us and chaos below us and the whole messy, beautiful future ahead of us, everything feels possible.
TWENTY
PAUL
Iwake up thinking about the bandaid.
Not the cut—that healed in two days, barely a mark. The bandaid itself. Cartoon whale. Peeling at the edges by bedtime. I kept it on longer than I needed to because every time I looked down, I could feel her fingers on my ribs.
That was three days ago. Three days of fixing dock hardware, coordinating wedding logistics, and pretending I don’t hold my breath every time Emma walks past the office window.
She’s been different since the rescue. Not distant—the opposite. She makes eye contact now. Holds it. Like she’s decided something and hasn’t told me what it is yet.
I pour my coffee in the galley of myboat and stare through the porthole at her houseboat. The fairy lights are on. Aidan’s face appears in the window, disappears, reappears wearing what looks like a snorkel mask. Normal morning.
Matt arrives in four days.
