She picks up the binder, stands, and walks to the door.
“Millie wants to know if you’ll come to her reading on the dock tonight. She’s been practicingIsland of the Blue Dolphinsand she says you’re the best audience because you don’t interrupt.”
“What time?”
“Seven. Bring your own chair.”
She leaves, and the office smells like her shampoo again. I don’t open the window.
I sit at my desk for a long time after she’s gone, looking at the water through the window, thinking about Holly and Matt and three kids who’ve started saving me a seat at everything, and I realize something that should scare me but doesn’t.
I’m not the neighbor anymore.
I don’t know when that changed. Maybe it was the pancakes or the fireworks, carrying Aidan home with his face pressed against my shoulder. Perhaps it was Stomper, sinking in the water, and my body moving before my brain caught up.
Or maybe it was just now. Emma sitting in my office, telling me I’m not the backup plan, looking at me like I’m the first chapter of something she’s been waiting to read.
Holly’s sticky note is still in the logbook.Don’t forget to eat lunch.
I already ate. Aidan made sure of that.
At seven,I bring my chair.
Millie has set up a reading station on the dock between Emma’s houseboat and my boat. She’s dragged out a beach towel, a battery-powered lantern, and a glass of lemonade.Island of the Blue Dolphinsis open on her lap, the spine cracked atchapter twelve, the pages marked with sticky tabs in three different colors.
“The blue tabs are vocabulary words,” she tells me as I unfold my chair. “The yellow tabs are passages I want to read out loud. The pink tabs are questions for the Q-and-A portion.”
“There’s a Q-and-A?”
“Mr. Paul. It’s areading.Not a monologue.”
I settle into my chair. “My apologies. Proceed.”
She clears her throat, adjusts the lantern, and smooths the page.
Emma appears on the houseboat deck with a mug of tea and sits on the top step. She doesn’t come down to the dock. She stays up there, curled into the corner with her knees tucked under her, watching.
Jenna is on the houseboat too. Stretched out on the bow with her earbuds in and her phone six inches from her face. Not participating. But she’s outside, which for a sixteen-year-old on a summer evening is its own kind of concession.
Millie reads.
She’s good. Better than good—she’s ten years old and she already understands pacing. She slows down for the emotional passages. Speeds up during the action. Drops her voice when the main character is alone, which happens a lot in thisparticular story because the main character is stranded on an island by herself.
I listen. Really listen. Not the way adults listen to kids read, where you’re half paying attention and half thinking about what you need to do tomorrow. The way you listen to a person who has something to say and has chosen you specifically to say it to.
The sun drops and the sky goes orange, pink, then that deep blue-purple Emma calls “blue hour.” The water turns dark, and the lantern makes a warm circle around us on the dock, and inside that circle it’s just Millie’s voice and the occasional slap of water against wood.
“‘I thought about all the happy times,’” Millie reads. She pauses and looks up. “This part always gets me.”
“Keep going.”
She reads three more paragraphs. Her voice wobbles once, steadies itself. She pushes through.
I glance up at Emma on the houseboat. She’s not looking at Millie anymore. She’s looking at me, her tea forgotten in her hands. Her expression is the one she gets behind the camera—that means she’s seeing something she wants to capture and hold onto.
I hold her gaze. Five seconds. Six. Long enough for the dock and the water and the evening to fallaway and leave just the two of us, suspended in whatever this is.
Millie turns a page. The spell breaks.
