“That sounds amazing, bud.”
“And then we got ice cream and I had the waffle cone and Dad let me get two scoops and one of them was blue and my tongue turned colors, look—” He sticks out his tongue. It’s blue. “And Dad said tomorrow he wants to see my room and meet Stomper and go on the boardwalk.”
Tomorrow. He’s coming back tomorrow. I should feel relieved.
Millie comes in next. Still in the daisy dress, which now has chocolate on the hem. She’s smiling—a real one, unguarded, the kind she saves for moments that lived up to the hope she put into them.
“Good day?” I ask.
She nods. “He remembered that I like mint chip.”
Her words carry the weight of the world.He remembered.Such a small thing to be grateful for. Such a devastating bar to clear.
Jenna is last through the door with her earbuds back in. She walks past me toward her room.
“Jen? How was it?”
She pauses in the doorway, but doesn’t turn around.
“He checked his phone eleven times during lunch. I counted.”
The door closes.
I stand in the galley with Aidan’s blue tongue and Millie’s chocolate-stained dress and Jenna’s number—eleven—ringing in my ears. Three children. Three completely different experiences of the same afternoon.
Matt texts after dinner.
Matt:Great day. Kids are amazing. Dinner tomorrow night? All of us? There’s a seafood place on the boardwalk that looked nice.
Me:Sounds good. They had a wonderful time.
Both sentences are true. Neither one captures the whole picture.
Matt comes back Sunday.
He shows up the next morning with a bag from the bakery on Main Street—croissants, muffins, a chocolate danish wrapped in wax paper that Aidan claims before anyone else can react. He’s wearingshorts and a Twin Waves T-shirt he must have bought at the tourist shop, and the effort of it—the costume of casual, the performance of belonging—makes my chest ache.
He’s trying. I can see him trying. And the trying is almost harder to watch than the not-trying, because it means he knows. He knows he failed. He knows what he lost. And he’s here, in pressed shorts and a tourist T-shirt, attempting to prove he can be different.
Aidan gives him the official tour. The houseboat bow to stern—his room, the galley, the deck where Stomper dries, the fairy lights I strung the first week. Matt nods at everything. He asks questions, touches the walls of Aidan’s room and says, “You did this yourself?”
“Our neighbor helped with the shelf brackets. Mr. Paul.”
A quick, controlled expression skitters across Matt’s face. The marina guy?”
“He’s our neighbor. He runs the marina. He makes us pancakes on Saturdays, and he jumped into the ocean to save Stomper when he fell off the dock.”
“Sounds like a good guy.”
“He’s the best.” Aidansays this with the absolute certainty of an eight-year-old who has decided something and sees no reason to qualify it.
Matt’s smile tightens at the corners. Just barely. Just enough for me to see from the doorway where I’m pretending to wipe the counter.
“So,” Matt says. “Your mom told me you have a list?”
I didn’t tell him about it. Aidan must have mentioned it at lunch yesterday.
Aidan pulls the folded paper from his pocket. “Fourteen things. I narrowed it down to a top five, but if we have enough time, we can do all of them.”
