I sand a board so aggressively that I take off more wood than I intend to.
“Easy,” Justin says. “That board didn’t do anything to you.”
“I dropped my drill in the water.”
“The Milwaukee?”
“Yep.”
“That was a two-hundred-dollar drill.”
"Two-forty."
It slipped. That's what I told Aidan, who was watching from Emma's deck with wide eyes. My hand slipped because I was distracted by a pelican landing. Very plausible. Not at all related to Matt's rental car pulling into the lot, or the way Emmasmiled when she saw him, or the fact that my grip went weak at the exact moment he stepped onto my dock like he belonged there.
Aidan said, "That looked expensive."
I said, "It's fine."
It was not fine. I watched two hundred and forty dollars sink to the bottom of the marina and I smiled at that kid like nothing was wrong, because his mother was twenty feet away hugging her ex-husband and I was not going to be the man who made a scene.
Justin winces.
“She hasn’t said anything to me,” I say. “Emma. She hasn’t come to the office. Hasn’t knocked. She sat on her deck with him drinking coffee and talking, and then they all left for the aquarium, and I’m here sanding boards with a forty-dollar replacement drill and no idea what’s happening.”
“What do you want to happen?”
“I want to be next to her. On the dock, in the office, at Millie’s readings, at Aidan’s crab expeditions. At the stupid yacht wedding and every morning after. That’s what I want.”
Justin stops sanding. Looks at me. His face does the thing where it shifts from closed to open, just for a second, like a door cracking before it shuts again.
“Then tell her that.”
“She’s exploring her options.”
“She’s not a boat at auction, Paul. She’s a person. Talk to her.”
Emma knockson my boat at eight that evening.
The kids are in bed. Matt’s back at his inn on the mainland. The marina is quiet except for the water and the distant thrum of music from the boardwalk brewery.
I open the cabin door. She’s standing on the dock in the oversized sweatshirt from this morning, her hair pulled back now, her face bare. She looks tired in the way that has nothing to do with sleep.
“Can I come in?”
I step aside. She climbs aboard. Sits on the bench in my cabin—the same bench where I eat breakfast, drink my coffee, stare at the water through the porthole. She pulls her knees up. Wraps her arms around them.
“Matt wants to move somewhere on the coast,” she says. “Not far. He says he wants to be closer to the kids. Wants to do every-other-weekend custody. Wants to be the dad he should havebeen.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he means it today. I think he meant it when he booked the flight too. And when he bought the tourist T-shirt and the bakery croissants and the new glasses.” She pauses. “I also think meaning it and sustaining it are two completely different skills, and Matt has always been better at the first one.”
“But.”
“But.” She looks at her hands. “He’s their father. And if there’s even a chance he’s serious—if he’s actually willing to show up consistently—I owe it to them to give him that chance.”
The cabin is small. Her knee is six inches from mine. I can smell her shampoo. I can hear her breathing. The whole boat is full of her, and she’s about to tell me something that empties it.
