“He’s not avoiding you. He’s respecting what you asked for.”
“How do you know what I asked for?”
Harold gives me the look. The Spencer look—the one that saysreally?without using a single word.
“Right. Twin Waves.”
“Grandma Hensley called me before I finished brushing my teeth this morning. She has sources. I don’t ask questions.”
He folds the magazine. Sets it on the counter. Picks up the tomato and turns it over in his hand.
“Can I tell you something about my son?”
“Which one?”
“The stubborn one.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
He almost smiles. “Paul lost Holly eleven years ago. And for eleven years, he’s been living on that boat, running this marina, raising Dawson, and keeping the whole operation going through sheer willpower and the inability to admit he needs help. He didn’t date. Didn’t look. Didn’t consider it. Holly was his person, and when she died, he sealed that part of himself off like a room in a house nobody’s allowed to enter.”
I sip the terrible coffee. It doesn’t get better with the second sip.
“Then you showed up. With your fairy lights and your kids and your broken coffee maker and your smile that could power the entire boardwalk. And he opened that room. For you. After eleven years, he unlocked the door and walked through it, and that is not a small thing for a Spencer man. We don’t open doors easily. We’d rather build new walls.”
“Harold —”
“I’m not finished.” He sets the tomato down. “Matt brought you coffee yesterday morning. Fancy stuff, probably. From a shop. In a paper cup with a cardboard sleeve.”
“It was from the bakery onMain.”
“Right. Nice gesture. Presentable. The kind of thing a man does when he wants to perform caring.” He pauses. “Paul replaced the wiring in your galley junction box at eleven o’clock at night because your lights were flickering and he was worried about a fire. He didn’t tell you. He just did it. That’s not performance. That’s the real thing.”
I stare at my cup of terrible coffee.
“I’m not saying Matt’s a bad person,” Harold continues. “I’m saying there’s a difference between a man who brings you coffee and a man who rewires your boat at midnight. One of them is trying to be seen. The other one just wants you to be safe.”
He picks up the tomato and puts it in my hand. “Cherokee Purple. Best one of the season. Take it.”
He walks out. I stand in the marina store holding a warm tomato and a terrible cup of coffee and the best advice anyone has given me in years.
The kids come backat four.
Not the six o’clock they were promised. Not the full-day, beach-to-boardwalk-to-dinner plan Matt texted me. Four o’clock. Two hours early.
Aidan comes throughthe door first. His shark tooth necklace is gone—lost in the sand, he says, and his voice is doing the brave thing, the thing where he flattens out the sadness and presents it as information.
“We didn’t make it to the boardwalk. Dad had to deal with something on his phone, so we came back early.”
“What kind of something?”
“Work, I think. Or maybe trains. I couldn’t tell. He went to the car to take it and when he came back he said we should head home because something came up.”
Something came up. The three words that have defined Matt’s fatherhood for eight years. Something always comes up. Something is always more urgent, more interesting, more worthy of his attention than three children who rearranged an entire day around his schedule.
Millie is quiet. She goes straight to her room with her beach bag still packed. She didn’t unpack the granola bar. She didn’t open the book.
Jenna stops in the galley doorway.
