She mouths something. I can’t make it out. But I think—I hope—it’sI’m done with space.
The reception transformsthe yacht into something out of a magazine nobody in Twin Waves subscribes to.
Amber and Brett’s catering crew from The Salty Pearl has turned the grand salon into a seafood paradise—raw bar, shrimp spread, grilled catch of the day, crab cakes that Harold has already eaten four of. Tally—their pastry genius—has built a dessert display that includes a five-tier cake decorated with flowers so realistic Delilah had to be physically restrained from rearranging them.
Michelle’s coffee corner occupies a spot on the upper deck—her little table with its hand-written menu and cream pitchers, sitting ten feet from a wine fridge that costs more than her shop. She’s made it beautiful, because Michelle makes everything beautiful, and Grayson is hovering near the espresso machine looking at his wife like she hung the stars, which, according to Grayson, she did.
The band plays. People dance. Aidan has somehow gotten onto the dance floor and is performing what he describes as “the shark”—a move that involves flattening one hand on top of his head like a fin and lunging at other guests. Millie is watching from a chair, horrified and delighted in equal measure. Jennais swaying with Finch near the railing, and they’re trying very hard to appear casual about it, and failing in the way that only sixteen-year-olds can fail—beautifully, obviously, with their whole hearts showing.
Dawson catches my eye from the far side of the deck. He grins. Tips his chin toward the two of them. Gives me a thumbs up.
My son. My quiet, careful, headphones-on son, wingmanning for the girl next door at a yacht wedding. Holly would have loved him tonight. She would have loved all of it.
Then Levi takes the stage.
The band clears. The lights dim. A single spotlight hits him as he pulls up a stool and settles a guitar across his knee—not his usual stage setup. Just an old acoustic. Beat-up. The kind of guitar that’s been loved hard for a long time.
“So,” he says into the microphone. “When I was seventeen, I buried a time capsule with a girl I loved. Inside that capsule was a cassette tape with a song I’d written for her. Terrible song. Truly awful. The kind of lyrics that should be illegal for a seventeen-year-old to write.”
The crowd erupts. Delilah covers her face with her hands.
“A few months ago, we dug up that capsule. We played the tape on her grandmother’s boom box in her mother’s backyard, sitting by a fire pit under a pecan tree. And it was...” He pauses. Grins. “It was really bad, you guys. Objectively terrible. The rhyme scheme was criminal. I rhymed ‘heart’ with ‘apart’ like some kind of monster.”
Dean shouts something from the back that I can’t hear. Levi points at him.
“Thank you, Dean. Your support is, as always, overwhelming.” He adjusts the guitar. “But here’s the thing about that terrible song. The heart of it—the feeling behind it—that part was real. That was the truest thing I’d ever written. I just didn’t have the skill yet to say it right.”
The yacht goes quiet. Every guest leaning in.
“So I rewrote it. Kept the heart. Fixed the everything else. And tonight, on our wedding night, on this yacht that I still can’t believe I actually own—” He looks at Delilah. “This one’s for you. The way it always should have been.”
He plays.
The opening notes are simple. Just the acousticguitar, just his fingers on the strings, just the sound carrying across the water.
Then he sings.
I was seventeen with a borrowed guitar
And a girl who believed I'd go far
Wrote her name in a letter I buried deep
Made a promise I was too young to keep
She ran like the morning, I chased like the tide
Twenty years of songs with her ghost by my side
Every lyric, every line, every note that I played
Was a love letter lost to the girl who got away
The ocean remembers what the shore forgets
And the heart holds a debt that the mind won't pay
You came back like a song I never finished
