“That's called character.”
“That's called a fire hazard.”
Lottie murmurs as I drag her toward the van, “Enemies to lovers. Textbook.”
“I will leave you on the side of the road.”
“I love you.”
“I'm reconsidering.”
She grins—the real Lottie grin, the one I haven't seen in months—and loops her arm through mine. Behind us, three boys are offering beef jerky to a crustacean. My kids are scattered across the marina like seeds. Paul is retreating into his office, probably to stare at his ceiling and question his life choices.
“Em?” Lottie says.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For telling me to come.”
“I'm glad you listened.”
She leans her head on my shoulder. Just for a second. Then she straightens, rolls up her sleeves, and opens the back of the U-Haul like she’s done crying on kitchen floors and ready to build a new life.
“Okay,” she says. “Show me everything.”
So I do.
FOUR
PAUL
There are five children on my dock.
I'm going to say that again because my brain keeps rejecting it like a bad organ transplant.
Five children. On my dock.
Three of them are eight years old and appear to be constructing a device out of rope and a bucket near slip three. Millie is reading on the edge of slip six with her feet dangling over the water, which is going to stop my heart if I stare at it too long. Jenna is at the far end of the dock with Dawson and Finch, the three of them sprawled across the bench in a tangle of headphones and bare feet, Dawson's boat keys dangling from his hand like they're about to disappear onto the water at any moment.
Early enough that the water is still flat—that pale, glassy calm before the wind picks up and the charter boats start heading out. A heron stands on the far piling like it owns the place. A mullet jumps near slip eight, a soft splash and nothing more. On a normal morning, this would be the best part of the day. Coffee and quiet water.
Not a normal morning.
I'm in the dock office trying to sketch out the reinforcement plan for slips four and five. Double up the posts, add cross-bracing, replace the bumpers. I've done this kind of work a hundred times. I could do it in my sleep. But every time I settle into the math, footsteps pound past my window, or Emma's voice carries across the dock—I can't make out the words, but whatever she's saying makes Lottie laugh.
The twins have been here less than two hours, and they've already found the bait freezer and attempted to scale the locked gate to the fuel dock. I went out to stop the climbing. Olson looked down at me from the top—which he'd reached with terrifying speed—and said, “Is this yours?”
“Everything here is mine.”
“Cool gate.”
“Get down.”
He got down. Not because I told himto—I could tell by the way he shrugged and wandered off mid-sentence. The gate had lost its appeal. I was irrelevant to the decision.
Justin said no when they asked to ride the shrimp boat. He said it in the Justin way—slow, quiet, almost gentle—and then he stood there watching the twins run off with an expression I couldn't read. I didn't ask about it. We don't ask about expressions in this family.
I'm mid-calculation on the load-bearing capacity of the south post when the rumble reaches me through the open window.
