I take another sip of coffee and check my phone. Two emails from potential wedding clients. One text from Jo reminding me about book club tomorrow night. And seventeen notifications from the Twin Waves Moms Facebook group, which I joined in a moment of weakness and now can’t leave because watching grown women argue about whether the school lunch program should include kombucha is the only entertainment I can afford.
“Okay, team.” I clap my hands. “Fifteen minutes. Shoes, sunscreen,and Aidan, so help me, if I find that crab in your camp bag I will lose what’s left of my mind. Millie, you’re in charge of making sure Aidan has matching socks.”
“I always have matching socks,” Aidan protests.
“You’re wearing one sock right now. One. Singular.”
He looks down at his foot. “The other one is in the bathroom.”
“Why is your sock in the bathroom?”
“I was conducting an experiment.”
“What kind of experiment requires—you know what, I don’t want to know. Sock. Foot. Now.”
I’m herding the younger two toward the door—crab returned to his piling (with promises that Gerald can visit), socks located, camp bags packed—while Jenna drifts toward the deck with her headphones, already mentally checked out for a day of doing absolutely nothing on the dock, which is the sixteen-year-old summer experience and I refuse to fight it. The houseboat rocks hard enough to slosh my coffee.
Justin’s shrimp boat is pulling out, right on schedule, its wake rolling through the marina like a daily earthquake. Through the galley window, I catch a glimpse of a familiar figure on the deck—tall, tanned, moving with the easy confidence ofsomeone who’s been on boats since birth. And behind Justin, hauling rope with the focused intensity of a kid who takes his job seriously, is Finch.
Jenna freezes mid-step on the dock.
“What?” I ask innocently.
“Nothing.”
“You stopped walking.”
“I was adjusting my—thing.”
“Your thing.”
“My hair. I was adjusting my hair.”
“Your hair is fine.”
“You didn’t even look.”
Millie catches my eye and gives me a look so knowing it should be illegal on a ten-year-old’s face.
“Move it, people.” I nudge Millie and Aidan toward the parking lot. Camp carpool leaves in ten, and I still need to get sunscreen on Aidan before he turns into a lobster for the third time this month.
We tumble off the houseboat and onto the dock, three kids and a mother doing her best impersonation of someone who has it all together. The marina is waking up around us—boats rocking, pelicans being dramatic on the pilings, the smell of salt and diesel and whatever Harold Spencer is cooking in the office that always smells vaguely like burned toast and optimism. It’s already warm at seven am, the kind ofCarolina summer heat that wraps around you like a wet blanket and doesn’t let go until October. My sundress is sticking to my back. Jenna’s wet hair will be dry in approximately four minutes. Aidan is already barefoot because he removed his shoes somewhere between the galley and the dock, and I have chosen not to investigate.
And there, standing on the dock between his boat and my houseboat, arms crossed, coffee mug in hand, expression set to its factory default of mildly aggravated, is Paul Spencer.
My neighbor. My landlord, technically, since he runs the marina. The most irritating man on the entire Eastern Seaboard and possibly the Western one too, though I haven’t surveyed all of it yet.
“Your port running light is still out.”
I force a smile. “Well, hello. How’d you sleep? How’s your day looking? Any fun plans?”
“My plans include wondering why you still haven’t fixed your port running light, which has now been out for?—”
“Three weeks, yes, I know.”
“Four.”
“Was it four? Time flies when you’re being nagged.”
