I close my eyes and let the salt air press against my face. The sun is hot on my bare shoulders. Thebreeze smells like warm spartina and tidal mud and the faintest edge of diesel from the engine.
When I open my eyes, Paul is watching me.
He looks away immediately. Picks up his water bottle. Studies the label like it's suddenly fascinating.
But I caught it. The way his face went soft for half a second—unguarded, open, the grump stripped back to whatever lives underneath. It lasted maybe two heartbeats. Enough to make my stomach flip in a way I'm going to blame on the boat rocking.
“Dolphins tend to show up in the shallows past the sandbar,” Harold tells the boys. He's steering us south along the coastline, where the shore curves and the water turns shallow over a series of sandbars that glow pale beneath the surface. “They follow the baitfish. You'll see birds diving first—where there's fish, there's dolphins.”
“What if there's a shark?” Aidan asks.
“Sharks don't bother boats this size.”
“What if it's a big shark?”
“Then we name it and give it the respect it deserves.”
“Can we name it Steve?”
“Aidan, you can't name everything Steve,” Millie says from the bow, not looking up fromher book. The wind has, as predicted, made reading nearly impossible—she's holding the pages down with both hands—but she's committed.
Harold cuts the engine as we approach the shallows. The sudden quiet is enormous—just the water slapping the hull, the breeze, and the distant cry of an osprey wheeling overhead. The boat rocks gently in the current.
“Now we wait,” Harold says, settling into the captain's chair. “Dolphins don't run on schedules.”
“Neither do you,” Paul says.
“Where do you think I learned it?”
The boys lean over the railing, scanning for fins. Lottie has her phone out, framing Olson and Mitch against the low line of a marsh island—the kind of light you can't manufacture in a studio, late and golden, cutting sideways across their faces. Her photographer's eye never shuts off. Exhausted, freshly divorced, sitting on a boat in a town she moved to six hours ago, and she's still composing shots.
“You're burning good light,” I tell her. The photographer in me can't help it.
“I've been shooting since we left the dock.” She tilts her phone—forty-seven photos, mostly the boys,but a solid ten of Harold's hat from various angles. “Not everything has to be for work. Some of us just take pictures of our kids like normal moms.”
“That hat deserves its own account, though.”
“It has more personality than Ryan. Lower maintenance too.”
Paul snorts. A short, involuntary sound that he immediately disguises as a cough. Lottie catches my eye. One eyebrow, a fraction of an inch. I pretend I didn't see it.
But I did. And I noticed that when Paul laughed—even that grudging, accidental half-laugh—the lines around his eyes changed. Softened. He looked younger. He looked like a man who used to laugh more and forgot how.
The boat drifts. The sun presses down warm on my bare shoulders. Millie has given up on reading and is lying on her back at the bow, staring up at the sky. Jenna has finally put her phone away and is trailing her fingers through the water.
“Tell me about this wedding,” Harold says, leaning back. “Levi Cole's getting married on a yacht at my dock. I want details.”
“Technically Paul's dock now.”
“I have a broad definition ofownership.”
I laugh. “Delilah and Levi. On a yacht that's going to make every other vessel here look like a bathtub toy. Paul's been handling the reinforcement.”
“Handling is generous,” Paul says. “I've been calculating load capacity for a floating palace that has no business at a working dock.”
“He measured the slip twice yesterday,” I tell Harold. “He's thrilled.”
Paul gives me a look that could curdle milk. I hold it. Hold it longer than I should, honestly, because there's a stubborn part of me that refuses to be the first to look away from Paul Spencer, and there's another part—a quieter, less sensible part—that just likes looking at him.
