“Where do these go?” Justin asks.
“Second bedroom,” Lottie manages, still holding the muffin. “On the right.”
They carry the frame down the hall. Paul passes within two feet of me in the narrow kitchen and our eyes meet for exactly one second—one second ofI know what almost happened and you know what almost happened and we are going to pretend it didn’t almost happen while standing in a kitchen full of people who probably already know.
He smells like cedar and coffee. I hate that I notice. I hate that I catalog it. I hate that my neck remembers exactly where his hand was and sends a full-body reminder at the worst possible moment.
“You okay?” Lottie whispers.
“Fine.”
“You’re holding a muffin like it insulted your mother.”
I look down. I’ve crushed the blueberry muffin in my fist. Purple juice is running between my fingers.
“I’m fine,” I repeat, and grab a paper towel.
The house fills.That’s the only way to describe it—it fills with people and noise and the particular chaos of a small town deciding that someone belongs to them now.
Jo and Dean arrive with Dean’s truck loaded with the furniture Lottie ordered online—a couch, a kitchen table, two nightstands still in their boxes. Dean carries the couch in by himself because Dean is built like someone carved a fire chief out of a mountain and gave him a German Shepherd. The German Shepherd—Rex—is in the truck bed, watching the proceedings with the calm authority of a dog who has seen everything and judges most of it.
Michelle shows up with iced coffee for everyone, carried in a cardboard tray with names written on each cup. She knows everyone’s order. She always knows everyone’s order.
“Lottie, I guessed on yours,” she says, handing over a cup. “Vanilla latte, oat milk, light ice. Let me know if I need to adjust.”
“That’s perfect. How did you —”
“You ordered it twice at the shop this week. I pay attention.” Michelle shrugs like memorizing a stranger’s coffee preferences in two visits is a normal thing to do. In Twin Waves, it probably is.
Harold is here, of course, because Harold is everywhere. He’s stationed himself in the backyard with the boys—all five of them, because Aidan and Millie came with me and the twins materialized the second the truck pulled up. Harold is teaching them something involving rope and the magnolia tree that I probably shouldn’t investigate.
“He’s teaching them bowline knots,” Paul says from behind me.
I turn. He’s standing in the kitchen doorway, iced coffee in one hand, the other hand shoved in his pocket. The sleeves-rolled-up situation is ongoing and I am choosing not to look at his forearms. I am a grown woman who does not notice forearms. I have a photography business and three children and a mortgage-free houseboat and I donotnotice the way the tendons in his wrist shift when he lifts his coffee cup.
“Bowline knots,” I repeat, because apparently I’ve lost the ability to generate original sentences in his presence.
“Useful knot. Can’t slip or jam. Good fortying off to a fixed point.” He takes a sip. “He taught me and Justin when we were six. Used the same tree.”
“Harold grew up in this neighborhood?”
“Three streets over. The house is still there. He rented it out after Mom died and moved onto the boat.” Paul leans against the doorframe. Casual. Like we’re just two neighbors having a conversation about knots and trees and not two people who were an inch away from kissing on a beach before a jellyfish intervened.
“Your mom,” I say carefully. “I don’t think you’ve mentioned her before.”
“She died when I was nineteen. Cancer. Long before Holly.” He says it matter-of-fact, the way people do when they’ve carried something so long it’s worn smooth. “Dad was a wreck. Justin was sixteen. I ran the marina for a year until Dad put himself back together.”
“At nineteen?”
“Spencer men process grief by working. It’s not healthy. But the boats got maintained.”
There’s so much in that sentence. A nineteen-year-old boy running a marina while his father fell apart. A pattern of bottling things up and fixing what he could instead of feeling whathe couldn’t. A lifetime ofthe boats got maintainedas a stand-in forI survived but I don’t know how.
“Paul —”
A crash from the hallway. Then Olson’s voice: “It wasn’t me.”
Immediately followed by Mitch: “It wasn’t me either.”
