“That’s the thing about Twin Waves,” Hazel says, easy and warm like it’s the simplest truth in the world. “Nobody has to ask.”
Lottie bumps her shoulder against mine. “Four blocks,” she whispers. “Blackout curtains. Morning clients. And a book club.”
I bump her back. “You’re going to be fine.”
“We both are.”
Through the front window, the sun is going down over Osprey Lane, turning the magnolia tree gold and the light in the room warm and everythingsoft in the way that evenings get when you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
The wine goes around again. The book discussion continues. Mads falls asleep with pie crumbs on her belly and everyone lets her because pregnant women at their first moving day deserve the rest.
And I sit in the middle of all of it—the noise, the laughter, the warmth—and think about a man who said “I’m not good at this” in my best friend’s kitchen with his jaw tight and his eyes open and his heart showing through the cracks in his armor like light through a door someone left ajar.
He’s wrong, by the way.
He’s so much better at this than he thinks.
TWELVE
PAUL
Isee her leave.
I’m in the dock office going through charter bookings for next month when I hear the engine—the particular sound of Dawson’s Boston Whaler, which I know the way I know every engine on this dock because I’ve maintained most of them and listened to all of them and can tell you which boat is starting up from inside the office with my eyes closed.
I look through the window. Emma is behind the console, camera bag slung across her body, hair pulled back, moving through the no-wake zone. She’s heading east. Past the channel markers. Toward open water.
I watch her clear the no-wake buoys and accelerate.The Whaler’s bow lifts and levels. She’s got decent trim. Dawson must have taught her, or she figured it out, or—knowing Emma—she watched a video on her phone and decided that qualified as preparation.
She’ll be fine. She’s a grown woman with a life jacket and a GPS and she’s not my responsibility. She’s my tenant. My neighbor. A woman I almost kissed on a beach and have been carefully not-mentioning for the past week while we pass each other on the dock and say things like “good morning” and “looks like rain” and “the bilge pump on C-3 needs a new float switch” as if maritime maintenance is a substitute for actual conversation.
I go back to the bookings. Charter for the fourteenth. Two families want the same time slot. I need to call back the Hendersons about their deposit.
My phone buzzes.
Weather alert. Small craft advisory starting at three. Storm system moving in from the southwest. Winds fifteen to twenty-five knots, gusts to thirty-five. Heavy rain. Lightning possible.
I look at the clock. One forty-seven.
I look out the window. The sky to the southwest is doing the thing that coastal skies do when they’re about to stop being friendly—the blue goingflat, the clouds stacking up on the horizon in a way that looks solid, like a wall being built in real time.
I look at the empty slip where Dawson’s boat was.
She’s heading east. The storm is coming from the southwest. She might not see it building behind her. And depending on how far she’s gone —
I’m already standing. Already moving. My body has made the decision before my brain catches up, which is becoming a pattern with this woman—feet first, logic second, panic dressed up as practicality.
I grab my keys. My phone. The emergency kit from under the desk that I keep stocked because I’m the kind of person who keeps emergency kits stocked, not because I anticipated chasing my neighbor across open water on a Tuesday afternoon.
This is what I’m doing now. This is who I am. Paul Spencer, forty-two years old, marina operator, chaser of women in boats. If my father finds out about this, and he will because Harold finds out about everything, I will never hear the end of it. The man will put it in his wedding toast if he ever marries Vivian.My son once commandeered a vessel to pursue a woman into a storm. He gets his romantic instincts from me, except I just brought Vivian coffee.
The dock is quiet.Justin’s out on a run. Harold’s at the house. Dawson and the kids are at the inlet—I know because Jenna told me this morning, casually, the way she shares information now like I’m someone who needs to know where people are.
I step onto my boat. Start the engine. Cast off the lines like I’ve done this ten thousand times.
I know where she’s going. There’s only one thing east of the channel that a photographer would want to see—Keeper’s Island. Two miles offshore, nothing on it but scrub oak and sea oats and an old lighthouse that’s been abandoned since the Coast Guard decommissioned it in the seventies. The paint is gone. The gallery railing is rusted through in places. The lantern room has been dark for fifty years.
But the bones are solid. The thing has survived every hurricane the Atlantic has thrown at it for a hundred and twenty years, and it’s still standing. Weathered and forgotten and beautiful in the way that only things that have endured can be beautiful.
