Paul steps aboard into my kitchen, the space where I’ve been carrying everything alone for so long that having someone else in it feels like setting down a bag I forgot I was holding.
He doesn’t reach for me or kiss me. He just stands in my galley with his coffee and watches me crack eggs and says, “Can I help?”
Three simple words that Matt never once said during our entire marriage.
Can I help?
My hands still over the mixing bowl. Because it’s not the words—it’s the fact that he’s asking. That he sees me doing something and his first instinct isn’t to go find something more interesting.His first instinct is to stand here, in my kitchen, and ask what he can do.
“You can mix,” I say. My voice only cracks a little.
He takes the bowl. Mixes. The muscles in his forearms tighten and release with each stroke of the whisk, and I let myself stare. A man mixing pancake batter should not be attractive. This is flour and eggs and buttermilk. There is nothing romantic about it.
His wrist turns the whisk and a tendon shifts, and I have to look away before I lose my mind overbaking.
Aidan appears wearing both shoes now, swim trunks still backward, and begins delivering a lecture on jellyfish to Paul with the confidence of a tenured professor. Paul listens. Actually listens—not the glazed-over listening Matt used to do while mentally calculating rail gauge dimensions. Real listening, where he asks follow-up questions and Aidan lights up like someone plugged him in.
“Did you know the box jellyfish has twenty-four eyes?” Aidan says.
“I did not.”
“Twenty-four. And zero brains. So it can see everything and think about none of it. That’s kind of like Olson.”
“Don’t tell Olson that.”
“I already told Olson that. He said ‘thank you.’ He didn’t understand the insult. Which kind of proved my point.”
Paul makes a sound that might be a laugh. A real one. Small, surprised, like it escaped before he could catch it.
Millie is reading at the table, and Jenna keeps walking through the galley for no reason except to see Paul standing there, and the morning light is coming through the window the way it always does—warm and steady and there whether I trust it or not.
Jenna’s voice in my head:A man who shows up with condiments he didn’t even buy because he wanted to bring something.
Paul’s voice in the lighthouse:Because I can’t sleep when your light is out.
And underneath both—the scared part of me that’s been running the show since Matt left, still whispering that good things don’t last. I let it whisper. I don’t fight it or stuff it down. I just let it sit in my chest alongside the hope, two things taking up the same space, because that’s what being brave feels like when you’re forty and divorced and falling for someone new.
It feels like both at the same time. And choosing to stay anyway.
Paul looks up from the batter. “Am I doing this right?”
“You’re doing fine.”
He’s doing more than fine. But I’m not ready to say that out loud yet.
Soon, though. I think soon.
FOURTEEN
PAUL
I’m making pancakes on a woman’s stove.
I need to sit with that sentence for a minute because it’s the most alarming thing that’s happened to me since yesterday, when I kissed someone in a lighthouse during a thunderstorm, which was previously the most alarming thing that had happened to me in a decade. My life has become a series of escalating events that I did not plan and cannot control, and I’m responding to this crisis by making breakfast.
Aidan is on his seventh pancake. I know because Millie is tracking the count in the margin of her book with a pencil, and she announced “seven” without looking up, and nobody at this table seems to find it unusual that a ten-year-old isrunning a statistical analysis of her brother’s eating habits.
“I can do ten.” Aidan reaches for the syrup. His elbow catches the butter dish. The butter dish slides across the table. Every person in the galley watches it travel. It stops at the edge.
