“I haven’t done this in a long time,” I say. “Any of it. Breakfast. Talking. Being in someone’s kitchen because an eight-year-old yelled at me from a dock.” I pause. “I’m going to be bad at it.”
“You just made perfect pancakes.”
“Pancakes have a recipe. There’s no recipe for —” I gesture between us. Vague. Encompassing everything. “This.”
“There’s kind of a recipe. Show up. Be honest. Don’t disappear into a garage.”
“I don’t have a garage.”
“Then we’re already ahead.”
My hand stops next to hers on the counter. An inch between my fingers and hers. Neither of us closes it.
I should leave. I should go back to my boat and my office and the life I know how to operate. Things with rules and routines. Things I know how to fix. This—standing in a kitchen with a woman who just compared my grief to a marina and somehow made it make sense—this I don’t know how to fix. Because it’s not broken. It’s just new.
“I should probably —”
“Yeah.”
“The charter bookings are still —”
“Yeah.”
Aidan yells from his room that Steve has escaped his enclosure and is making a run for the bathroom and would someone please bring a cup and also Steve might be in the toilet but everyone should stay calm.
I close my eyes. “The crab is in the toilet.”
“Possibly.”
I open my eyes, look at Emma, then look down the hall.
“I’ll get the crab,” I say, because evidently this is who I am now. A man who rescues hermit crabs from toilets. Spencer men. Truly a gift to romance.
Aidan is standing outside the bathroom door with the enclosure in his hands.
“He went under the door,” Aidan says. “He’s fast when he’s motivated.”
“Crabs don’t belong in bathrooms.”
“You don’t know Steve. Steve is exceptional.”
I get on my knees. Steve is on the rim of the toilet, one claw gripping the porcelain, his shell tilted at an angle that suggests he regrets his choices. I cup my hands around him and lift.
“Got him.”
“Steve, you’re grounded!” Aidan takes him back. “No more unsupervised bathroom privileges!”
I stand up. My knees pop. I’m forty-two years old and I just kneeled on a houseboat bathroom floor to rescue a hermit crab, and somehow this is the most honest thing I’ve done all morning. Not the confession. Not the dishes. This. Getting on thefloor for a kid’s pet because it mattered to him, and because I was here.
I come back to the kitchen.
“Steve is fine. Made it to the rim but not past it.”
“Thank you for rescuing my son’s crab from the toilet.”
“This is not how I expected this morning to go.”
“How did you expect it to go?”
