“They probably already do.”
I step onto the dock. Both feet off her boat. Hands in my pockets. Looking at her on her deck. Wanting to say the thing I rehearsed at dawn on my own deck—the thing that got obliterated by pancakes and hermit crabs and model trains.
“Thanks for breakfast,” I say. Which is not what I want to say.
"Thanks for breakfast," I say. Which is not what I want to say.
"Thanks for the pancakes."
"And the crab rescue."
"And the crab rescue."
We're repeating each other like two people who forgot how conversations work. I should leave. I should have left thirty seconds ago.
"I'll see you," I say.
"You live ten feet away. You'll see me whether you want to or not."
“Yeah.”
I walk away. Down the dock, past Millie reading in her shade, past Aidan narrating the bait shop to a crustacean, toward the office and the life I know how to operate.
I don’t turn around. I want to. But turning around means going back, and going back means staying, and I’m not sure I deserve that yet.
I slow down at the corner. Just slightly. Then I go to work.
In the dock office, the marina logbook is on the shelf behind my desk. I pull it down. Open it to the page I always open it to. Holly’ssticky note, her handwriting, slightly faded but still there.Gone to get Dawson, back by four, don’t forget to eat lunch.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I put the logbook back. And I pick up the phone and call the Langleys about their deposit. And I don’t pull out the sticky note. And I don’t think about the fact that for the first time in a very long time, the list of things I care about has gotten longer.
Except I do think about it.
All day.
FIFTEEN
EMMA
The Twin Waves Fourth of July Festival smells like smoked brisket and funnel cake and the kind of grilled corn that makes you forget you’re an adult with responsibilities, and I’m carrying a camera bag that weighs more than Aidan while trying to keep track of three children who have scattered in three separate directions like fireworks that went off early.
“Millie went toward the bookshop!” Jenna calls from somewhere near the lemonade stand. “Aidan went—actually, I don’t know where Aidan went. He said something about finding the crab racing booth.”
“There’s a crab racing booth?”
“There is now, apparently.”
This is fine. My children are loose at a festival. Aidan is looking for crabs. Millie is looking for books. Jenna is looking for Finch—Dawson’s best friend, the boy she swears she doesn’t have a crush on—which is why she’s wearing the earrings she saves for special occasions and her sunscreen game is suspiciously thorough.
I adjust the camera bag on my shoulder and scan the crowd. The boardwalk is packed—families and couples and teenagers and dogs and at least one parrot on someone’s shoulder, because Twin Waves is the kind of town where people bring parrots to community events and nobody questions it. The beach is a patchwork of umbrellas and towels. The band is setting up on the boardwalk stage, and someone has hung enough red, white, and blue bunting to gift-wrap the entire island.
I’ve got my camera because I always have my camera. It’s an extension of my arm at this point. Jenna says I photograph everything—food, sunsets, strangers’ dogs, the way light hits a building at a certain angle. She’s not wrong. It’s how I process the world. Other people journal. I shoot.
It also gives me an excuse to point my lens at everything instead of thinking about the fact thatPaul Spencer is somewhere on this island and I haven’t seen him since he walked away from my houseboat three days ago.
Three days. He said “I’ll see you” and then he went to his office and I went to my deck and we’ve been ten feet apart ever since, doing the thing where you’re both home and both aware the other person is home and neither of you knocks. He fixed something on C-dock yesterday. I heard his drill. I did not go outside to accidentally be in his line of sight. I absolutely did not check my hair before stepping onto my deck to water the plant I don’t have.
