“We’ll need to restrict access to this section of the dock starting three days before the wedding,” I say. “No press, no public, no kayakers pretending to be lost. I’ve already talked to the harbor patrol about water-side security.”
“You’ve thought of everything,” Delilah says.
“I’ve thought of the things that can go wrong. There are more of those than you’d expect.”
Delilah is already aboard the yacht, rearranging invisible furniture. “The cake table goes here. No—here. Actually, maybe here. Levi, what do you think about a dessert wall?”
“I think you should have whatever you want.”
“That is the correct answer.” She pulls out her phone. “I need to call Amber about the crab cake situation. And the shrimp tower. And whether we can do a raw bar on a yacht without someone getting food poisoning.”
“Nobody is getting food poisoning at my marina.”
“See, you just called it ‘my marina’ again. If it’s your marina, then this is your wedding. You’re invested now.”
I am not invested. I am responsible for dock infrastructure and safety compliance.Those are different things.
“What about the ceremony layout?” She flips open her binder. There’s a diagram of the yacht’s bow deck covered in her handwriting and little sketches of flower arrangements. “Aubrey wants chairs in a semicircle facing the water, with an aisle down the center. She says the bow gives us the best backdrop—open ocean, sunset timing at seven-thirty.”
“The bow is stable enough for that if the water’s calm. If it’s choppy, people in those chairs are going to feel it.”
“It won’t be choppy,” Delilah says with confidence like she has decided the weather will cooperate with her wedding and expects the ocean to comply.
“I’ll have the stabilizers checked,” Levi says, because he’s the one who understands that the ocean does not take requests.
I am good at this. This is what I do—identify problems, build solutions, make things work. There’s no emotion in a fender system. There’s no grief in a piling calculation. I can talk about weight distribution and emergency egress without anyone noticing that standing on this dock, planning a wedding, makes my chest tight in a way that has nothing to do with engineering.
A wedding. On my dock. The dock where Holly used to sit in the evenings with her feet in the water, reading papers from her first graders, laughing at the ones who drew pictures of her with enormous hair because she did have enormous hair and they weren’t wrong.
I push that thought down. File it under things I’ll deal with later. Which is where I file most things.
Delilah is taking pictures of everything. The yacht from the dock. The dock from the yacht. The marina from every angle, probably for her binder, which has tabs and color-coding and a section labeled “Flower Emergencies” that I choose not to ask about.
Levi walks beside me, quiet, observing. He’s the kind of man who listens more than he talks, which I respect, because I am also that kind of man and we recognize each other.
“The dock can handle it?” he asks.
“I built it to handle it.”
“Good.” He pauses. “Paul, I want you to know—this isn’t just a business arrangement for us. You’re in the wedding party. You’re family.”
I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve been treating this as an engineering project with a largefee attached, and now Levi is calling me family in the same tone he’d use to tell me he likes my boat.
“I appreciate that,” I say, which is the most I can offer without my throat doing something embarrassing.
“Delilah wants to go over the ceremony layout with Emma and Aubrey this week. Can we use the dock office?”
“It seats four people and smells like burned coffee.”
“Perfect.”
I’min the dock office after they leave, updating the marina schedule to account for restricted dock access during the wedding week, when I hear Emma through the open window.
She’s on her deck. The houseboat is ten feet away. I can hear almost everything that happens on that deck, which is a fact I try not to think about because it implies a level of proximity that I haven’t fully processed.
“Okay, guys. Come sit down. I have some news.”
Three sets of footsteps. The creak of the bench. Aidan’s voice: “Is it good news or bad news?Because if it’s bad news, I want a snack first. Bad news is easier with snacks.”
