She pushes to her feet. “I hope things work out for you, Wren, for the museum and everything else.”
“Sure,” I say, my anger burning like a shield, when inside it feels like I might never be warm again. Spinning my back to her, I grab the album before she can reach for it. “This stays, by the way. I get whatever we find, remember? You’re welcome to keep your employee shirt though. I know how you tourists love your souvenirs.”
Thirty-Four
Wren
I cut the engine as my tires sink into the sand at Brant Point Beach. The moonlit waves softly lap at the shore, while Lord Huron’s “Wait by the River” plays its melancholy, dreamy notes on repeat. The wooden lighthouse looms in the distance through my windshield, but I stay in the truck, my gaze unfocused. I’ve seen it up close many times before.
The original Brant Point Lighthouse, built some 250 years ago, used to stand nearly six hundred feet from where the current one stands. Fires and storms claimed the first five iterations, each lasting only a few years. Later versions fared slightly better, with the current lighthouse, the tenth to hold that name, going strong since 1901.
Maybe it’s not as tall or grand as that first brick lighthouse, but it’s stood in this exact spot for well over a century. Staring at it now, it seems indestructible in a way that almost nothing else is.
A gentle tap on my window jolts me from my thoughts. The girl outside doesn’t wait for an invitation before opening the passenger door and sliding in.
“I wasn’t sure if you got my message,” I say.
“You said you’d be waiting here every night until I did.” Eryn stares out at the lighthouse too. I can’t tell if the memories it brings up for her are sweet or bitter now. Right down this beach is where she kissed me for the first time. We’ve shared countless other kisses since then, and so many nights sitting just like this, with the breeze carrying the same sweet scent of wild roses and salty sea air through my half-open window as it does now.
She reaches for the controls to turn off the song, but I tap her wrist with a finger.
“Let it play?”
She seems puzzled, since I’ve never stopped her before, then somehow sad, as she lowers her hand. “You like this.”
I nod.
“You never played it for me.”
I don’t have an answer for her. “I should have. I should have told you that I don’t like pepperoni on pizza, that fireflies make me think of my mom, and that sometimes I think about setting fire to the museum because I can’t stand what it’s become.”
I hear her quick inhalation but otherwise she doesn’t react. “Would you really—”
“No, but sometimes I like to imagine it.”
“What would you do if it was gone?”
I gaze out at the lighthouse again. “I’d build my own.”
The lead singer croons on in the otherwise quiet cab, singing about lost love, grappling with regret and the consequences of his own actions. Maybe I should have let her turn it off. It’s starting to feel too much like a confession.
“I am sorry, Er. Sorry for everything.”
She remains silent, and I open my mouth, ready to seize the opportunity to say more, but she stops me.
“I think about leaving the island all the time. Sometimes I’ll stay up for hours looking at apartment listings in Paris.”
“Pastry school?”
She nods. “I keep filling out applications that I never send, but I want to. I really want to.” She lowers her head. “And the reason I’m waiting tables again? Teresa caught me looking at different schools and is making me work out front over the summer as an incentive until I apply to one.”
I settle back against my seat. “You’ve been planning to leave all summer?”
“Not planning,” she hurries to say. “Just imagining.”
It sounded like more than imagining. “You never said anything.”
“Would you have come with me?”
