She plonks herself down, sitting cross-legged on the hotel bed in one of my t-shirts and a pair of shorts, surrounded by three months of a life packed into cardboard.
This room is where it all started, technically.
She once confessed that her first morning in Beachside she stood on this exact balcony watching this yoga class, thinking about me. About our one night together.
Which is why I'm out here doing yoga badly. Because making this woman laugh has become the single most important item on my daily schedule, above practice, above food, abovebreathing.
I came to this town to feel nothing. Easy season, easy sun, easy everything. I had it all planned out… Two years of coasting, no cameras, no weight of expectation.
Now I'm doing sunrise yoga on a balcony to make a woman laugh into a box of throw pillows, and I have never once in my life been this stupidly, completely happy.
"You know," Josie says, taping another box shut, "this room watched me have an entire crisis about you. Multiple crises, actually. That balcony hasseen things."
"So has the shower. And the desk."
She bites her lip, remembering.
"We don't talk about the desk. I had to tip housekeeping extra and I still can't make eye contact with the concierge."
She stands, plants her hands on her hips, and surveys the suite.
It's stripped bare now, just boxes and sunlight and the dent in the mattress where three months of us happened.
"It's weird. I extended this room two weeks at a time. I kept telling myself I'd get an apartment when things calmed down."
"But things never calmed down?"
"Thingsescalated, is what things did." She hauls a box into my arms and stacks a second one on top like I'm a shelving unit. "But, Captain. It's time to go. So please, take these to the Rover and let's get to my new rental. I sent the address to your phone."
I take the boxes, and I've already looked at the address so I know exactly where to go.
But here's the thing.
I have absolutely no intention of using it.
We load up the Rover, get some coffee from Goldie's, and soon, the coastal road unspools in the warming sunshine. The ocean is on one side, and Josie's got her bare feet up on my dashboard narrating directions off her phone.
"Okay, so it's left on Driftwood Avenue, then the rental's the gray duplex behind the—" She pauses and frowns at the window. "Declan. That was Driftwood Avenue."
"Mmhmm."
"You missed the turn."
"Mm."
"Declan." She twists in her seat. "The rental isback there! Where are you going?"
I keep driving and put on on my blinker.
"Oh my God, it's the grumpy silence. He's doing the grumpy silence." She jabs a finger at me. "You have aplan. I know that look. That's plan look. Last time you had plan look I endedup with champagne, chocolates, and an emotionally devastating handwritten letter in San Francisco."
"And that worked out pretty well for you, as I recall."
"That's not thepoint—"
Then our destination comes into view, and she goes quiet.
The mansion gates swing open like they've been expecting us. Palm shadows stripe the drive and the house rises up out of the dunes, the ocean blazing blue behind it.
