Page 4 of Hearts on the Line

“Well, fuck, Annie.” I lean back in my chair, lacing my hands behind my head in a long stretch.

“I know it’s last minute, but…”

“I’ll—”

My grandmother reaches over and pinches my arm. “Watch your language at the dinner table, Ethan.” She leans forward in her seat to peek around me, grinning at my sister. “And congratulations, sweetie.”

I pivot and glance at the small woman next to me in her late seventies drinking a White Russian, discussing the merits of dating after sixty. Something about Fred and his latest escapades at the senior center involving yoga mats and someone named Dolores. It makes me want to bleach my brain.

“What?” she says innocently, looking at me with big, pleading blue eyes that match my father’s.

“I made supper. Maybe no pinching?”

“But you’re such a big, strong man, dear.” June adjusts her giant plastic pink-framed glasses from across me at the table. She’s Nana’s best friend in the whole world, and with the amount of time I’ve spent with her growing up, she might as well be considered a bonus grandmother. She’s also a complete menace who prefers wearing sweatshirts with birds on them when it’s eighty degrees outside and loves to make sex jokes about the bartenders during Sunday brunch at the Seas the Day diner on Main Street. She also corroborated the rumors about Fred.

Annie giggles.

With a sigh, I shove my chair back from the table, stand up, and start clearing dishes. Outside, the storm clouds are quickly building on the horizon.

“That’s exciting news,” Nana continues. “You’ll have a great summer in Cohasset, is it?”

I hang by the kitchen doorway a beat longer than I should.

“To start. I’ll be involved with the ecological restoration on the Cape. I’m excited, but I shouldn’t go,” Annie whispers. “I don’t want to leave everything. Someone should help Ethan.”

“Oh, he’ll figure it out, dear. He always does.”

My grandmother isn’t wrong, but after my mom’s health scare last fall, I told my parents to take that European vacation they’d been dreaming about for years. My dad didn’t even argue.

That left me running Merritt’s Catch Lobster Co., the family’s seafood shack, in Merritt Point. On paper, it sounds simple—keep the kitchen running and the customers happy, and make good food. But we’re drowning. If I can’t pull in another fifty grand before the season ends, we’ll default and lose everything my great-grandfather worked so hard to build.

Running the restaurant is one thing. Supplying it ourselves is another. I’m up before dawn every day, hauling traps in all kinds of weather, to make sure we serve the freshest lobster. It was easier when we were all younger and my brothers were home to help me and my dad on the boat. But Nolan hasn’t been home in years, and Jack’s too busy playing forward for the Boston Breakers when he’s not getting benched for fighting and running his mouth.

I want Annie to be excited to see something other than Merritt Point for a summer. Anything to leave this small town of ours. I’m stuck, but it’s my choice, and that’s different.

But Annie is twenty-one now, and she should be living her life, not worried about helping me or what will happen if Mom gets sick again. I can handle everything.

I can.

The universe has a twisted sense of humor.

I take the corner by White’s farmstand too fast and nearly cross the double yellow when I see her.

Sloane Arden is perched on the hood of her dad’s 1970s Charger, clutching a bag of Taco Bell like a lifeline, at the exact moment the sky opens up.

Fuck.

I yank the wheel hard to the right, my brand-new tires screaming as I pull off onto the shoulder and kill the engine.

For a minute, the rain hammers between us as my heart thumps against my chest. Until I snap out of it and roll down my window. “What are you doing, Arden?”

She groans this low, guttural sound that punches me through my chest and makes it clear she still hates me.

“Fuck all the way off, Ethan. You’re the last person I need to deal with right now.”

I chuckle, wringing my hands over my steering wheel as a crack of thunder rumbles above.

“Get out of the rain! You’re going to get yourself killed.”