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I’m taller than Michael, and I know it, and I let him feel it. I look at him, level, the way I look at someone across the ice who I’ve already decided I’m going to beat.

“Your loss is my gain, man. And you’re the loser here. She’s mine now, and I will spend every second making sure she’s taken care of the way she deserves. Because she’s fucking worth it.”

Michael says nothing. The charm has nowhere to go, and he knows it.

I pick up my coffee, go inside, and I leave him on the porch.

“Walk with me,” Margo says.

It’s mid-morning. Caroline and Maddison left an hour ago — shopping, she said, and I watched the way Margo said it, the specific not-going that she performed as a choice rather than an exclusion. I wanted to stay home. Said light, said easy, the Charleston daughter not making waves. Richard and Michael went somewhere too, some errand that didn’t require explanation, and suddenly it’s just us in the house and the Atlantic and the dunes beyond the back garden.

She appears at my elbow with her coat on and the specific expression of a woman who needs outside air. Slip-on pumps on her feet — wrong for the beach in the technical sense, very her in every other sense — and I follow her through the back garden without another word said.

I glance down at myself: cargo pants, a white button-down with the sleeves rolled to the forearm, the tattoos visible the way they always are when I’m not in practice gear. It’s the closest to casual-dressed I get, which Beau tells me still reads as intentional. I don’t argue with him about it.

We go over the dunes and onto the beach.

Sullivan’s Island in February is nearly deserted. The beach opens up in both directions, pale and gray-gold, the sea grass moving in the wind off the water. The Atlantic is heavy this morning, dark green, the waves low and serious. We walk south, toward nothing in particular, our footprints filling in behind us in the wet sand.

She doesn’t say much. Neither do I. We’ve said the big things; the quiet between us now is different from any quiet we’ve had before this weekend. Not loaded. Not the quiet of two people pretending. Just two people, walking, in the specific peace of a beach that has nothing it needs from either of us.

She picks up a shell. Turns it over in her hand. Puts it in her pocket.

“You talked to my dad,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“He likes you.”

“I think he trusts me.” I watch the water. “Which might be more useful.”

She looks at me sideways. That look, the quiet one. Then she faces the water again.

“I heard some of it,” she says. “Not all. But some.” A pause. “You told him I deserved better.”

“You do.”

“Theo —”

“You do.” Not defensive. Just the fact, the same way I said it on the porch.

She’s quiet. Her coat in the wind.

“Nobody’s ever said that to my parents before,” she says. “About me. In my family.”

“I know.”

She puts her hand in mine. Walking, looking at the water, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which, for her, isn’t nothing.

We walk until the cold gets serious, and then we turn around and walk back.

The house is still quiet when we get back up to the pink room.

She closes the door. She takes off her coat, and she looks at me, and I look at her, and there’s a beat that we both let sit — the morning, the beach, the walk, everything from last night that has settled into something different in the light. Then she crosses the room and she’s in my arms, forehead to my chest, just standing there, the way she stood in the shower last night.

Except this is different. This isn’t falling apart. This is the after.

I hold her for a moment. Then I lift her face up and I kiss her, soft, and she makes a small sound and leans into it.