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She heard the man hesitate.

Archer placed a hand on her back. “It’s not smart to repair it, Tea. It’s going to cost you a fortune, and at that point, you might as well get yourself a new car.”

“But I don’t want a new one,” she whispered. “I want that one.”

She heard scratching of a pen on a clipboard, then listened as Archer thanked Larson for helping them out. The door to the auto shop swung open and shut, then they were enveloped by silence again.

Archer knelt before her and gently pulled her hands away from her face. “Hey, talk to me.”

She exhaled a long, frustrated breath. “About what?”

“About the fact that you have to give up your father’s car.”

Her chest flared as she looked up at him. Talk to him? The man who kept putting up all of these walls between them? She was tired of watching Archer open up small bits of himself, only to abruptly slam the door in her face, like none of it mattered. Like she didn’t matter.

She looked into his brown eyes, soft around the edges. His cap was backward on his head, and she could see the lines of a tan around his collar, likely from working under the blistering ninety-degree heat the past three days. The fight drained out of her.

He pulled her out of her seat, then cupped her hands as he led her out of the auto shop and into the July sun. He didn’t let go until they reached his truck, parked on the side of the road.

“I’m stuck,” she whispered.

Archer dropped her hands and pulled his mask down as he turned to face her. “What do you mean you’re stuck?”

“I’m stuck here. I have to keep spending my summer here without any kind of escape.” Her voice rose with every word she revealed. “I can’t fly home, I now can’t drive home. I don’t have a car. I don’t have money. I don’t have a job or a place to live.” Her words were frantic as she rattled them out. She ripped her mask off. “And there’s literally nothing I can do but sit here and I have absolutely no idea what I should be doing next, or where I should go. And I miss my mom and I feel like—”

The words clogged in her throat, tight with emotion. She blinked away tears and shook her head. She’d said too much.

“Tea, what can I do? What do you want right now?”

“I want my car.”

“No.” Archer reached for her wrists again and pulled her toward him, his grip tight. “What do you want?”

I want to go home. But where was home? New Jersey hadn’t felt like home in a long time, maybe even ever. Being with Mom was her only real reason for being there. She didn’t have an apartment to call home either, and her place in Chicago made her feel like she lived in a shoebox. Wild Pines felt the most like home, but even if being in Cabin B or out on the docks felt familiar, there was still something missing. Still something she was longing for.

What she really wanted was Dad. She wanted his booming laugh and his grilled burgers. She wanted another long road trip to the lake, or a run to the grocery store with the windows down, singing “Under Pressure.” She wanted to watch him dance with Mom in the kitchen and kiss her in a way that made Nan scream at them to get a room. She wanted to go out on their boat and fish or water ski. She wanted just one more early morning of him waking her up, telling her to get ready for a sail.

Archer squeezed her wrists. “What do you want, Tea?”

“I want to go sailing.”

Tea pulled her hair into a ponytail, swimsuit on, life jacket clipped to her chest. She padded over to the beach toward Archer as he tightened the sail for a boat she had never seen before.

“Whose is that?”

Archer guided the boat into the water, not looking her in the eye. “It’s mine.”

“Yours? Since when do you have a boat?”

“Since the only person I knew that had one never came back to the lake.”

Emotion seized her chest. It sounded like a dig, but she knew it wasn’t. Her father’s sailboat was no longer at the lake—Mom sold it a year after he passed, after Tea insisted she would never sail again. Mom got a nice chunk of change for it, enough to cover some of their costs until she found her job at the hospital. Secretly, Tea was grateful she would never have to see that boat again. She knew it would make returning to Wild Pines near impossible.

Archer looked up at her, like he was waiting for her to say something on the matter. But she kept her mouth shut as she stepped into the cool lake, inspecting the details of his boat: the sleek white hull with a thin yellow stripe that matched the bright sail securely tied above.

He audibly sighed. “You ready for this?”

Waves splashed around them, the sky a hazy gray. She could see whitecaps out on the lake. Dad used to say a sunny day was deceitful for sailing—the wind may be there, but it could die quickly, then you’d be stuck on the lake until the next gust…or until someone saved you. It was these gray days he loved the most, when the waves were rough and the wind blew at your hair.