Anchoring Up My Grumpy Neighbor (Twin Waves #5)

Chapter 1

ONE

EMMA

Here’s the thing about living on a houseboat with three children: you develop a very specific relationship with gravity.

Gravity is not your friend. It’s the force that sends your eight-year-old’s cereal bowl sliding off the counter every single morning when the wake from Justin Spencer’s shrimp boat rolls through at six forty-five.

Gravity is why your coffee mug lives in a cupholder screwed directly into the wall and why you learned, approximately three days into houseboat life, that placing anything on any surface without securing it first is an act of breathtaking optimism.

I used to be an optimist. Nine months on a boat has cured me of that particular affliction.

“Mom.” Aidan appears in the galley doorway, shirtless, one sock on, holding what appears to be a drawing of a kraken devouring a stick figure. “I need a jar.”

“Good morning to you too.” I’m fighting the coffee maker, which has decided that today—like every day—is the day it tests the limits of Aunt Dottie’s electrical system.

The lights flicker. The coffee maker gurgles.

Somewhere on the dock, I can practically hear Paul Spencer’s blood pressure rising. “What do you need a jar for?”

“I found a crab.”

“Where did you find it?”

“On the dock. He was just sitting on the piling. I think he lives here. I think he’s ours.”

“We don’t have a crab.”

“We do now. His name is Gerald.”

I love this child with my entire heart, and also he is going to be the reason I develop a twitch.

“Aidan. You cannot keep a crab named Gerald.”

“Why not? He likes me. He pinched me and everything.”

“Pinching is not affection.”

“It is for crabs. That’s how they hug.”

From the tiny bedroom down the hall, Millie’s voice floats out with the calm authority of a ten-year-old who has been parenting her siblings since birth. “Aidan, you put that crab back. You said the same thing about the hermit crab last week, and it escaped into the bathroom.”

I pour my coffee—finally, the machine has stopped its electrical tantrum—and take a sip that tastes like survival.

The houseboat rocks gently. Morning light pours through the porthole windows, painting everything gold, and for one perfect second, it’s beautiful.

Peaceful. The kind of moment that makes you think, yes, this was the right decision, moving three kids onto a boat in a town where you knew nobody, starting over at forty-four with a photography business and not much else.

Then Jenna emerges from the aft cabin like a vampire who’s been personally victimized by the sunrise.

“There’s no hot water.”

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

“There’s. No. Hot. Water.”

“The tank takes twenty minutes to heat up after—”

“Then I suggest a brisk shower. Builds character.”

“I don’t want character. I want hot water.”

“Unfortunately, this houseboat comes with one but not the other.”

She stares at me with the withering contempt that only a sixteen-year-old girl can generate before seven am. Then she turns on her heel and slams the bathroom door, which doesn’t actually slam because it’s on a boat and everything has soft-close hinges, so it just sort of...sighs shut.

Dramatically.

I’m raising three humans on a floating house with possessed electrical wiring and a hot water tank the size of a Crock-Pot. I am thriving.

I take another sip of coffee and check my phone.

Two emails from potential wedding clients.

One text from Jo reminding me about book club tomorrow night.

And seventeen notifications from the Twin Waves Moms Facebook group, which I joined in a moment of weakness and now can’t leave because watching grown women argue about whether the school lunch program should include kombucha is the only entertainment I can afford.

“Okay, team.” I clap my hands. “Fifteen minutes. Shoes, sunscreen, and Aidan, so help me, if I find that crab in your camp bag I will lose what’s left of my mind. Millie, you’re in charge of making sure Aidan has matching socks.”

“I always have matching socks,” Aidan protests.

“You’re wearing one sock right now. One. Singular.”

He looks down at his foot. “The other one is in the bathroom.”

“Why is your sock in the bathroom?”

“I was conducting an experiment.”

“What kind of experiment requires—you know what, I don’t want to know. Sock. Foot. Now.”

I’m herding the younger two toward the door—crab returned to his piling (with promises that Gerald can visit), socks located, camp bags packed—while Jenna drifts toward the deck with her headphones, already mentally checked out for a day of doing absolutely nothing on the dock, which is the sixteen-year-old summer experience and I refuse to fight it.

The houseboat rocks hard enough to slosh my coffee.

Justin’s shrimp boat is pulling out, right on schedule, its wake rolling through the marina like a daily earthquake.

Through the galley window, I catch a glimpse of a familiar figure on the deck—tall, tanned, moving with the easy confidence of someone who’s been on boats since birth.

And behind Justin, hauling rope with the focused intensity of a kid who takes his job seriously, is Finch.

Jenna freezes mid-step on the dock.

“What?” I ask innocently.

“Nothing.”

“You stopped walking.”

“I was adjusting my—thing.”

“Your thing.”

“My hair. I was adjusting my hair.”

“Your hair is fine.”

“You didn’t even look.”

Millie catches my eye and gives me a look so knowing it should be illegal on a ten-year-old’s face.

“Move it, people.” I nudge Millie and Aidan toward the parking lot. Camp carpool leaves in ten, and I still need to get sunscreen on Aidan before he turns into a lobster for the third time this month.

We tumble off the houseboat and onto the dock, three kids and a mother doing her best impersonation of someone who has it all together.

The marina is waking up around us—boats rocking, pelicans being dramatic on the pilings, the smell of salt and diesel and whatever Harold Spencer is cooking in the office that always smells vaguely like burned toast and optimism.

It’s already warm at seven am, the kind of Carolina summer heat that wraps around you like a wet blanket and doesn’t let go until October.

My sundress is sticking to my back. Jenna’s wet hair will be dry in approximately four minutes.

Aidan is already barefoot because he removed his shoes somewhere between the galley and the dock, and I have chosen not to investigate.

And there, standing on the dock between his boat and my houseboat, arms crossed, coffee mug in hand, expression set to its factory default of mildly aggravated, is Paul Spencer.

My neighbor. My landlord, technically, since he runs the marina. The most irritating man on the entire Eastern Seaboard and possibly the Western one too, though I haven’t surveyed all of it yet.

“Your port running light is still out.”

I force a smile. “Well, hello. How’d you sleep? How’s your day looking? Any fun plans?”

“My plans include wondering why you still haven’t fixed your port running light, which has now been out for—”

“Three weeks, yes, I know.”

“Four.”

“Was it four? Time flies when you’re being nagged.”

His jaw does the thing. The tightening thing, where the muscle flexes and his eyes get that particular shade of exasperated that I find deeply, enormously, not-at-all-attractively satisfying.

I don’t find it attractive. I want to be very clear about that.

Paul Spencer’s jaw and what it does when I irritate him is completely irrelevant to my life.

The fact that he’s standing there in a faded gray T-shirt with his sleeves straining and his forearms doing whatever forearms do when they’re tanned and capable—

Irrelevant. All of it.

“It’s a safety hazard, Emma.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“Because it’s still not fixed.”

“And I’ve heard you because my ears work. It’s on my list.”

“Where on your list?”

“Between ‘keep three children alive’ and ‘build a photography business.’ So, you know. Top priority.”

Something flickers across his face—something that might be sympathy or might be heartburn, hard to tell with Paul—and for half a second, his expression softens. Then it’s gone, replaced by the Great Wall of Grump.

“I can fix it,” he says, and the words come out like they’ve been extracted under duress. Like each syllable costs him money. “If you’d let me.”

And there it is. The thing Paul does that makes me absolutely insane. He offers to help, but he does it like it physically pains him, and then I feel guilty for either accepting or refusing, and somehow I’m the unreasonable one no matter which direction I go.

“I don’t need you to fix it.”

“I didn’t say you need me to. I said I can do it.”

“Those are the same sentence.”

“They’re really not.”

Behind me, Dawson appears on the deck of Paul’s boat, shirtless and already tan, looking like a younger, less grumpy version of his father, which is to say he looks like a sixteen-year-old who’s already bored with both of us.

“Hey, Jenna,” he calls. “Finch is bringing donuts when he gets off the boat.”

“Cool.” Jenna’s voice is so aggressively casual it circles back around to obvious. “Whatever. I mean, that’s fine. I wasn’t even hungry.”

I’m not supposed to know about the Finch thing. But I do.

Dawson and Jenna have spent this summer becoming the thing I never expected—genuine friends. Not romantic or awkward, just two teenagers who bonded over the shared trauma of watching their single parents bicker every morning like it’s a competitive sport.

“Dad,” Dawson says over his shoulder. “Stop flirting. You’re scaring the pelicans.”

Paul’s coffee mug freezes halfway to his mouth. “I’m not—”

“You kind of are, though.” Dawson drops onto the dock, bare feet, and heads toward Jenna, who is very casually positioning herself where she’ll have a clear sightline to Justin’s shrimp boat when it comes back in.

I check my watch. “Millie, Aidan—carpool. Now.”