Chapter 3
THREE
EMMA
My phone rings at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday, which is never good.
Good news calls at reasonable hours. It sends a text first and waits for a response like a civilized human being.
Eleven p.m. on a Tuesday is a crisis call.
I know this because I've made a few myself—the night Matt told me he was converting the spare bedroom into a train museum, and the night I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot and cried for forty-five minutes because I couldn't remember the last time anyone asked me how my day was.
I check the screen. Lottie.
My stomach drops. The divorce papers were supposed to come through this week, and Lottie's been going progressively quieter in our text thread. Lottie quiet is Lottie drowning.
“Hey.” I'm already sitting up in bed, already in best-friend mode. The houseboat rocks gently beneath me. Through the thin wall, Aidan is talking in his sleep—Gerald the crab and a submarine.
“He signed the papers.” Lottie's voice is flat. Not crying. Past crying. “It's done.”
“Oh, Lottie.”
“He signed them, and then he said 'I hope we can still be friends,' and then he shook my hand, Emma. He shook my hand. Like we just closed on a house. Like twelve years of marriage was a business deal and now we were dissolving the partnership amicably.”
I close my eyes. Because that's Ryan in a single gesture. Pleasant. Polite. Completely incapable of meeting the moment with actual human emotion.
I've never hated a man I couldn't find a single thing wrong with.
Ryan Roberts isn't cruel. He doesn't yell or cheat or drink too much or do any of the things that would give Lottie a villain to point to.
Ryan is nice. Ryan remembers birthdays and holds doors and says “I love you” in a voice that sounds like he's reading it off a cue card he's memorized but doesn't understand.
Ryan is the emotional equivalent of a screensaver. He's there. He's functioning. But there's nothing behind it.
“Where are the boys?”
“Asleep. Finally. Olson cried for an hour because he asked if Daddy was coming back and I couldn't lie to him anymore, so I said no, and he cried, and then Mitch cried because Olson was crying, and then I cried because they were both crying, and now we're all empty and I'm sitting on the kitchen floor eating cereal out of the box at eleven o'clock at night like a divorced cliché.”
“You're not a cliché.”
“I'm eating Lucky Charms on linoleum, Em. I'm practically a country song.”
I almost laugh, but the wobble underneath the joke catches me.
Lottie does this—laughs her way through catastrophe, holds it together for the twins, and falls apart when the house goes quiet.
I know because I did the same thing. We've been taking turns being the strong one since tenth grade, passing the baton back and forth across two decades of friendship.
“Talk to me,” I say. “Tell me everything.”
She tells me about Ryan showing up to the mediator in a pressed shirt, like a job interview instead of the end of his marriage. How he'd divided their assets on a spreadsheet—categorized by room, with a separate tab for the boys' belongings listed by age appropriateness and replacement cost.
“He's not a monster. That's the worst part. He's just... not anything. He's a polite man in an ironed collar who felt nothing when he signed the paper that ended our family.”
My throat aches. Because I know this wound. Matt wasn't cruel either—he was just absent. His body in the house, his heart in the garage with his trains. Two different flavors of the same thing: women who weren't enough to compete with whatever else their husbands preferred.
“He moved into the separate bedroom a year ago,” Lottie says.
“Did I tell you that? A whole year. He just quietly moved his things down the hall one Tuesday like he was rearranging inventory.
Didn't fight about it. Didn't explain. And I let him, because by then I was so tired of reaching for a person who wasn't reaching back that sleeping alone felt like relief instead of rejection, and that's what scares me. That I was relieved.”
“Lottie, being relieved doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a person who was exhausted.”
“It feels like failure.”
“It's not.”
“Then why does everything taste like it right now? Even the Lucky Charms. The marshmallows are lying to me, Emma.”
“The marshmallows are doing their best.”
She laughs—a wet, broken sound. Then: “I can't stay here. His mother told me at Easter that maybe if I'd been 'less intense' he would have been 'more present.' Less intense. I'm supposed to shrink so that a grown man can tolerate being married to me.”
My hand finds her shoulder, squeezes hard. "Ryan's mother is a piece of work."
“She's a blueprint for how Ryan was built. She married a man who golfed six days a week and called it a healthy marriage because nobody argued. That's the template. That's what Ryan thinks love looks like—two polite people in the same house who never bother each other.”
“That's not love. That's roommates.”
“I had roommates in college who were more emotionally available than my husband.” She pauses. “Ex-husband. I'm never going to get used to that word.”
“It gets easier to say.”
“When?”
“Honestly? I'll let you know.”
She goes quiet. The cereal box rustles. Then: “I ran into his coworker at the dentist. Trevor said 'Hey, tough break about you and Ryan' while a hygienist was scraping plaque off my molars. I can't live in a town where my divorce is small talk between cleanings.”
“Then don't.”
“What?”
“Don't stay. Come here.”
Silence. The houseboat rocks.
“Come to Twin Waves?” Lottie's voice is careful. Testing the words like stepping onto ice.
“Bring the twins. Start over. There's a whole town here full of people who don't know Ryan and will never ambush you about it at the dentist.”
“Emma, I can't just—”
“Why not? I did.”
“You had a houseboat.”
“You have a best friend with a houseboat. And you have fifty thousand dollars in divorce equity sitting in your bank account because Ryan kept the house he organized into a spreadsheet.”
She's quiet. Ryan got the house—of course he did, because Ryan wanted the house, and Lottie wanted out, and the equity was the cleanest way to split. Twelve years of marriage, distilled into a number on a check. It's not a fortune, but it's enough for first and last month's rent. Enough to breathe.
“That money is supposed to be for the boys,” she says.
“That money is supposed to be for building them a life. You can do that here.”
“You can shoot newborns anywhere,” I add. “Babies exist in coastal North Carolina. I've checked.”
She laughs. A real one, wet and surprised. “You're insane.”
“I'm practical. You're a newborn photographer. I'm a wedding photographer. Beach town full of couples having babies and getting married. This is basically our natural habitat.”
“The twins—”
“Would be with Aidan.”
That stops her. Olson and Mitch have been heartbroken since we left Chattanooga—their other half, the boy who understands the way their brains work because his works the same way. The three of them FaceTiming every day, planning schemes they can't execute.
“With Aidan,” she repeats slowly. Her voice cracks, but this time it's not grief. It's hope.
“Every day. At the marina. Where there are boats and crabs and an entire ocean to yell at.”
“The marina owner—”
“Paul? He'll survive.”
“You said he has a blood pressure problem every time your kids step on the dock.”
“He doesn't have a blood pressure problem. He has an everything problem. Adding two more kids is just incremental grumpiness. He won't even notice.”
“Oh, he'll notice.”
“And then he'll grumble about it for ten minutes and go back to his spreadsheets. That's his whole process.”
She's leaning into it. I can hear it in her breathing—the terrifying, exhilarating thought of packing up and driving toward a life instead of sitting in the wreckage of one.
Nine months ago, I was the one eating cereal on the floor, and Lottie was the one on the phone saying take the houseboat and just go. Now it's my turn.
“There are rentals everywhere,” I say. “Cute little beach houses. And the light here, Lottie—the light is unbelievable. Your newborn sessions would look like magazine covers.”
“You think I could really build a client base there?” she asks quietly. She's picturing it. I know her well enough to hear that—a studio that's hers, not squeezed into the corner of a house she shared with a man who organized their divorce into spreadsheet tabs. Starting over, but on her terms.
“Lottie. Come home.”
The houseboat rocks. Aidan mumbles about Gerald forming an alliance with the dolphins. Moonlight spills through the porthole.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I'm coming. Give me two weeks.”
We stay on the phone another hour, planning and being ridiculous. Before I hang up, I text her one more thing:
Me: You deserve a man who stays in the same bedroom. That's the floor, not the ceiling.
Three dots. Then:
Lottie: Lucky Charms are the floor of cereal and I still deserve those too.
Me: Go to sleep, Lottie.
Lottie: Going. Love you.
Me: Love you more.
Paul is going to lose his mind. I can't wait.
Two weeks later.
I hear them before I see them.
This is not unusual for Olson and Mitch Roberts. These are children whose volume knob was removed at birth and replaced with a toggle switch that only goes between loud and louder.
The minivan tears into the marina parking lot trailing a U-Haul that's fishtailing slightly, with a boogie board strapped to the roof rack at an angle that defies physics. A bumper sticker on the U-Haul says Adventure Awaits, and one of the twins has added in marker: And Also Sharks.