Chapter 3 #2
I'm standing on the dock with my coffee.
Millie beside me, reading a book. Jenna leaning against the railing, pretending she's not excited.
Aidan vibrating at a frequency only dogs and dolphins can detect.
He hasn't slept in three days. He's been drawing welcome signs.
There are seventeen of them. One features Gerald the crab wearing a top hat.
“They're here,” Aidan whispers, like he's witnessing a religious event.
The van hasn't fully stopped before the sliding door flies open and a blur of boy launches himself onto the asphalt.
“Aidan!” Olson screams at a volume that startles pelicans off the pilings. “We're here! We drove all night! I saw a dead armadillo on the highway and Mitch cried!”
“I didn't cry,” Mitch says, climbing out with the weary dignity of a child who has been in a car for ten hours. “I had feelings about it. There's a difference.”
“You had wet feelings. On your face.”
“That was sweat.”
“From your eyes?”
Aidan teleports off the dock—I didn't even see him move—and throws himself at both twins, and the three of them go down in a pile of limbs and screaming on the asphalt.
“Gerald lives under the dock! He has a family now! There are four of them!”
“Can we see them?”
“Right now!”
They're up and sprinting before any adult can intervene, leaving the rest of us in the wreckage of their reunion.
“They got louder,” Jenna says, lowering her sunglasses.
“You thought nine months apart would calm them down?”
“I thought maybe one of them would lose his voice. Statistically.”
Lottie emerges from the driver's side looking like ten hours in a car with twin eight-year-olds have personally victimized her.
Her red curls are in a bun that has clearly given up on itself.
There's a fruit snack stuck to her shoulder.
Her eyes are red-rimmed and wide, scanning the marina like she's jumped off a cliff and is trying to figure out if there's water at the bottom.
She looks beautiful and terrified and exactly like I did when I pulled in here nine months ago.
“Emma.” Her voice cracks on the second syllable.
We collide in the parking lot. She's hugging me so hard my coffee sloshes, laughing and crying at the same time, and Jenna is filming because teenagers document everything, and it's loud and messy and perfect.
“I can't believe I did it,” she says into my shoulder. “Olson spilled a Slurpee on the dashboard outside Asheville. Mitch fell asleep with his mouth open and Olson put a Cheeto in it. The U-Haul made a noise on I-40 that sounded like a dying whale and I just kept driving.”
“Was it like this for you?” she asks quietly. “When you first got here?”
“Worse. I got lost twice. Aidan threw up in Fayetteville. And the houseboat had a pelican living in it.”
“A pelican?”
“In the galley. Standing there like he owned the place. I named him Frank and we coexisted for three hours until Paul removed him with a fishing net and the clear conviction that I'd personally invited the pelican.”
She laughs—the first real one in person in months—and turns to take in the marina.
The weathered dock stretching over the water.
Fishing boats bobbing in their slips—Second Wind and No Regrets and Reel Therapy.
Justin's shrimp boat, gleaming and immaculate.
Pelicans on their pilings with offended dignity.
The sound stretching out blue and sparkling behind everything, so wide it swallows the horizon.
And at the end of the dock, my houseboat, warm light in the portholes, Aidan's “sea monster trap” tangled on the railing.
“Emma,” Lottie breathes. “It's gorgeous.”
“Wait until you see the wiring.”
Down at the water, the chaos trio is already on their stomachs hanging over the edge.
“Come out, Gerald! I brought my friends!”
“We brought offerings!” Mitch holds up a piece of beef jerky.
“Crabs don't eat beef jerky,” Millie says from behind her book, not looking up.
“This one does! Gerald is special!”
Lottie watches her sons with the exhausted fondness of a mother who stopped being surprised by them six years ago. “Olson counted down the days on the rental car ceiling. In marker. The company is going to charge me.”
And then Paul appears.
Doorway of the dock office. Arms crossed. Coffee mug in hand. Expression dialed to its usual setting, but this particular version has an undercurrent of what fresh chaos is this that I find deeply satisfying.
He takes in the trio—Aidan pointing, Olson hanging over the edge, Mitch on lookout. Then the U-Haul. Then me.
I give him my brightest smile. The one he hates.
“Paul! This is my best friend Lottie. She's moving to Twin Waves. Her twins are the ones dangling off your dock.”
His jaw tightens.
“Lottie, this is Paul. He owns the marina. He's very welcoming.”
“I'm not—”
“Ignore the expression. That's just how he looks.”
He stares at me. I stare back. The morning sun is beating down and on the dock three boys are offering beef jerky to a crustacean.
He shakes his head once—slowly, a man accepting his fate—and retreats into the office, closing the door behind him with a quiet deliberateness that communicates more irritation than slamming it would have.
The second the door clicks shut, Lottie turns to me.
“You didn't mention he looked like that.”
“Like what? Annoyed? That's his whole personality.”
“Grumpy marina owner who secretly fixes things for the sunshine single mom next door? Emma, that's a whole shelf at Barnes and Noble.”
“I will push you into the water.”
“Have you kissed yet?”
“Lottie.”
“You're blushing.”
“It's sunburn.”
“It's June.”
I hear the splash before the yelling starts. “Olson fell in!”
“I didn't fall! I dove! It was intentional!”
Lottie doesn't flinch. A child in the water is Tuesday for her. She spots Olson—waist-deep in the shallows, grinning like he's discovered Atlantis—and calls out, “Olson James Roberts, get out of the water, you've been here four minutes.”
“Five minutes!”
“Out.”
He climbs out dripping and immediately resumes the Gerald investigation, shaking himself off like a Labrador in his brother's direction.
The office door opens. Paul reappears, drawn out by the splash the way a fire chief responds to an alarm. His expression has entered territory I've never seen—a man recalculating whether his medication is strong enough.
“There are five of them now,” he says quietly. Like a man delivering his own eulogy.
“Five kids. Three of whom are running at peak reunion energy.”
“Welcome to Twin Waves,” he says to Lottie, and it sounds like a funeral announcement. The most Paul Spencer welcome anyone has ever received.
“Thank you,” Lottie says brightly. “It's so nice to finally meet you. Emma talks about you all the time.”
His eyebrows lift. “She does?”
“I do not—”
“All the time. 'Paul said this.' 'Paul did that.' 'Paul has opinions about my running light.' You're practically the main character of her texts.”
I am going to murder her. I grab her arm and steer her toward the U-Haul before she can destroy anything else.
“The houseboat already has four people and questionable wiring,” Paul calls from the doorway.
“The wiring is fine.”
“The lights flicker when you make coffee.”
“That's called character.”
“That's called a fire hazard.”
Lottie murmurs as I drag her toward the van, “Enemies to lovers. Textbook.”
“I will leave you on the side of the road.”
“I love you.”
“I'm reconsidering.”
She grins—the real Lottie grin, the one I haven't seen in months—and loops her arm through mine.
Behind us, three boys are offering beef jerky to a crustacean.
My kids are scattered across the marina like seeds.
Paul is retreating into his office, probably to stare at his ceiling and question his life choices.
“Em?” Lottie says.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For telling me to come.”
“I'm glad you listened.”
She leans her head on my shoulder. Just for a second. Then she straightens, rolls up her sleeves, and opens the back of the U-Haul like she’s done crying on kitchen floors and ready to build a new life.
“Okay,” she says. “Show me everything.”
So I do.