Chapter 5 #2
Paul snorts. A short, involuntary sound that he immediately disguises as a cough. Lottie catches my eye. One eyebrow, a fraction of an inch. I pretend I didn't see it.
But I did. And I noticed that when Paul laughed—even that grudging, accidental half-laugh—the lines around his eyes changed. Softened. He looked younger. He looked like a man who used to laugh more and forgot how.
The boat drifts. The sun presses down warm on my bare shoulders. Millie has given up on reading and is lying on her back at the bow, staring up at the sky. Jenna has finally put her phone away and is trailing her fingers through the water.
“Tell me about this wedding,” Harold says, leaning back. “Levi Cole's getting married on a yacht at my dock. I want details.”
“Technically Paul's dock now.”
“I have a broad definition of ownership.”
I laugh. “Delilah and Levi. On a yacht that's going to make every other vessel here look like a bathtub toy. Paul's been handling the reinforcement.”
“Handling is generous,” Paul says. “I've been calculating load capacity for a floating palace that has no business at a working dock.”
“He measured the slip twice yesterday,” I tell Harold. “He's thrilled.”
Paul gives me a look that could curdle milk. I hold it. Hold it longer than I should, honestly, because there's a stubborn part of me that refuses to be the first to look away from Paul Spencer, and there's another part—a quieter, less sensible part—that just likes looking at him.
He breaks first. Turns toward the water. His jaw does the tightening thing, but I swear the tips of his ears are pink.
Harold chuckles. “Your aunt Dottie would have loved a yacht wedding. She loved a spectacle.”
I've heard him mention Dottie before, always in passing, always carefully. But his voice shifts now—not sad, exactly, but tender. Like he's holding glass.
“She used to dock that houseboat in the same slip every summer,” he says. “Before it was yours. Before you were born, probably. She'd show up in June with a different hair color and a new story about wherever she'd been, and the whole marina would come alive.”
I didn't know that part. I knew Dottie kept the boat here, but I'd pictured it sitting quiet in the slip, waiting. Not alive. Not the center of anything.
“You remind me of her,” Harold says quietly. “Same energy. Same way of filling up a room without trying.”
My eyes sting. I blink it back.
Paul is very quiet. He's looking at his father with an expression I haven't seen before—careful and knowing, like he's watching a man touch a wound he doesn't usually show.
“There,” Millie says suddenly, sitting up at the bow and pointing toward the sandbar.
A dorsal fin. Smooth and gray, cutting the surface for just a moment before disappearing.
“Dolphin,” Harold confirms, sitting forward. “Southeast, about forty yards. Watch.”
The fin surfaces again. Then another beside it, smaller—a calf, keeping pace with its mother. They move through the shallows with an ease that makes the water look like it was designed for them, their backs catching the sun each time they arc up to breathe.
Nobody speaks. Even Olson is silent, which might be a first. The three boys are pressed against the railing, mouths open, watching the dolphins move through the water like they've stepped inside a nature documentary.
“There's a baby,” Mitch whispers. He says it with the same quiet reverence he brings to everything that genuinely moves him—the dead armadillo, the wet feelings from his eyes.
“That's a calf,” Harold says softly. “Born this spring, probably. See how it stays close to the mother? Rides in the slipstream. Saves energy.”
“Smart,” Aidan breathes.
Harold glances at Paul, and a look passes between them—father to son, quick and loaded. “They also mate for life. Some species. When they find their pod, they stay.”
I am going to pretend Harold Spencer did not just use a dolphin metaphor to matchmake his forty-two-year-old son in front of me and my best friend. I am going to stare at the marsh islands and enjoy the wildlife and absolutely not make eye contact with anyone.
Lottie makes a sound beside me that is definitely not a cough.
The dolphins stay for about ten minutes, surfacing and diving, the calf occasionally leaping with more enthusiasm than grace.
Aidan narrates the entire thing in a whisper—“That's the dad, I think, because he's bigger, and that one is the teenager because she's doing her own thing”—and Harold lets him, nodding along like Aidan's marine biology is peer-reviewed.
When the pod finally moves on toward deeper channels, the boat goes quiet. The engine is off and the breeze has settled into a warm, steady exhale. Water laps against the hull in a rhythm that sounds intentional, like the sound itself is breathing.
“Can we come back tomorrow?” Olson asks.
“You can come back anytime,” Harold says. “They're here every day. You just have to know where to look.”
He starts the engine. The boys stay at the railing as we turn back toward the marina, eyes on the surface.
Lottie leans her head on my shoulder, and I lean mine on hers, and we sit like that—two women on a boat in the late sun, watching our kids fall in love with the coast while a seventy-two-year-old man steers us home.
“Thank you,” Lottie murmurs. “For making me come here.”
“You drove yourself. I just gave you the address.”
“You gave me the push.” She's quiet for a beat.
“I spent two years trying to convince myself that what I had was enough. That polite was the same as happy. That a man who remembered my birthday but forgot to ask about my day was close enough.” She watches Olson lean over the railing, his wet hair whipping in the breeze, his face split wide with joy.
“This is what it's actually supposed to feel like.”
I squeeze her hand. The marina is growing larger ahead of us—the boathouse, the dock, Aidan's sea monster trap dangling from the houseboat stern.
Paul hasn't said much since the dolphins.
He's sitting with his elbows on his knees, watching the marina come back into focus the way you watch your own house from a distance—like he forgot, for an hour, to be the person who worries about load capacity and electrical panels.
He looks almost peaceful. It's unsettling.
Paul Spencer peaceful is like seeing a cat swim—technically possible but deeply suspicious.
As Harold guides The Good Life back into the slip, Paul stands and catches the dock line before anyone asks. He wraps it around the cleat with the muscle memory of a lifetime, and for just a second—while his hands are busy and his guard is down—he looks up at me.
Not a glance. Not the quick look-away he usually does. An actual look. Steady and warm and lasting about two seconds longer than it should.
My face goes hot. My fingers tighten around the railing.
He holds my gaze and I hold his and the whole marina disappears for a breath—the kids, the engine, Harold's whistling, all of it gone—and it's just Paul Spencer's gray eyes and the late sun on his face and my heart doing absolutely reckless things in my chest.
Then he finishes the knot and steps onto the dock and becomes Paul again—shoulders set, jaw tight, already scanning for a problem to fix.
But those two seconds. I felt those two seconds all the way to my toes.
Harold catches my arm as I step off the boat. “Same time Thursday?” he asks, quiet enough that only I can hear.
“The boys would love that.”
“I wasn't asking about the boys.” He pats my arm once and walks toward his truck, whistling.
The sun is dropping toward the tree line, painting everything peach.
The boards are warm under my bare feet. Aidan is telling Millie about the teenage dolphin's backstory while Olson asks when Thursday is.
Lottie is standing at the railing with her face tipped up to the evening light, breathing in salt air like she's learning how.
I glance at the office. Paul is inside, at his desk, back to work.
But the light is on. And through the window, I catch him looking out at the water one more time before he picks up his pen.