Chapter 9
NINE
EMMA
Lottie found a place.
She told me last night, sitting on the deck with wine and the fairy lights making everything soft.
Three bedrooms, fenced yard, and a spare room off the hallway she's already calling “the studio.” Newborn photography is all about controlled lighting—softboxes, strobes, everything positioned exactly right.
This room has one small window with blackout curtains already installed and enough floor space for her backdrops and props.
Osprey Lane, four blocks from the beach, school bus stop at the corner.
The landlord is a retired teacher named Mrs. Harding who told Lottie the boys could be as loud as they wanted because she wears hearing aids and considers them optional.
The rent is manageable. Not cheap, but manageable. If she books even two newborn sessions a month to start, she can cover it without draining the cushion too fast.
She's signing the lease this morning, which is why I'm currently standing on the beach with three eight-year-old boys, a bag full of snacks, and the increasingly familiar sensation that I am outnumbered and outmatched.
“Mom, can I dig to China?”
“No.”
“What about Australia? Australia is closer if you go through the middle.”
“Aidan, that is not how geography works.”
“How do you know? Have you ever dug through the middle?”
Jenna went with Dawson, Piper, and Finch to the inlet.
Millie is at Harold's, helping him organize his tackle box, which is her idea of a perfect morning because my middle child finds joy in sorting small objects into categories.
That leaves me with the chaos trio on a wide open beach with shovels and limitless energy.
Paul's truck was gone from the marina lot when we left. I noticed. I'm not proud of noticing, but I noticed.
I have not been thinking about the running light or the way his hands looked when I saw him replacing a dock cleat last week—capable, unhurried, like everything he touches is worth doing right.
I have not been thinking about his hands.
The boys are digging. I set up my towel and sit down.
The sun is already pressing down hard—Carolina heat that turns the sand into a griddle and makes the air above the dunes shimmer.
I can taste the salt on my lips. The waves are steady, rhythmic, the hiss of foam retreating over shells.
The boys are occupied. This is what peace feels like.
“Dig faster, he's coming back!”
My eyes fly open.
The boys have abandoned their China excavation and are now forty yards down the beach, shovels flying, a different hole taking shape with alarming speed.
And walking back from the water's edge, carrying a water bottle—dark hair with silver at the temples, arms crossed even while walking—is Paul.
Paul is on the beach. On a walk. Like a normal person. And my son and Lottie's sons have found him the way heat-seeking missiles find their targets.
“Mr. Paul! The hole is ready! You promised!”
That's Aidan. My son. Yelling across a public beach at the grumpiest man in Twin Waves.
And Paul—I watch this in real time—looks at the hole. Looks at the three boys standing around it like surgeons around an operating table. Looks at the ocean like he's considering walking into it and never coming back.
Then he gets in the hole.
Paul Spencer, owner of Harold's Marina, who folds his dock lines in identical coils and once lectured me for eleven minutes about the proper amperage for a marine refrigeration unit, sits down in a hole dug by three eight-year-olds on a public beach.
I am not going over there. I am going to watch from a safe distance because this is the most entertaining thing I've seen since Lottie told Justin to net some more.
The boys go to work. Sand flies. Paul disappears by degrees. First his legs. Then his waist. Then his chest. Mitch pats sand around his shoulders with the firm competence of a kid who has buried many adults and takes pride in his craft.
Within ten minutes, Paul Spencer is buried up to his chin.
His head is just—sitting there. On the sand. Like a grumpy coconut. His dark hair is catching the wind and his jaw is doing its usual thing and he is completely, totally immobilized.
And he's not fighting it.
I get up. I can't help it.
I walk over trying to look casual, like I'm just strolling, not drawn by the gravitational pull of a buried grumpy man. The boys spot me first.
“Mom! We buried Mr. Paul!”
“I can see that.”
Paul's eyes find mine. From ground level. His entire body is under sand and his chin is resting on the beach like a man quietly accepting the consequences of his choices.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Get it out of your system.”
“I haven't said a word.”
“You don't have to. Your whole face is composing a speech.”
He's not wrong. I'm holding back laughter so hard my ribs ache.
“How did this happen?” I manage.
“They asked.”
“They asked you to get in a hole.”
“They said it was for a sand castle. I was going to help them dig. Then the scope changed.”
Olson is smoothing the sand around Paul's neck with the precision of a sculptor. “He's really good at being buried. He doesn't wiggle.”
“Wiggling would compromise the structural integrity.”
“See?” Olson pats his shoulder area. “He gets it.”
Mitch appears with a bucket of wet sand and begins constructing a castle wall around Paul's head. “We're building a fortress. Mr. Paul is the prisoner.”
“I'm not a prisoner. I'm a—” Paul pauses. “What am I?”
“You're the dragon,” Aidan says, dropping to his knees with the intense focus of a boy who has found his creative vision. “The dragon who guards the treasure, but the knights trapped you. We're the knights.”
“I don't want to be a dragon.”
“You don't get to pick. You're buried.”
I lower myself onto the sand next to Paul's head. Close enough to talk. Close enough to see the sand in his eyebrows and the way his mouth is doing a thing it almost never does.
He's almost smiling.
Not fully. Paul Spencer doesn't do full smiles. But the corners are twitching and his eyes have that crinkle that means his face is trying to do a thing his brain hasn't authorized.
“You let them bury you,” I say quietly.
“They're persuasive.”
“They're eight.”
“Eight-year-olds are the most persuasive humans on the planet. They don't understand no. They just keep asking with different words until your resistance collapses.”
“That's called parenting.”
“That's called a siege.”
Aidan is now drawing scales on the sand around Paul's neck with a stick. “Dragons have scales. Hold still.”
“I literally cannot move.”
“Good. Scales require precision.”
I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them.
My son is drawing on the sand around the neck of the man who told me my coffee maker was a fire hazard and my children were a dock liability.
Aidan's tongue is sticking out the way it does when he's concentrating.
His curls are full of sand. He's utterly absorbed, completely happy.
And Paul is letting him.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it.
“Mom, he needs food,” Mitch announces. “Prisoners need food. It's in the Geneva Conventions.”
“You don't know what the Geneva Conventions are.”
“Olson told me. It means you have to feed prisoners or it's a war crime.”
“Feed the dragon,” Olson says with dignity.
I look at Paul. Paul looks at me. His entire body is underground and his head is surrounded by a sand fortress and my son is drawing scales on his neck and two other eight-year-olds are invoking international law to demand I feed him.
“I have goldfish crackers in my bag,” I say.
“I'm not eating goldfish crackers.”
“You don't have arms.”
He blinks. Processes this. “I'm not eating goldfish crackers that get hand-fed to me on a public beach.”
“Then starve, dragon.”
I come back with crackers, a water bottle, and a granola bar. Mitch holds a cracker in front of Paul's mouth.
“Open,” Mitch commands.
“Absolutely not.”
Mitch puts the cracker on Paul's lower lip. Paul stares at it. Cross-eyed, because it's on his face. The cracker sits there, orange and defiant.
Paul eats the cracker.
The boys cheer. Mitch produces another one. Paul opens his mouth with resigned dignity. Resistance is futile. Acceptance is less exhausting.
I'm sitting cross-legged on the sand next to a man's head, watching eight-year-olds feed him goldfish crackers, and my chest is doing a warm, expanding thing I can't blame on the sunshine or the salt air or the three cups of coffee I had this morning.
He catches me looking. Our eyes meet over the sand fortress and the cracker crumbs on his chin.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing.”
“You're looking at me.”
“You're a head on a beach. It's hard not to look.”
“Water break,” Aidan announces. He picks up my water bottle, unscrews the cap, and holds it to Paul's mouth at an angle that would be approximately perfect if Aidan's sense of angles weren't governed by the same brain that thinks crabs need vitamin D.
Water runs down Paul's chin. Into the sand fortress. Paul sputters.
“Sorry. I'm used to watering Steve.”
“You water your crab?”
“Hydration is important for all living things, Mr. Paul.”
“Give it to your mother. Let your mother do it.”
Aidan hands me the bottle.
I hold the water to Paul's mouth. Carefully.
Tilted just enough for him to drink without drowning.
He takes a sip. Then another. His eyes are on mine the whole time and I'm suddenly very aware of how close my fingers are to his lips.
How close my face is to his face. How this is the most intimate thing I've done with another adult in longer than I want to calculate, and it involves a water bottle and a man buried in sand.
“Thank you,” he says. Quiet. Just for me.
“You're welcome.”
We stay like that for a second too long. Me holding a water bottle. Him buried. Our faces close enough that I can see the flecks of amber in his brown eyes and the sand on his eyelashes and the way his jaw softens when he's not clenching it.