Chapter 11 #2
Lottie appears from the hallway. “They knocked the bookshelf off the wall. It’s fine. Nothing broke. Except the wall. The wall has a hole in it.”
“I’ll fix it,” Jack calls from somewhere in the back of the house.
“Jack, you already fixed the door and the kitchen faucet and the —”
“Already fixing it.”
Paul pushes off the doorframe. “I’ll help him.” And just like that, he’s gone. Down the hallway toward the sound of Jack’s toolbox and twin destruction, leaving me in the kitchen holding my iced coffee and a feeling I can’t put down.
By noon, the house is moved in. Not decorated, not organized, not home yet—but filled.
The furniture is placed. The beds are assembled.
Jack fixed four things nobody asked him to fix and found two more that need attention next week.
The boys’ room has bunk beds and a rug and a poster of a shark that Aidan contributed as a housewarming gift.
The studio room has Lottie’s backdrop stands and her lighting kit and three boxes of props she hasn’t unpacked yet.
Amber arrives with lunch from The Salty Pearl—shrimp tacos and coleslaw and a key lime pie that makes Mads moan in a way that’s probably inappropriate for mixed company.
“This pie is a religious experience,” Mads announces from her chair, which she has not left in two hours. “I’m having another piece and if Asher texts one more person about my glucose levels, I’m hiding his phone in the ocean.”
Everyone eats in the living room, spread across the new couch and the kitchen chairs and the floor. The boys are in the backyard with Harold, who has graduated from bowline knots to some kind of game involving the garden hose that I can hear but have chosen not to witness.
Justin is leaning against the kitchen counter, eating a taco. Lottie is across the room, not looking at him. Justin is across the room, not looking at her. They are both very committed to not looking at each other, which is its own kind of looking.
“So,” Michelle says, settling onto the couch arm with her plate. “Book club tonight?”
“Tonight?” Lottie looks up. “I just moved in. I don’t even know where my wine glasses are.”
“We’ll bring wine glasses,” Jo says. “And wine. And the book.”
“I haven’t read the book.”
“You have approximately six hours,” Hazel says. “It’s a fast read.”
“What is it?”
Michelle pulls a paperback from her bag. The cover features a scowling man in a flannel shirt and a grinning woman in a sundress, standing on a dock. A dock.
“Grumpy by the Sea,” Michelle reads. “By Waverly Kane. Quote from the back: ‘She was sunshine in human form. He hadn’t seen the sun in years.’”
Mads makes a sound like a teakettle. Hazel elbows her.
“It’s a grumpy-sunshine romance,” Michelle continues, her face perfectly innocent. “Set in a small coastal town. He’s a brooding boat mechanic. She’s the optimistic new neighbor who won’t stop talking to him.” She looks at me. “The book club chose it unanimously.”
“Unanimously,” I repeat.
“It was Grandma’s pick,” Mads says, and then has to stuff pie in her mouth to keep from laughing.
I glance across the room. Paul is standing by the front door, talking to Dean about something—truck engines, probably, or fire code regulations.
He didn’t hear the book description. He doesn’t know that the entire book club is about to spend an evening analyzing a fictional version of our situation while sitting in the living room of the house that exists because Lottie is building a life here and I am falling for my neighbor and nothing about any of this was in the plan.
“I’ll read it,” Lottie says. “But I’m going to need more wine than usual.”
“Already handled.” Amber holds up her phone. “Brett’s bringing three bottles after the dinner rush.”
The men filter out slowly over the next hour.
Justin leaves first, nodding goodbye to Lottie without quite meeting her eyes.
Dean whistles for Rex and heads out with Jo promising to stay for book club.
Jack kisses Hazel’s forehead and tells Lottie the back door works now but the bathroom vent needs a new motor.
Dawson and Finch head out on Dawson’s boat, Jenna watching from the porch with studied indifference until Finch waves goodbye and she practically melts into the railing.
Paul is last.
He finds me in the kitchen, rinsing plates. The house is loud behind us—women settling in, wine being opened, Mads demanding someone bring her a pillow for her back.
“The wall patch needs twenty-four hours to dry,” he says. “Tell Lottie not to hang anything on it until tomorrow.”
“I’ll tell her.”
He stands there. I rinse another plate. The water runs and the noise from the living room fills the silence that’s building between us—the silence that’s been building since the beach, since his hand on my neck, since the inch we didn’t cross.
“Emma.”
I turn off the water. Look at him.
He’s doing the thing with his jaw. The tight thing. The thing that means he’s holding something back, and the effort of holding it is costing him more than saying it would.
“I’m not good at this,” he says.
“At what?”
“Whatever this is. I haven’t —” He stops. Pushes his hand through his hair. “I’m out of practice.”
“Me too.”
“You’re not out of practice. You talk to everyone. You’re warm with everyone.”
“That’s not the same thing and you know it.”
He holds my gaze. The kitchen is small and he’s close and the sound of the book club assembling in the next room feels very far away.
“The book they’re reading,” he says. “Michelle showed me the cover.”
My heart drops through the floor. “You saw it.”
“The man on the cover is wearing my exact shirt.”
“Paul —”
“It’s the same flannel. Emma. The same one I’m wearing right now.”
I look. He’s right. It’s not identical, but it’s close enough—dark green flannel, sleeves rolled, collar open. The fictional grumpy boat mechanic on the cover of Grumpy by the Sea is wearing Paul Spencer’s shirt.
“Grandma Hensley picked it,” I say weakly.
“Grandma Hensley is a menace and an artist and I have nothing but respect and fear.” He almost smiles. Almost. “Have a good book club.”
He leaves. The front door closes quietly behind him. Through the window, I watch him walk to Justin’s truck, where Justin is waiting with the engine running. Paul gets in. They pull away.
I stand in the kitchen with wet hands and a hammering heart and the absolute certainty that I am in trouble. Deep, warm, terrifying, flannel-shirt trouble.
“Emma!” Michelle calls from the living room. “Wine’s open and Mads is already on chapter three. Get in here!”
The book club meets in Lottie’s living room on a couch that was in a truck four hours ago, with wine in mismatched glasses because Lottie’s real glasses are in a box labeled Kitchen—Maybe and nobody felt like looking.
The group consists of Michelle, Hazel, Jo, Amber, Mads, me, and Lottie—attending her first official meeting as the newest member of Bookaholics Anonymous.
“Welcome to the club,” Hazel says, raising her glass. “The rules are simple. Read the book. Have opinions. Don’t judge anyone’s wine consumption.”
“And whatever happens at book club stays at book club,” Amber adds. “Except the parts that are too good not to share. Those go directly to Grandma Hensley.”
“Grandma has a separate intelligence channel,” Mads confirms. “She gets a full debrief. It’s non-negotiable.”
Lottie takes a sip of wine. “I read the book.”
“Already?” Jo looks impressed. “We just gave it to you this morning.”
“I skimmed during lunch and read the rest while Harold had the boys in the backyard. I read fast when I’m motivated.” She holds up the paperback. “I have feelings.”
“Welcome to Bookaholics Anonymous,” Michelle says. “Feelings are the whole point.”
“Okay.” Lottie flips the book open. “The hero. Graham. The grumpy boat guy who grunts instead of communicating and fixes things at midnight because he can’t admit he cares.”
“What about him?” I ask, and my voice comes out higher than intended.
“He’s infuriating. He’s exactly the kind of man who makes you want to shake him and kiss him at the same time. He does something so sweet in chapter fourteen—fixes her porch light without telling her—and then spends three chapters pretending it never happened.”
My hand tightens on my wine glass.
“The porch light scene was everything,” Michelle says. “He literally can’t sleep knowing her light is out. He can’t articulate why. He just shows up at two in the morning with a ladder and a bulb and does it.”
“Because he cares,” Mads says, shifting her pillow. “His love language is acts of service and denial. He cares so much it scares him, so he expresses it through home repair and then pretends he was just being practical.”
“It was a safety issue,” Lottie reads from the book. “That’s what Graham tells her when she finds out. ‘It was a safety issue.’ As if anyone believes that.”
The room goes quiet for one beat.
Every woman in this room knows about the running light. I know they know. They know I know they know. Grandma Hensley’s intelligence network does not have gaps.
“The sunshine character,” Hazel says, gracefully pivoting. “Marguerite. What did everyone think?”
“She’s lovely,” Jo says. “Warm without being naive. She sees through his grumpiness from the beginning. She knows it’s armor. She just waits.”
“I love that she doesn’t try to fix him,” Amber adds. “She doesn’t make it her project to crack him open. She just keeps being herself, keeps being warm, and lets him come to her on his own terms.”
“The almost-kiss in chapter sixteen,” Mads says. “On the beach.”
I take a very large sip of wine.
“They’re so close,” Mads continues, her hand on her belly, completely unaware—or completely aware and enjoying every second—of what she’s doing to me.
“And then his phone rings and the moment breaks and he walks away. And she just stands there. And the line is —” She opens the book.
“‘She watched him go and thought about how brave it was, coming back. How brave and terrifying and human, to walk toward someone when every instinct says to run.’”
The room is looking at me. Not obviously. Not directly. Just—looking. The way women look when they know something and are waiting for someone to confirm it.
“I think,” I say carefully, “that Graham needed more time. I think the almost-kiss was honest but the timing was wrong and he wasn’t ready to let himself have it.”
“But she was,” Lottie says softly. This is her first book club meeting and she’s already going for the throat. “Marguerite was ready. She was standing right there.”
“Sometimes standing there is enough,” Jo says. “Sometimes that’s the bravest thing—not chasing someone down, not demanding they feel what you feel. Just being there. Letting them know the door is open.”
“The door and the porch light,” Michelle says, and everyone laughs, and the conversation moves on to the subplot about the heroine’s friendship with the local baker, and I sit on Lottie’s new couch with my wine and my feelings and the warm, overwhelming certainty that I have found my people.
Not just the book club. Not just the women in this room who showed up today with trucks and muffins and furniture and the casual, breathtaking generosity of a community that decided Lottie belongs before she even signed the lease.
All of it. The marina and the dock and the coffee shop and the town that fills a house without being asked. The kids on the beach and Harold in the backyard and Justin not-looking at Lottie and Paul carrying a bunk bed through my best friend’s front door with his sleeves rolled up.
This is what I came here for. This is what Aunt Dottie knew I’d find.
I look around the room—at Michelle pouring more wine, at Hazel making notes in her book, at Jo and Amber debating the hero’s emotional intelligence, at Mads eating her third piece of pie, at Lottie sitting cross-legged on her own couch in her own house in a town that decided she was theirs before she decided it herself.
“Thank you,” I say.
The room pauses.
“For what?” Michelle asks.
“For showing up today. Nobody asked you to come.”
“That’s the thing about Twin Waves,” Hazel says, easy and warm like it’s the simplest truth in the world. “Nobody has to ask.”
Lottie bumps her shoulder against mine. “Four blocks,” she whispers. “Blackout curtains. Morning clients. And a book club.”
I bump her back. “You’re going to be fine.”
“We both are.”
Through the front window, the sun is going down over Osprey Lane, turning the magnolia tree gold and the light in the room warm and everything soft in the way that evenings get when you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
The wine goes around again. The book discussion continues. Mads falls asleep with pie crumbs on her belly and everyone lets her because pregnant women at their first moving day deserve the rest.
And I sit in the middle of all of it—the noise, the laughter, the warmth—and think about a man who said “I’m not good at this” in my best friend’s kitchen with his jaw tight and his eyes open and his heart showing through the cracks in his armor like light through a door someone left ajar.
He’s wrong, by the way.
He’s so much better at this than he thinks.