Chapter 13 #2
So much for reasonable volume. Seagulls scatter. A heron on the next piling gives Aidan a look of pure contempt.
"Mr. Paul, do you want pancakes? My mom is making them.
She didn't say so yet but I can tell because she has the overthinking face and she always makes pancakes when she has the overthinking face.
It's a pattern. My teacher says I'm gifted at noticing things.
She also says I need to stop noticing things out loud during math but that's a different conversation. "
Silence from Paul's boat.
Then, muffled through the hull: "Give me five minutes."
I am going to have a conversation with my daughter about what we announce to grumpy neighbors before seven a.m.
“That’s a yes!” Aidan turns and gives me a thumbs up from the dock, grinning with every tooth he has. The backward swim trunks catch the morning light. The single shoe is now on his head. “He said yes, Mom! Make the good pancakes! With the chocolate chips! And whipped cream!”
This is the life Paul Spencer is voluntarily entering.
He runs back aboard and disappears below to presumably find his other shoe, or to inform Steve the crab about the breakfast guest, or to do whatever Aidan does in the mornings that involves so much noise and so little actual preparation for the day.
I sit on the deck.
He said he’d come. And I believe him. Because Paul Spencer has never once said he’d do something and not done it. The running light. The dock cleat. Showing up at the beach and the lighthouse and my dinner table with pickled okra and the quiet, terrifying willingness to be here.
The scared part of me is still there. It lives in me the way the tide lives in the marina—always present, always moving. I don’t think it ever fully goes away. I think you just learn to swim in it.
I go inside. Get out the flour, the eggs, the buttermilk. The good pancakes. Not the healthy ones.
And when Paul knocks on the hull right on time—because of course he’s right on time—I open the door, and he’s standing there with wet hair and a cup of coffee and an expression that’s trying very hard to be casual and failing completely.
He looks like a man who rehearsed a face in the mirror and then forgot it the second someone opened a door.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
“Your son invited me to pancakes.”
“I heard. The retirement community three miles away heard.”
“He also told me jellyfish have no brains.”
“He’s been saving that one.”
“He then asked me if I had a brain, and before I could answer, he said ‘that’s okay, Mr. Paul, you can still have pancakes.’”
“That’s... generous of him.”
“I’ve been put in my place. This is rock bottom. I’m here for pancakes.”
Paul steps aboard into my kitchen, the space where I’ve been carrying everything alone for so long that having someone else in it feels like setting down a bag I forgot I was holding.
He doesn’t reach for me or kiss me. He just stands in my galley with his coffee and watches me crack eggs and says, “Can I help?”
Three simple words that Matt never once said during our entire marriage.
Can I help?
My hands still over the mixing bowl. Because it’s not the words—it’s the fact that he’s asking. That he sees me doing something and his first instinct isn’t to go find something more interesting. His first instinct is to stand here, in my kitchen, and ask what he can do.
“You can mix,” I say. My voice only cracks a little.
He takes the bowl. Mixes. The muscles in his forearms tighten and release with each stroke of the whisk, and I let myself stare. A man mixing pancake batter should not be attractive. This is flour and eggs and buttermilk. There is nothing romantic about it.
His wrist turns the whisk and a tendon shifts, and I have to look away before I lose my mind over baking.
Aidan appears wearing both shoes now, swim trunks still backward, and begins delivering a lecture on jellyfish to Paul with the confidence of a tenured professor.
Paul listens. Actually listens—not the glazed-over listening Matt used to do while mentally calculating rail gauge dimensions.
Real listening, where he asks follow-up questions and Aidan lights up like someone plugged him in.
“Did you know the box jellyfish has twenty-four eyes?” Aidan says.
“I did not.”
“Twenty-four. And zero brains. So it can see everything and think about none of it. That’s kind of like Olson.”
“Don’t tell Olson that.”
“I already told Olson that. He said ‘thank you.’ He didn’t understand the insult. Which kind of proved my point.”
Paul makes a sound that might be a laugh. A real one. Small, surprised, like it escaped before he could catch it.
Millie is reading at the table, and Jenna keeps walking through the galley for no reason except to see Paul standing there, and the morning light is coming through the window the way it always does—warm and steady and there whether I trust it or not.
Jenna’s voice in my head: A man who shows up with condiments he didn’t even buy because he wanted to bring something.
Paul’s voice in the lighthouse: Because I can’t sleep when your light is out.
And underneath both—the scared part of me that’s been running the show since Matt left, still whispering that good things don’t last. I let it whisper.
I don’t fight it or stuff it down. I just let it sit in my chest alongside the hope, two things taking up the same space, because that’s what being brave feels like when you’re forty and divorced and falling for someone new.
It feels like both at the same time. And choosing to stay anyway.
Paul looks up from the batter. “Am I doing this right?”
“You’re doing fine.”
He’s doing more than fine. But I’m not ready to say that out loud yet.
Soon, though. I think soon.