Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
EMMA
The Twin Waves Fourth of July Festival smells like smoked brisket and funnel cake and the kind of grilled corn that makes you forget you’re an adult with responsibilities, and I’m carrying a camera bag that weighs more than Aidan while trying to keep track of three children who have scattered in three separate directions like fireworks that went off early.
“Millie went toward the bookshop!” Jenna calls from somewhere near the lemonade stand. “Aidan went—actually, I don’t know where Aidan went. He said something about finding the crab racing booth.”
“There’s a crab racing booth?”
“There is now, apparently.”
This is fine. My children are loose at a festival.
Aidan is looking for crabs. Millie is looking for books.
Jenna is looking for Finch—Dawson’s best friend, the boy she swears she doesn’t have a crush on—which is why she’s wearing the earrings she saves for special occasions and her sunscreen game is suspiciously thorough.
I adjust the camera bag on my shoulder and scan the crowd.
The boardwalk is packed—families and couples and teenagers and dogs and at least one parrot on someone’s shoulder, because Twin Waves is the kind of town where people bring parrots to community events and nobody questions it.
The beach is a patchwork of umbrellas and towels.
The band is setting up on the boardwalk stage, and someone has hung enough red, white, and blue bunting to gift-wrap the entire island.
I’ve got my camera because I always have my camera. It’s an extension of my arm at this point. Jenna says I photograph everything—food, sunsets, strangers’ dogs, the way light hits a building at a certain angle. She’s not wrong. It’s how I process the world. Other people journal. I shoot.
It also gives me an excuse to point my lens at everything instead of thinking about the fact that Paul Spencer is somewhere on this island and I haven’t seen him since he walked away from my houseboat three days ago.
Three days. He said “I’ll see you” and then he went to his office and I went to my deck and we’ve been ten feet apart ever since, doing the thing where you’re both home and both aware the other person is home and neither of you knocks.
He fixed something on C-dock yesterday. I heard his drill.
I did not go outside to accidentally be in his line of sight.
I absolutely did not check my hair before stepping onto my deck to water the plant I don’t have.
I might have bought a plant.
“Emma!”
Michelle is waving at me from behind a table set up near the coffee station—because of course Michelle has a coffee station at the festival. The woman brings coffee to everything. I’m fairly certain Michelle’s will stipulates that Twin Waves Brewing Co. must provide refreshments at her own funeral.
“You look cute,” she says, handing me an iced latte without asking. “Is that a new top?”
“It’s not new.”
“It looks new.”
“It’s from the back of my closet.”
“The back of the closet is where we keep the clothes we’re saving for when we want to impress someone.” She grins over the rim of her cup. “So. How’s your neighbor?”
“Which neighbor? I live on a dock. I have several neighbors.”
“The one you kissed in a lighthouse.”
I nearly drop the latte. “How do you know about that?”
“Honey.” Michelle tilts her head. “Mads told Hazel. Hazel told me. I told Jo. Jo told Jessica. Jessica told Amber. Amber told Brett, who told Grayson, who apparently already knew because Harold told him at the hardware store.”
“Harold told—Harold knows?”
“Harold has known since the morning after. He drove his golf cart down the dock and found Paul on your boat with a dish towel over his shoulder. He’s been telling everyone at the marina. I think he called Justin in Wilmington.”
I close my eyes. “I’m going to kill Harold.”
“You’re going to do no such thing. Harold is thrilled.
Harold is living his best life right now.
That man has been trying to get Paul to show interest in a human woman for a decade, and you did it with a camera and a houseboat and what Harold described as —” She air-quotes. “‘The kind of chaos that boy needed.’”
“He called me chaos?”
“He called you a blessing. The chaos part was implied.” Michelle squeezes my arm. “We’re happy for you. All of us. Now go shoot photos before I make you tell me everything.”
I escape with my latte and my camera and the knowledge that the entire town of Twin Waves is aware that I kissed Paul Spencer in a lighthouse and I have zero privacy and my life is a small-town romance novel and the book club ladies are the Greek chorus.
The boardwalk is lined with food trucks—Bubba’s BBQ with its smoker pumping out clouds that smell like heaven, a taco truck called Shell Yeah with a line twenty people deep, a shaved ice stand run by two teenagers who look like they’d rather be anywhere else, and a kettle corn operation that’s basically printing money.
I buy two hot dogs from the vendor near the pier.
Classic festival hot dogs—the kind with too much mustard and soft buns that fall apart halfway through and you end up wearing half of it.
I eat the first one leaning against the boardwalk railing, watching kids run past with cotton candy bigger than their heads, and I shoot photos between bites because this is my life now—mustard on my chin, camera in one hand, hot dog in the other.
I eat the second hot dog because it’s the Fourth of July and calories don’t count on national holidays. This is a fact. I don’t make the rules.
The boardwalk stretches out in front of me and it hits me, the way it does sometimes—how much I love this place.
The buildings along the boardwalk are painted in soft pastels with white gingerbread trim, like a row of candy-colored dollhouses lined up facing the ocean.
Shutters in seafoam and coral and butter yellow.
Little covered porches with ceiling fans turning lazy circles.
Flower boxes spilling over with petunias and geraniums. The whole stretch looks like something off a postcard, the kind you’d send home and write wish you were here and actually mean it.
Twin Waves Brewing Co. has its doors wide open, the smell of fresh coffee cutting through the salt air.
Michelle’s chalkboard out front reads Iced Liberty Lattes—Because Freedom Tastes Like Caramel.
American flag bunting drapes across the awning, and through the windows I can see the cozy interior she’s spent years turning into the town’s living room—mismatched mugs on hooks, local art on exposed brick, the community bulletin board covered in flyers and business cards and a poster for tonight’s fireworks.
Next door, Chapters by the Sea is glowing.
Jessica’s bookshop has those big bay windows that catch the light off the ocean, and she’s done the display in red, white, and blue—romance novels stacked into the shape of a flag, which is the most Jessica thing I’ve ever seen.
The Victorian trim on the building is painted white against soft blue siding, and the gingerbread details along the roofline make it look like it belongs in a storybook.
A little farther down, Jo’s place—Driftwood and Dreams—has its workshop doors propped open and the smell of furniture polish and sawdust drifts out alongside whatever oldies station she’s got playing inside.
She’s hung vintage signal flags from the porch railing and set a display of refinished coastal pieces on the boardwalk—a turquoise side table, a driftwood mirror, a rocking chair painted the color of sea glass. Everything she touches turns beautiful.
I stop and take photos of all of it. The buildings.
The trim. The way the afternoon light hits the pastel siding and makes the whole boardwalk glow.
This is what Matt never understood—why I moved here, why I stayed.
This place isn’t just pretty. It’s alive.
Every shop is someone’s dream, every porch is someone’s version of home, and the whole thing sits right on the edge of the Atlantic like it’s daring the ocean to wash it away.
It won’t. These buildings have survived hurricanes. They’ll survive anything.
The ring toss booth is my next assignment, and the man running it is Scott Avery.
I know Scott from book club gatherings—Jessica’s husband, the real estate developer who turned out to be a secret romance novelist, which is the most Twin Waves thing that has ever happened.
He’s tall, well-dressed even at a festival booth, and currently in the process of handing a giant stuffed dolphin to a little boy who clearly did not land enough rings to earn it.
“That was close enough,” Scott says to the kid. “Practically a bull’s-eye.”
“He missed every bottle,” the boy’s mother says.
“He had excellent form. Effort counts.”
I raise my camera. “Can I get a shot of this?”
Scott looks at me he’s been caught doing something soft. “Do you photograph everything?”
“Occupational hazard. Hold still.”
Jessica appears beside the booth with two snow cones and a grin. “He does this every year. Last year he gave away the entire inventory in two hours and the festival committee had to run to the dollar store for more stuffed animals.”
“It was ninety minutes,” Scott corrects. “And the committee’s budget was fine.”
“The committee’s budget was not fine. You wrote them a personal check.” Jessica hands him a snow cone. “You’re the worst carny in the history of carnival games and everyone loves you for it.”
“I’m not a carny. I’m a volunteer with generous impulses.”
“You’re a marshmallow in a polo shirt.”
I get several shots—Scott handing out prizes, a line of kids waiting with crumpled dollar bills, Jessica leaning against the booth watching her husband.
A small hand tugs my shorts. Aidan.
“Mom. I found the crab races.”
“There are actual crab races?”