Chapter 20 #2
“I think it’s a solid list,” I say. “But if you only have one day, you might want to pick your top five. The ones you’d be saddest to skip.”
“I’d be sad to skip all of them.”
“I know. But sometimes you have to choose.”
He chews his lip and studies the list. “Okay. Fishing is number one because Dad and I used to fish at the lake near our old house. Before the trains took over the garage.”
I nod, keeping my face neutral.
“Ice cream is important because everybody likes ice cream. And showing him my room is important because I set it up myself. Mom helped with the curtains, but the rest was me.” He pauses. “And number twelve is important because you’re important.”
I set down my sandwich. “Aidan.”
“You are. Mom’s happier since we moved here. And Millie reads to you, which she doesn’t do for just anybody, and even Jenna takes her earbuds out when you’re around, which is like...a big deal.”
I don’t know what to do with this. I’ve been handed a piece of paper with fourteen items on it by an eight-year-old who has decided I belong on the same list as his father, and I don’t know what to do with the weight of that.
“I think your dad is going to love the list,” I say.
“You think he’ll actually do the stuff? Like, for real? Not just say he will and then check his phone the whole time?”
“I think you should give him the chance to show you.”
Aidan nods, folds the paper back up, and tucks it in his pocket with care like he’s handling something precious.
“Mr. Paul?”
“Yeah.”
“If Dad can’t do all fourteen, can we do the leftover ones with you?”
I look at this kid with his folded list and his hopeful face and his stuffed elephant drying on the deck rail, and I realize I would do all fourteen twice. I would do them every Saturday for the rest of my life if he asked.
“Absolutely,” I say.
He grins. Punches my arm—the way he’s seen older kids do, too hard, slightly off-target—and runs out the door yelling something to Olson about hermit crab habitats.
I pick up my sandwich, put it down, then pick it up again.
Eat it without tasting a single bite.
Emma finds me in the dock office an hour later.
She’s carrying her binder—the wedding one, with the tabs and the shot lists and the hand-drawn diagrams. But she doesn’t open it.
She sets it on the desk and sits in the chair across from me and pulls her knees up, which she does when she’s about to say something real instead of something logistical.
“Matt texted this morning,” she says. “His flight’s confirmed for Saturday. He booked a hotel in town.”
“Good.”
“He wants to take the kids to dinner Saturday night. Just him and them. No me.”
“How do you feel about that?”
She considers this. “Relieved. If he’s good with them—actually present, actually paying attention—then maybe this visit will be different. Maybe he’s growing up.”
“And if he’s not?”
“Then I handle it the way I always handle it. Put them to bed. Answer the questions. Tape the cracks back together.”
“You shouldn’t have to do that alone.”
She looks at me. The afternoon light is coming through the office window, catching the side of her face, turning her hair gold at the edges. Her beauty has nothing to do with the light and everything to do with the fact that she’s sitting in my office being brave about something that terrifies her.
“I’m not alone,” she says. “Not anymore.”
The office goes quiet. The kind of quiet that isn’t empty—the kind that’s full, that’s holding something between two people who aren’t ready to name it but both know it’s there.
“Paul.”
“Yeah.”
“When Matt comes—whatever happens—I need you to know something.” She unfolds her legs and sits forward. “You’re not the backup plan. You’re not the consolation prize. You’re not the guy I’m settling for because my first choice didn’t work out.”
A lump forms in my throat, and I swallow past it. “Okay.”
“I mean it. Whatever Matt is or isn’t to those kids, whatever history we share—that’s separate. It has nothing to do with this.” She gestures between us in the space that’s been shrinking for months. “This is its own thing. And I need you to believe that.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.” She smiles. The real one that makes the fairy lights on her houseboat look dim by comparison.
She picks up the binder, stands, and walks to the door.
“Millie wants to know if you’ll come to her reading on the dock tonight. She’s been practicing Island of the Blue Dolphins and she says you’re the best audience because you don’t interrupt.”
“What time?”
“Seven. Bring your own chair.”
She leaves, and the office smells like her shampoo again. I don’t open the window.
I sit at my desk for a long time after she’s gone, looking at the water through the window, thinking about Holly and Matt and three kids who’ve started saving me a seat at everything, and I realize something that should scare me but doesn’t.
I’m not the neighbor anymore.
I don’t know when that changed. Maybe it was the pancakes or the fireworks, carrying Aidan home with his face pressed against my shoulder. Perhaps it was Stomper, sinking in the water, and my body moving before my brain caught up.
Or maybe it was just now. Emma sitting in my office, telling me I’m not the backup plan, looking at me like I’m the first chapter of something she’s been waiting to read.
Holly’s sticky note is still in the logbook. Don’t forget to eat lunch.
I already ate. Aidan made sure of that.
At seven, I bring my chair.
Millie has set up a reading station on the dock between Emma’s houseboat and my boat.
She’s dragged out a beach towel, a battery-powered lantern, and a glass of lemonade.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is open on her lap, the spine cracked at chapter twelve, the pages marked with sticky tabs in three different colors.
“The blue tabs are vocabulary words,” she tells me as I unfold my chair. “The yellow tabs are passages I want to read out loud. The pink tabs are questions for the Q-and-A portion.”
“There’s a Q-and-A?”
“Mr. Paul. It’s a reading. Not a monologue.”
I settle into my chair. “My apologies. Proceed.”
She clears her throat, adjusts the lantern, and smooths the page.
Emma appears on the houseboat deck with a mug of tea and sits on the top step. She doesn’t come down to the dock. She stays up there, curled into the corner with her knees tucked under her, watching.
Jenna is on the houseboat too. Stretched out on the bow with her earbuds in and her phone six inches from her face. Not participating. But she’s outside, which for a sixteen-year-old on a summer evening is its own kind of concession.
Millie reads.
She’s good. Better than good—she’s ten years old and she already understands pacing.
She slows down for the emotional passages.
Speeds up during the action. Drops her voice when the main character is alone, which happens a lot in this particular story because the main character is stranded on an island by herself.
I listen. Really listen. Not the way adults listen to kids read, where you’re half paying attention and half thinking about what you need to do tomorrow. The way you listen to a person who has something to say and has chosen you specifically to say it to.
The sun drops and the sky goes orange, pink, then that deep blue-purple Emma calls “blue hour.” The water turns dark, and the lantern makes a warm circle around us on the dock, and inside that circle it’s just Millie’s voice and the occasional slap of water against wood.
“‘I thought about all the happy times,’” Millie reads. She pauses and looks up. “This part always gets me.”
“Keep going.”
She reads three more paragraphs. Her voice wobbles once, steadies itself. She pushes through.
I glance up at Emma on the houseboat. She’s not looking at Millie anymore. She’s looking at me, her tea forgotten in her hands. Her expression is the one she gets behind the camera—that means she’s seeing something she wants to capture and hold onto.
I hold her gaze. Five seconds. Six. Long enough for the dock and the water and the evening to fall away and leave just the two of us, suspended in whatever this is.
Millie turns a page. The spell breaks.
“Okay,” Millie says. “Q-and-A time. First question: do you think Karana was right to stay on the island alone?”
“I think she was brave to stay.”
“Brave and right aren’t the same.”
“No. It’s not.”
She considers this, tapping her finger against the page. “Second question: do you think it’s possible to build a whole life by yourself, or do you eventually need other people?”
I look at this ten-year-old philosopher sitting cross-legged on a dock in the lantern light, asking me the question I’ve been avoiding for a decade.
“I think you can survive alone,” I say. “But surviving and living aren’t the same.”
Millie nods. Writes something in the margin of her book. Looks up.
“Last question. Did you bring snacks? Because Mom said you might bring snacks, and I skipped dessert purposely.”
I reach under my chair and produce a bag of chocolate chip cookies from the marina store.
“Mr. Paul. You are the perfect audience.”
Emma laughs from the houseboat deck. The sound carries across the water, and Jenna pulls out one earbud—just one—and says, “Can I have a cookie too, or is this a members-only situation?”
“Get down here,” Millie says. “But you have to answer a discussion question first.”
“Pass.”
“One question. Non-negotiable.”
Jenna sighs the sigh of a teenager being asked to participate in family bonding. She climbs down to the dock, takes a cookie, and drops onto the beach towel next to her sister.
“Fine. One question.”
“Good. I just asked Mr. Paul this one, but I want to hear what you think. Do you think it’s possible to build a whole life by yourself?”
Jenna looks at the cookie, looks at her sister, and looks at me sitting in my fold-out chair on the dock at seven o’clock on a Tuesday because a ten-year-old invited me.
“No,” she says. “Obviously not.”
Then she puts her earbud back in and eats her cookie, and that’s the most words Jenna Spencer Mills has ever voluntarily spoken in my presence, and I’ll take it.
Emma catches my eye from the houseboat. She mouths two words.
Thank you.
I nod. Mouth one back.
Always.
The stars come out. Millie reads one more chapter. The cookies disappear. Somewhere on the boardwalk, music drifts from the brewery. The evening wraps around us like something warm and lived-in, and I think: this is what it feels like. This is what I’ve been missing.
Not the romance, the butterflies, the heat of Emma’s fingers on my ribs, or the way my pulse kicks when she walks past.
This. Cookies on the dock. A kid reading out loud. A teenager tolerating my existence. A woman on the houseboat steps, watching me with her children, deciding I’m safe.
I fold up my chair at nine. Millie hugs me—arms around my waist, face against my chest, no warning. Just a full-body, ten-year-old commitment to affection that knocks the air out of me.
“Same time Thursday?” she asks.
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
She runs inside. Jenna follows without saying goodbye, which I’ve learned is her version of goodbye.
Emma stays on the steps.
“Paul.”
“Yeah.”
“You brought cookies.”
“The marina store had them on sale.”
“You brought a chair. And cookies. And sat on the dock for two hours listening to a fifth-grader read a Newbery Medal winner.”
“She’s a good reader.”
Emma smiles and steps down to the dock. She walks toward me in the dark, the lantern behind her, her face half-lit and half-shadow.
She stops close. Close enough that I can smell her strawberry shampoo again, that if I reached out, I could touch her.
She puts her hand on my chest, right over my heart, and she holds it there.
“Goodnight, Paul.”
“Night, Emma.”
She keeps her hand there for three more seconds. Then she pulls it back, turns, and walks up the steps to her houseboat. The screen door closes behind her, and the fairy lights glow.
I stand on the dock with my folded chair and my empty cookie bag and her handprint still burning through my shirt. Holly would have loved tonight. Every single second of it.
I go to bed without setting an alarm. I know I’ll wake up early anyway, because there’s a dock that needs me and a houseboat next door full of people who’ve started to feel like mine.
The water rocks my boat. The stars turn. Somewhere in the harbor, a pelican settles in for the night.
So do I.