Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
EMMA
Matt’s flying in this morning.
I know this because Aidan has been counting down since he woke up. “Is it time yet, Mom?” Then, over cereal: “How much longer?” Then, from the bathroom with his toothbrush in his mouth: “Do you think he’ll bring presents?”
Millie is quieter about the whole thing. She put on her favorite dress—the blue one with the daisies—without explaining why. Brushed her hair twice. She’s on the houseboat steps with a book open on her lap, but the pages haven’t moved in twenty minutes.
Jenna has her earbuds in. The volume is louder than usual, like she’s constructing a fortress out of bass and melody. She hasn’t mentioned her father once this morning. She’s sixteen. She remembers more than the younger two.
I’m in the galley scrolling through old photos on my camera—a nervous habit I picked up during the divorce. When I don’t know what to do with my feelings, I look at other people’s happiest moments. Weddings, mostly. Couples who figured it out.
Paul is on the dock.
I can see him through the porthole, working on a section of railing near slip four.
He’s been out there since dawn, which isn’t unusual.
What’s unusual is that he hasn’t come by.
No knock on the hull. No coffee delivery.
No quiet “morning” through the screen door.
He’s giving me space, and I understand why, and I hate that I understand why.
“Mom.” Aidan appears in the galley doorway. “Three hours and six minutes. Can I wear my shark tooth necklace? The one Olson found?”
“Sure, bud.”
“And can I bring the list? I want to show Dad the list.”
My stomach tightens. “Of course.”
He disappears. I hear him rummaging through his room, narrating his preparations to Stomper, who is propped on the windowsill in his permanent drying spot.
I look through the porthole again. Paul is drilling something into the railing post, his back to me, his shoulders set in the way they get when he’s concentrating. Or when he’s trying not to feel something.
I should go talk to him. I should walk out there and say something reassuring, something that bridges the gap between yesterday’s hand-on-his-chest and today’s careful distance.
Instead, I scroll through three more weddings and close the camera.
Matt texts mid-morning.
Landed. Grabbing the rental car. Should be there soon. Can’t wait to see the kids.
I stare at the message. Four sentences. Cheerful. Punctual. Promising.
I’ve seen this version of Matt before. The one who shows up with energy and enthusiasm and a trunk full of good intentions.
The version who lasts about six hours before the real Matt surfaces—the one whose attention drifts, whose phone buzzes with model train forum notifications, whose eyes glaze over during conversations that don’t involve HO-scale locomotives.
But maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe people change. Maybe the distance gave him perspective. Maybe this time—
“Mom, he landed early!” Aidan is reading over my shoulder because privacy is a concept that does not exist in a houseboat with three children.
“I see that.”
“Can we wait on the dock? Can we be there when he pulls up? Like in the movies when people hold signs at the airport?”
“We don’t have a sign.”
“I can make one.”
He’s already grabbing markers from the supply drawer.
Millie appears silently beside him, the way she does when she wants to participate but doesn’t want to seem eager.
Jenna stays on the bow. Doesn’t take her earbuds out.
But she shifts position so she can see the parking area at the end of the dock.
His rental car pulls into the marina parking lot about an hour later. Silver SUV. Brand new. The kind of car that screams I’m doing well financially and I want you to notice.
He steps out wearing pressed khakis and a polo shirt, like he’s arriving at a country club instead of a marina.
His hair is shorter than the last time I saw him.
He’s wearing new glasses—wire frames, trendy.
He looks... good. Rested. Like a man who sleeps eight uninterrupted hours in a quiet house with no children and no leaking pipes and no coffee maker that sounds possessed.
Aidan breaks into a sprint.
“Dad!”
He’s across the dock in seconds, crashing into Matt with the full-body force of an eight-year-old who has been counting minutes all morning. Matt catches him—I’ll give him that—scoops him up, holds him tight.
“Hey, buddy. Look at you. You got so tall.”
“I grew an inch and a half since April. Mom measured me on the doorframe. Well, it’s not a doorframe, it’s a bulkhead, because we live on a boat now. Did you know boats have bulkheads instead of walls?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There’s so much I need to tell you. I have a list.”
Millie reaches them next. She doesn’t sprint. She walks—measured, careful, her blue daisy dress fluttering in the breeze—and when she gets there, she wraps her arms around Matt’s waist and presses her face against his shirt without saying a word.
“Hey, Mills.” His voice goes soft. “I missed you.”
She nods against his chest and doesn’t let go.
Jenna is last. She walks down from the houseboat with her earbuds draped around her neck—a concession—and stops about four feet from Matt with her arms crossed like she’s evaluating him.
“Hey, Jen.”
“Hi.”
That’s it. No hug. No sprint. Just hi, delivered like she’s learned to manage expectations.
Matt takes it without pushing, which is another point in his favor.
Then he looks at me.
“Em.”
“Matt.”
We don’t hug. We do the divorced-parent smile—the one that says we are going to be pleasant and functional for the sake of these children—and he asks where they should grab lunch, like he’s a tourist who needs a local’s recommendation. Which, I suppose, he is.
They leave for the afternoon.
Matt takes all three kids to lunch, then ice cream, then the pier for fishing—numbers one, three, and six from Aidan’s list, though Matt doesn’t know there’s a list yet because Aidan is saving the official presentation for the right moment.
I stand on the houseboat deck and watch the silver SUV pull out of the marina parking lot, and the silence that settles over the dock is enormous. No Aidan narrating his day. No Millie turning pages. No muffled bass from Jenna’s earbuds.
Just the water. The gulls. The creak of the houseboat.
And Paul, thirty feet away, sanding a dock rail.
He looks up. Our eyes meet across the stretch of weathered wood between us. He lifts his hand—not a wave, just an acknowledgment. A quiet I’m here.
I lift mine back.
Then I go inside, sit on my bed, and cry for about ten minutes. Not because anything is wrong. Because everything is confusing. Because watching Aidan sprint toward his father made my heart soar and break at the same time, and I don’t know which feeling to trust.
I wash my face. Edit photos for an hour. Text Lottie.
Emma: He showed up.
Lottie: And?
Emma: Pressed khakis. New glasses. Scooped Aidan right up.
Lottie: How long before the cracks show?
Emma: That’s a terrible thing to say.
Lottie: Is it wrong though?
I put down my phone. Pick up my camera. Walk out to the dock and shoot the marina for an hour—the light on the water, the pelicans, the ropes coiled on wooden posts. Anything to keep my hands busy.
Paul is gone by the time I come back. His boat is dark. The dock office is locked.
He’s giving me space.
I don’t want space. I want him to knock on the hull and bring me coffee and sit in the chair by my editing desk and not say anything, because Paul is the only person in my life who understands that sometimes silence is the most generous thing you can offer.
But I don’t text him. And he doesn’t knock.
The kids come back late afternoon.
Aidan tumbles through the door with sunburned cheeks and a bucket of shells. “Mom, we caught a fish! Well, Dad caught a fish. I caught seaweed. But I helped identify the species—it was a pinfish, which is in the Sparidae family, and Dad said he was impressed.”
“That sounds amazing, bud.”
“And then we got ice cream and I had the waffle cone and Dad let me get two scoops and one of them was blue and my tongue turned colors, look—” He sticks out his tongue. It’s blue. “And Dad said tomorrow he wants to see my room and meet Stomper and go on the boardwalk.”
Tomorrow. He’s coming back tomorrow. I should feel relieved.
Millie comes in next. Still in the daisy dress, which now has chocolate on the hem. She’s smiling—a real one, unguarded, the kind she saves for moments that lived up to the hope she put into them.
“Good day?” I ask.
She nods. “He remembered that I like mint chip.”
Her words carry the weight of the world. He remembered. Such a small thing to be grateful for. Such a devastating bar to clear.
Jenna is last through the door with her earbuds back in. She walks past me toward her room.
“Jen? How was it?”
She pauses in the doorway, but doesn’t turn around.
“He checked his phone eleven times during lunch. I counted.”
The door closes.
I stand in the galley with Aidan’s blue tongue and Millie’s chocolate-stained dress and Jenna’s number—eleven—ringing in my ears. Three children. Three completely different experiences of the same afternoon.
Matt texts after dinner.
Matt: Great day. Kids are amazing. Dinner tomorrow night? All of us? There’s a seafood place on the boardwalk that looked nice.
Me: Sounds good. They had a wonderful time.
Both sentences are true. Neither one captures the whole picture.
Matt comes back Sunday.
He shows up the next morning with a bag from the bakery on Main Street—croissants, muffins, a chocolate danish wrapped in wax paper that Aidan claims before anyone else can react.
He’s wearing shorts and a Twin Waves T-shirt he must have bought at the tourist shop, and the effort of it—the costume of casual, the performance of belonging—makes my chest ache.