Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
EMMA
The coffee maker dies on Monday morning.
Not the slow decline I’ve been expecting—the gradual dimming, the sad gurgling, the eventual surrender of an appliance that has lived a full and haunted life. This is sudden. Violent. A pop, a spark, and a smell that can only be described as burning ambition, and then silence.
I stand in the galley staring at it. The coffee maker stares back. We have reached an impasse.
“Mom.” Aidan appears behind me. “Something smells like a campfire.”
“The coffee maker passed away.”
“Again?”
“This time I think it’s permanent.”
He peers at it. Pokes the power button. Nothing. Pokes it again. Still nothing. “Should we have a funeral?”
“I’m considering it.”
“Mr. Paul could fix it. He fixed it last time.”
The name lands in the galley like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples everywhere.
“I’ll figure it out,” I say. “Go eat your cereal.”
Aidan gives me a look that is far too perceptive for someone whose shirt is on inside out. Then he disappears, and I’m alone with a dead coffee maker, no caffeine, and the knowledge that the person who can fix this is ten feet away and I told him I needed space.
Space. What a stupid word. Space is what exists between planets.
Space is what astronauts float through. Space is not what you ask for when the man you’re falling for lives on the boat next to yours and you can hear him making his own coffee through the wall of the hull every morning at six-fifteen.
Not that I’ve been listening.
Matt is supposed to take the kids to the beach today. It’s his last full day before his flight tomorrow. He texted a plan—pick up by nine, beach until lunch, boardwalk in the afternoon, early dinner, then he’d drop them off and head back to the inn on the mainland where he’s staying.
Aidan has been ready since seven. Shark tooth necklace. Swim trunks. Towel draped over his shoulder like a cape. Stomper is in a ziplock bag because “he’s coming but he can’t get wet again, not after what happened last time.”
Millie packed her own beach bag. Book, sunscreen, water bottle, granola bar. She’s ten going on forty.
Jenna is in her room. The door is closed. I can hear music through it—something moody and bass-heavy that vibrates the thin houseboat walls.
Nine o’clock comes. No Matt.
Nine-fifteen. No Matt.
Nine-thirty. Aidan is sitting on the deck steps with his towel-cape, watching the parking lot. He hasn’t said anything. He doesn’t need to. His whole body is saying it—the way he’s leaned forward, the way his legs are swinging, the way Stomper’s ziplock bag is clutched against his chest.
I text Matt.
Emma: Kids are ready. Everything okay?
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Matt: Running behind. Be there in 20.
I show Aidan the screen. “Twenty minutes, bud.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t move from the steps. Keeps watching.
From my houseboat deck, I can see Paul’s boat. His cabin door is open. He’s inside—I can see him moving through the porthole. He hasn’t come out on deck all morning. Hasn’t walked past. Hasn’t looked over.
He’s giving me exactly what I asked for.
I hate it.
Matt arrives at ten.
Not nine-twenty, which is what his text implied. Not nine-forty-five, which would have been late but forgivable. Ten o’clock. A full hour after pickup, in the same silver SUV, wearing the same tourist T-shirt, carrying a cardboard tray of gas station coffees like that fixes anything.
“Sorry, guys. Got a late start. The inn didn’t have the coffee I like so I drove to find a decent one, and then the bridge was up for a boat passing through.”
A drawbridge. He was late because he needed the right coffee. Three children in swimsuits, watching the parking lot, and he was hunting for a latte.
Aidan’s off the steps before Matt finishes parking. Whatever hurt he felt during that hour of waiting, he’s packed it away with the efficiency of a kid who has learned to compress disappointment into a very small space and put it somewhere it won’t slow him down.
“Dad! I brought Stomper! He’s in a waterproof bag because of what happened last time!”
“What happened last time?”
“It’s a long story. It involves the ocean and heroism.”
Millie walks to the car at her measured pace. She gets in, buckles her seatbelt, and opens her book.
Jenna comes last. Earbuds in. Sunglasses on. She gets in the back seat without a word and closes the door.
I stand on the dock and watch them drive away. Again. The second time in three days that I’ve watched my children leave with a man I’m not sure I trust, and both times I’ve stood here on the weathered wood feeling like the dock might be the only solid ground I have left.
Paul’s cabin door closes. I hear the latch click from ten feet away.
He saw me standing here. I know he did.
I last forty-five minutes before I crack.
Not about Paul. About the coffee. I need coffee. The machine is dead. I don’t have a French press because I am a woman who owns exactly one method of making coffee, and that method is currently deceased on my galley counter.
I could go to Michelle’s. That’s the rational choice. Walk to the boardwalk, order a latte, sit in a booth like a functioning adult.
Instead I walk to the marina store because it’s closer and because the marina store has a terrible drip coffee pot that produces something closer to hot brown water than actual coffee, but it’s caffeinated and it’s twenty steps from my houseboat.
Harold is in the marina store.
He’s behind the counter with a crossword puzzle and a Tupperware of tomatoes, looking like a man who owns the place. Which he did, once. Now he just haunts it.
“Emma.” He lowers the magazine. “You look like you need coffee.”
“The machine on my boat died.”
“The haunted one?”
“It wasn’t haunted. It had electrical quirks.”
“Paul called it a demon appliance. Said it made noises that didn’t correspond to any known kitchen function.”
I pour myself a cup of the terrible coffee. It’s as bad as I expected. I drink it anyway.
“Paul won’t come near me,” I say, and I don’t know why I say it.
Harold is not my therapist. Harold is a seventy-two-year-old man in a fishing vest who showed up to a store he doesn’t run to read a magazine he’s already read.
But he’s here, and I’m here, and the coffee is terrible, and it comes out.
“He’s not avoiding you. He’s respecting what you asked for.”
“How do you know what I asked for?”
Harold gives me the look. The Spencer look—the one that says really? without using a single word.
“Right. Twin Waves.”
“Grandma Hensley called me before I finished brushing my teeth this morning. She has sources. I don’t ask questions.”
He folds the magazine. Sets it on the counter. Picks up the tomato and turns it over in his hand.
“Can I tell you something about my son?”
“Which one?”
“The stubborn one.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
He almost smiles. “Paul lost Holly eleven years ago. And for eleven years, he’s been living on that boat, running this marina, raising Dawson, and keeping the whole operation going through sheer willpower and the inability to admit he needs help.
He didn’t date. Didn’t look. Didn’t consider it.
Holly was his person, and when she died, he sealed that part of himself off like a room in a house nobody’s allowed to enter. ”
I sip the terrible coffee. It doesn’t get better with the second sip.
“Then you showed up. With your fairy lights and your kids and your broken coffee maker and your smile that could power the entire boardwalk. And he opened that room. For you. After eleven years, he unlocked the door and walked through it, and that is not a small thing for a Spencer man. We don’t open doors easily. We’d rather build new walls.”
“Harold —”
“I’m not finished.” He sets the tomato down. “Matt brought you coffee yesterday morning. Fancy stuff, probably. From a shop. In a paper cup with a cardboard sleeve.”
“It was from the bakery on Main.”
“Right. Nice gesture. Presentable. The kind of thing a man does when he wants to perform caring.” He pauses.
“Paul replaced the wiring in your galley junction box at eleven o’clock at night because your lights were flickering and he was worried about a fire.
He didn’t tell you. He just did it. That’s not performance. That’s the real thing.”
I stare at my cup of terrible coffee.
“I’m not saying Matt’s a bad person,” Harold continues. “I’m saying there’s a difference between a man who brings you coffee and a man who rewires your boat at midnight. One of them is trying to be seen. The other one just wants you to be safe.”
He picks up the tomato and puts it in my hand. “Cherokee Purple. Best one of the season. Take it.”
He walks out. I stand in the marina store holding a warm tomato and a terrible cup of coffee and the best advice anyone has given me in years.
The kids come back at four.
Not the six o’clock they were promised. Not the full-day, beach-to-boardwalk-to-dinner plan Matt texted me. Four o’clock. Two hours early.
Aidan comes through the door first. His shark tooth necklace is gone—lost in the sand, he says, and his voice is doing the brave thing, the thing where he flattens out the sadness and presents it as information.
“We didn’t make it to the boardwalk. Dad had to deal with something on his phone, so we came back early.”
“What kind of something?”
“Work, I think. Or maybe trains. I couldn’t tell. He went to the car to take it and when he came back he said we should head home because something came up.”
Something came up. The three words that have defined Matt’s fatherhood for eight years. Something always comes up. Something is always more urgent, more interesting, more worthy of his attention than three children who rearranged an entire day around his schedule.
Millie is quiet. She goes straight to her room with her beach bag still packed. She didn’t unpack the granola bar. She didn’t open the book.
Jenna stops in the galley doorway.