Chapter 16 - Sean
SEAN
On a walk home one night, I spot her before she sees me.
Her hair is piled up like she did it with one hand, salt still in the curls, a canvas tote and a surfboard both bumping her knee as she cuts away from the last straggle of tourists at the market.
The night’s got that Charleston mix of hot brick breathing up from the ground, horse sweat and soap from the carriage barn, sea air drifting in from the harbor like a promise you half believe.
She smells like work—the sugar of the sweets she sells and the salt of the sweat on the tourists.
“Howya, Miss Abel,” I call, low and cheerful, so I don’t scare her. “You planning to give me gray hair, walking alone at this hour?”
She startles, then softens when she clocks me. “Sean, are you stalking me?”
I fall into step beside her, take the tote to ease her load. I would take the surfboard since it’s bulkier, but I have a feeling that would be a step too far. She lets me take the tote, and I count it as a victory. “Why—do you like it?”
The market behind us is a rib cage of shadowed stalls, a few vendors still packing up baskets that look like moon-colored rope. Somewhere a tour guide is explaining ghosts with too much confidence.
We pass through a gate of wrought iron that makes shadows like lace on her arms. I tuck my hands into my pockets so I don’t reach for her. I think I’d be allowed to reach for her, but I’m not positive about it. The rules are getting so foggy for me. “You eaten?” I ask.
“Does two benne wafers and a Coke count?”
“Not when you’re eating for four.” I hook my chin toward East Bay. “Let’s walk past the waterfront, see if we can find you something decent on the way.”
“You always ‘find’ things,” she says. “Like how you found my address without asking.”
“I have me ways,” I say mysteriously.
She lifts a brow. “Are ‘your ways’ Cheyenne?”
“All right, so I’ve one way,” I admit, bumping her shoulder with mine.
We hit the pineapple fountain, which is trying its best under a haze of gnats. A kid legs it through the shallow water in his socks while his mother debates joining him. The harbor beyond is a dark sheet, the lights at the end of the pier smearing into the water with each small slap of a wave.
Willow breathes in deeply, and the deep line on her brow eases just slightly.
“You surf today?” I ask, nodding at the board under her arm. “Or just wishful thinking?”
She grins, the real kind, not the polite one saved for customers. “A tiny swell on Folly beach. Just enough to stand up twice and embarrass myself a third time.”
“I’m fierce jealous of you.” I tilt my head. “Would you chance teaching me sometime?”
“Something tells me you’re not a good learner.”
“Willow, after high school, I went to school for twelve more years.”
“Right, okay. But, you know, it’s personal when you…know your instructor.” She trails off, embarrassed by the verb know. I can feel it. She wasn’t sure what to say there, how we know each other. It’s both intimately and not very well.
Somehow, I’m falling for her. Somehow, she’s a mystery to me. “I’ve got sound balance,” I say, just to say something. “I’m afraid of sharks, though.”
“We don’t have sharks,” she says, kicking a rock on the pavement.
“I didn’t know you lied so easily.”
“Okay, we have sharks,” she relents with a laugh. “They’re not interested in people, though, unless they get hungry enough. Then they’ll eat anything.”
“I identify with sharks that way, sure,” I tell her solemnly, steering us toward a window emanating a strong garlic smell. I pop inside and return with a paper boat of fried shrimp and a half loaf of bread I absolutely didn’t pay enough for.
We sit on a bench with the water performing its quiet tricks twenty feet away.
She tears bread, curls tucked behind one ear, wrist balanced over her belly without thinking. The movement is so natural, and something inside me is twisting watching her do it, but I pretend that it isn’t, diverting my eyes to the water.
“Cheyenne’s going to kill me for enabling your salt habit,” I say, passing her the lemon.
“She’ll forgive you when I share a benne wafer with her,” Willow says, mouth full. “The baby likes shrimp.”
“Which baby?”
“All of them,” she says, and something bright passes over her face—quick, tender, reverent. It makes me want to kneel and swear fealty to whatever god governs small impossible hearts.
“Do you ever think of them as three…little surfers?” I ask. “Like they’re just…bobbing in there, waiting for the set?”
“They’re more like land developers,” she deadpans. “Stake a claim, build a cul-de-sac, fight about zoning.”
I bark a laugh. She hides a smile in her shoulder. We rinse our fingers with water from a bottle. I steal a napkin; she steals the last shrimp. It’s easy. Too easy. I remind myself that there’s competition for her heart.
We almost make it the whole walk without talking about anything that really matters.
The easy part runs out somewhere near the fountain.
We’re quiet, the kind of quiet that makes me itch to crack a joke, but she doesn’t laugh at the last one I tried.
She keeps twisting her sleeve, eyes locked on the water.
I know better than to fill that silence with nonsense.
Since I’m not a coward, I ask gently, “So, are you going to tell me what’s really bothering you?”
She swallows, watching the fountain. “I don’t know if I should.”
“Alright.” I let the stones rattle under our shoes. Palm fronds gossip above us; the harbor smells like salt and diesel and the kind of evening that keeps secrets.
“It’s Rowan,” she says at last, like she’s broken some pact we made by staying silent. “Before he came to Lamaze class, well, we had this fight.” Her fingers twist the edge of her sleeve. “I guess it was a fight. He told me about foster care. But he didn’t just tell me. He used it against me.”
I let out a sound that isn’t a laugh, not quite. “He gives knives when he means to hand you a key, sure,” I say, then laugh at how weirdly poetic it came out. “Sorry, that sounds—”
Willow looks up sharply, like she’s surprised I’m taking the conversation so well. “No, that’s exactly it.” She stops short, her shoes scraping noisily against the ground. “You’ve known him for a long time, huh?”
I nod. “A fair while, I have. He’s been through a lot.
He aged out of foster care. He was never adopted.
Everything he has, he did himself. He’s resilient.
And he doesn’t know what a family even looks like, Willow.
My friend…he claims he’s locking the door to keep you safe, but mostly he bolts both sides so no one gets in or out, like. ”
She looks at me sternly, like she’s reading between the lines.
Her freckles stand out in the bright sun.
Sighing, she shakes her head and keeps walking.
“That makes sense. He said he doesn’t do attachments like the rest of you, and that he knew I wanted him to be scared but he wasn’t scared, he was…
smarter than you two. That I should just pick you or Declan.
” She looks up apologetically. “Not that either of you isn’t a prize, but—”
“But it still hurts when someone rejects you,” I say, for her and for me. It does hurt. This is the first time she’s said aloud what we’ve always known—that there’s a choice to made, that she alone has to make it.
“Right,” she says, guarded but matter-of-factly. “And also, it isn’t fair to make the choice for me. And then later he came to Lamaze, and so I thought he had realized how silly that was, but—”
“He ran scared after he showed up for you?”
“Yes,” she says flatly. “He…he told me he’ll never be my boyfriend. And I told him he’s nothing to me.”
“Do you want him to be your boyfriend?” I ask, not looking, not wanting to scare her from telling the truth with whatever she might see in my eyes.
“I don’t feel like I have any time to think about what I want with him. I feel like it’s all up to him.”
“You wanted him to say he was scared,” I say, because it’s the obvious thing and because I know her enough to call it. I chuckle a little, imagining Rowan saying “I’m scared.” It’s like imagining a pig talking.
She looks at me, small and honest. “Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not,” I tell her quickly, bumping her a little. “I’m just…he’s a tough nut to crack.” I smile sympathetically.
She says, “It’s just that if he had said he was scared, then I could do the comforting. Because then it wouldn’t all be on me. Because if he admitted fear, it would make room for me.”
She stops talking abruptly, and I let her think, not filling the sound waves with fluff.
After a second, she flinches at a thought, blinks, and says quietly, “My dad left my family when I was little. He had a whole secret family we didn’t know about, and he chose them over us.
I learned to, I don’t know, fight? For my spot?
Like…if they don’t want me, and I can make them choose me, it’s better than someone who outright wants me. Because I didn’t prove anything.”
There it is, the hinge. The reason she’s even entertaining Rowan.
It’s not too different from the reason Rowan isn’t entertaining a future with her and the babies.
The way abandonment teaches you to prize who won’t stay because staying is the thing you never got.
The way you start thinking someone who keeps you at arm’s length is kinder than the one who might leave.
“You deserved a father who stayed. You did, love,” I tell her, reaching for her free hand. She lets me take it, and I shake her arm gently. “Not one who taught you how to measure people by the distance they keep.”
Her laugh is a jagged thing. “So poetic tonight.” I don’t say anything back, and then she punctuates the thought by saying, “It’s stupid.”
“Oi, it isn’t.” I slow my steps to match hers. “It makes sense.” She stares out at the water. “You deserve someone who doesn’t make you prove you deserve him,” I say before I can stop myself.
She bites her lip, thinking. The moon pretends to be a lamp and the lamps pretend to be moons; everything is a little false and a little grand. “So you’re saying I deserve someone like you? That I should forget him?” she asks.
I want to tell her she should choose me, but the words curdle in my throat. They’d sound selfish when she’s this raw. “That’s not what I said.” My voice is soft.
“It’s what you meant, though, isn’t it?” She meets my eyes, trying to see if I’ll flinch.
Maybe it is what I meant. Maybe it isn’t. Rowan is a tough nut to crack, yes, but he can be cracked. I’m sure of it. Even if I never have.
If someone could do it, Willow could. She’s resilient and soft just like he is.
And he’s blunt and efficient. He loves people, and you can tell by what he chose to do for work, even if it’s hard to believe at first. He cares about women.
And he’d hold the line if the roof fell in.
He’s the sort of man who, when a thing breaks, will fix it without asking for your thanks.
That’s part of the pull for Willow. She’s hungry for someone who won’t bolt. Maybe she’s right to think that’s him.
“What I meant,” I say finally, and I stop walking and twirl her under a streetlight, “is what I said, Willow.” I stop twirling her, and we look into the sparkle of the moonlight in each other’s eyes.
“You deserve someone who can be an open door, not a wall. Don’t break all your bones trying to get through a wall, like. ”
“You can climb over walls,” she points out, a smile tugging at her lips like she can’t help herself.
“Not with three wee ones, you can’t,” I say with a laugh.
She smiles, that crooked thing she does that means she’s listening and also measuring me for truth. “You sound like you planned this speech in advance,” she teases.
“No. I just know Rowan well enough to give you some advice. I don’t like seeing you put effort into someone who might never appreciate it.”
“You don’t think he’ll ever—”
“It doesn’t matter if he’ll ever. I think this is hard on all of us.
I think there are people right in front of you who will be ready before he’s even considered it.
” It’s too obvious, what I’m admitting to her.
I want her to reach for it. I want to be the one she chooses, but I also want what’s best for her.
I don’t know if Rowan is. I just know I am.
She pokes me with the tip of her shoe, then tucks her hands into her jacket and looks at me properly. “Thanks, Sean.”
I nod. “Anytime. That’s me job.”
The night is full of little mercies—a well-timed joke, a hand on the small of a back, the kind of honesty that keeps people from undoing themselves. She reaches her arm around my midsection, and I tuck her hand into my jeans pocket. She grins, and I tuck that into my pocket too.