Chapter 5
DARIUS
Darius gripped the steering wheel of the SUV with one hand and rolled his shoulder with the other, working out the small ache that had set in somewhere around the third hour.
The highway stretched ahead of him in the long gold light of late afternoon, and Florida went by the windows in long flat green panels of sawgrass and palmetto, the way it had been going by for most of the drive.
In the seat beside him, Isabel was watching the landscape with a small softness around her mouth that Darius hadn’t seen on his sister’s face in three years.
She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t tapping at her phone.
She was just looking out at the world going past her window, the way a person looked out at the world when they were trying to remember what it had felt like to enjoy it.
In the back seat, Emma had been chattering happily for nearly an hour straight, and right now they were discussing the weird crabs on the beach.
“Sideways crabs,” Penny said with great seriousness. “I haven’t been to a beach with sideways crabs in years.”
“They’re really fast,” Emma told her solemnly. “You have to be quick if you want to catch one. Not that I caught one. I just got close.” She shuddered. “They’re actually quite freaky and I don’t think I’d like to actually pick one up.”
“I don’t like them either,” Penny said. “The only good type of crab is one on my plate in a seafood restaurant.” She grinned. “That’s the only kind of crab I approve of.”
Emma laughed, and Darius’s heart lifted. It was good to see her laugh again. Emma had had a terrible few years since her parents had been killed in a car accident. But with the support of her grandmother, him, and Penny, she was getting through it.
Darius caught Penny’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, and they shared a small, knowing smile.
He hadn’t had to say anything. Penny had simply settled into the back seat beside Emma, opened her tablet for show, and then, within the first twenty minutes of the drive, abandoned it entirely to ask Emma questions.
By the time they’d hit Naples, Emma had been in full flight, telling stories Darius had forgotten about a vacation he could only barely remember, lighting up like the small, fierce star she was. Penny had been listening to every word.
That was Penny. Forty years of standing beside him and Darius had only really started noticing how much of her job was unwritten about ten years ago. She would have made a good mother. He didn’t know why he was thinking that now.
“Uncle Darius,” Emma said, leaning forward between the front seats, “tell Penny about the time you and Gran found all those frogs in Sweet Blossom Bay.”
“Yes, Darius,” Penny said innocently from the back, “do tell.”
Darius laughed, and it felt good to do so. He hadn’t felt so relaxed in a long time.
“All right,” he said with a sigh. Then he told the story.
The summer he had been eleven, and Isabel had been eight, when their parents had brought them to Sweet Blossom Bay for two weeks, and they had stayed at the Hearts Hotel.
There had been a long stretch of mangrove and salt marsh between the hotel and the next property, a piece of land their parents had told them was protected and important.
A team of researchers had been there that summer doing a survey of the wildlife.
Darius and Isabel had spent two solid days hunting frogs in the marsh with the ecologists, ankle-deep in mud, hair plastered to their foreheads, hands cupped carefully around tiny, dark-green frogs the size of nickels.
“Mother washed our clothes in the sink three times that week,” Isabel said, picking up the thread softly. “And Father kept saying we were going to grow up to be biologists, and we’d nod very seriously, and then we’d go out the next morning and do it all over again.”
Darius glanced sideways at her.
“You remember more than I do,” he said.
“I remember the breakfast restaurant,” Isabel said. “Do you remember? The little white one near the marina with the blue shutters. They had pancakes the size of dinner plates. We ate there every single morning.”
“I remember the pancakes,” Darius said. “I’d forgotten about the shutters.”
“Mother loved that place,” Isabel said.” She used to say she wanted us to remember the breakfast we’d had on vacation more than the suppers. She said suppers happened every night, but vacation breakfasts were special as it was the start of a day of adventure.”
Darius felt something move in his chest that he didn’t have a word for.
“I remember Father humming something on the boat,” he said after a moment. “That afternoon, we went out to look for dolphins. I can’t remember what the song was. It’s been on the edge of my mind all the way over here.”
“It was a Sinatra song,” Isabel said softly. “I don’t know which one. But it was a Sinatra.”
“It would have been,” Darius said. His smile was back on his lips. “He loved Frank Sinatra.”
Penny, in the back, had gone quiet as she watched and listened to the interaction between Darius and his younger sister. Emma was listening intently.
“Do you think that pancake place is still there?” Emma asked. “I love pancakes.”
Isabel turned and looked at her granddaughter over her shoulder, and her face changed slightly.
“I’m not sure, sweetheart, but we can find out.” Isabel smiled warmly at her granddaughter. “Do you know if that place is still open?”
“I don’t, no,” Darius said, shaking his head and making a mental note to check as he suddenly felt like pancakes.
They stopped at a service station just past Naples.
Emma talked Darius into a frozen lemonade.
Isabel ordered one too, and Penny pretended to scold them for enabling each other and then ordered her own.
Darius leaned against the warm side of the SUV in the soft Florida evening with the cup cold against his palm, and watched the three of them laughing together at the curb at some small joke he hadn’t quite caught, and felt something settle into his chest that he didn’t try to name.
They got back on the road. The sun was beginning to drop.
Emma was yawning, and her eyes looked sleepy.
Isabel and Penny were talking about the house Darius had just bought that they were on their way to.
He’d promised the three ladies with him that they could decorate it for the summer.
He didn’t tell them after the summer he had other plans for the house.
He decided to keep that quiet and was grateful that Penny had said nothing about the plans.
Although he knew how Penny felt about what his company was driving for on that particular property. He shook the thought away as he had a few weeks with his family, and he was going to make the most out of it.
Somewhere outside Fort Myers, his thoughts drifted, the way they had been drifting all afternoon when he wasn’t paying attention.
He thought about the deed he’d signed in his Miami office a few hours before they’d left. The Bay View Beach House. The neat strokes of his pen across each line of the contract. The small flicker of unease he hadn’t been able to push all the way away.
The man who had owned that house had refused to sell it to him for forty years.
Darius had approached the owner himself when he was in his thirties, had sent letters every two years through Penny, and had once flown personally to the small retirement village in Fort Lauderdale where the man had moved after his wife passed.
The man had received Darius politely, given him a glass of iced tea, and told him that the beach house wasn’t for sale, that it had been in the family since his grandfather had built it, and that he intended to keep it there.
Darius had thanked him for his time and left.
The man had died less than a year ago. The daughter, an only child living elsewhere with her own grief, had reached out to Penny within six months.
The grief had made the house too painful to keep.
She’d let it go quietly. No realtor. No sign in the front yard.
A clean, private sale to Wayne Group International.
The papers were signed two weeks ago, and the keys were delivered to Darius’s office in a small leather pouch containing the new alarm codes.
Darius had won the property by waiting forty years for an old man to die.
The thought sat strangely in his chest as he drove.
He had told himself, every time he had thought about it over the last few weeks, that he had not done anything wrong.
He had made a fair offer. The daughter had accepted.
The transaction had been clean. He had not done anything that any other man in his position would not have done.
But every time he thought of the daughter signing those papers from her quiet living room somewhere up the coast, he felt a small, unfamiliar tightness in his chest that he couldn’t quite get rid of.
“Uncle Darius,” Emma said from the back seat, snapping him out of it, “I can see the bay.”
The Sanibel causeway had begun to lift them up over the water.
The gulf opened out on either side of the road in long shimmering panels of indigo and gold, and the late sun spread itself across the surface of the bay in the particular way that only ever seemed to happen here.
Emma pressed her face to the window and let out a small, delighted gasp.
Beside him, Isabel reached over and squeezed Darius’s hand on the steering wheel.
He squeezed back.
“Thank you for this,” Isabel said softly. “It’s what we all need. I remember coming here after…” She sucked in a breath, thinking of their parents’ death.
“I know,” Darius said, giving her a warm smile.
He rolled down his window for the first time on the drive. The warm bay air poured in, full of salt and sun-baked sand and something else underneath, the faint sweetness of jasmine somewhere on the breeze. Emma rolled hers down too, and her dark hair flew in long streamers behind her.