Chapter 2
CRUZ
I saw her before she saw the fire.
That’s the honest version of events, and I’m trying to be honest with myself about this one because I have a feeling it matters. I was setting up the shot —grill going, camera angle locked, the whole bit— when movement from the neighboring deck caught my eye and I looked over and just… stopped.
She’s standing at her railing with a coffee cup, looking at the ocean like it owes her something.
Dark hair pulled back, that particular stillness that belongs to people who are used to being the most competent person in any given room.
She’s wearing a cover-up over a bikini and she has absolutely no idea I exist and something in my chest does a thing I don’t have a word for yet.
Then my grill reminds me it’s on fire.
I pick up my phone because the content brain kicks in on autopilot.
I’ve been doing this long enough that it’s reflex before it’s thought.
But I’m only half there. The other half is watching her clock the smoke, assess the situation, disappear inside, and reappear with a fire extinguisher in the time it takes most people to find their shoes.
She leans over the railing between our decks and says move like she’s done it a thousand times, and I move, because that tone is not a suggestion.
She puts out my grill fire with the efficiency of someone dismantling an argument. Clean, certain, no wasted motion. When the smoke clears she’s looking at me with the specific expression of a woman who has handled worse before breakfast and is mildly annoyed to be handling this now.
I tell her she’s my hero because she is.
She tells me I’m a hazard because I am.
And then she says her name… Hannah… and shakes my hand and goes back to her deck and her book like I’m a minor inconvenience she’s already filed and forgotten, and I stand there next to my ruined salmon thinking: I am in so much trouble.
Here’s what’s up with the influencer thing.
I know how it looks. I built it to look a certain way— approachable, fun, a little ridiculous, the kind of guy you’d want at your cookout even knowing he might set something on fire.
It performs because people want uncomplicated, and I can do uncomplicated, I’m genuinely good at it.
But it’s not the whole picture.
The architecture degree is real. The work is real.
Sustainable coastal design, projects that try to give back more than they take from the shoreline.
I took the content deal three years ago because it funded a preservation project that couldn’t get traditional backing, and then it kept funding things, and now it funds my actual life while I do the work that I’d do even if it never paid.
It’s a good arrangement. I’m not apologizing for it.
I just don’t lead with it because people get weird about the gap between the persona and the reality, and I got tired of explaining myself.
Hannah, I suspect, would not get weird about it. Hannah, I suspect, would just want the accurate information so she could assess correctly.
I post the video. It goes the way I knew it would, comments stacking up immediately, the algorithm happy. And then I put my phone face-down on the deck table and think about the wine I have in the kitchen that I was saving for no particular occasion.
There’s an occasion now.
I’m not reading into this. I’m not constructing a thing from a five-minute interaction and a fire extinguisher.
I’m just a person who would like to say thank you to his neighbor in a way that doesn’t require her to talk to me if she doesn’t want to, because I clocked that she’s here alone and that the solitude seems intentional, and I’m not going to be the thing that crowds her.
I write the note twice. The first version is too much. The second version is right.
I leave the bottle on the shared railing at seven, go back inside, and tell myself I’m not watching from the window.
I watch from the window.
She comes out around seven-fifteen, spots it, crosses the deck with the same purposeful walk she had with the fire extinguisher —she doesn’t drift, this woman, she goes— and picks up the note. Reads it. And there it is, just for a second, the corner of her mouth.
Not a smile. Almost a smile. The shape of one, caught and reconsidered.
She takes the wine inside.
I’ve been coming to the Outer Banks for six years. I’ve had good summers here, easy ones, the kind that don’t ask much and don’t leave much behind. I know what a vacation mood feels like, that particular loosening that happens when you’re somewhere temporary and the normal rules feel negotiable.
This isn’t that.
I know the difference because the vacation mood is light, pleasant, forgettable. What I feel standing on my deck at seven-thirty watching the last of the sunset is none of those things. It’s specific.
It’s her.
The way she assessed the fire, the way she said my name like she was cataloguing it, the way she almost smiled and pulled it back, like joy was something she’d learned to ration.
I don’t know her story. I know exactly nothing about her except her name and the fact that she came prepared for emergencies and that she’s here alone and that something about this coast brought her here the same way it brought me.
I want to know the rest.
I’m not going to push. I’m not going to perform.
I’m just going to be exactly who I am and let her decide what she does with that, because I have a feeling Hannah Caldwell has spent a significant portion of her life being managed and maneuvered and I’m not going to be another person who does that to her.
But I’m also not going anywhere.
The ocean settles into its nighttime rhythm. Next door, a light comes on in the kitchen window.
I stay on the deck a little longer than I need to.