Chapter 3
HANNAH
I sleep better than I have in months.
This is annoying to admit, even to myself, because I’d like to attribute it to the ocean air and the absence of my phone alarm and the particular darkness that exists when you’re away from the city and those things are true, those things are factors.
But somewhere around six a.m. when I surface slowly into consciousness with the sound of waves replacing the usual soundtrack of Omaha traffic, I know that the good sleep has something to do with the loosening feeling that started on my deck last night.
I don’t examine that too carefully.
I make coffee. I put on a swimsuit and the linen cover-up that Mia said made me look like a “coastal grandmother and I mean that as a complete compliment, Mom” and I take my mug out to the deck because the morning light out here is obscene.
Gold, blue, and… clean. Different but not exactly better from the pinks, oranges, and purples of a Midwestern sunrise that I’ve been living under.
But it almost feels fictional, produced by some artist who didn’t want to use all the other colors.
I settle into my chair.
I have twelve pages left in my chapter.
I am going to read them.
“Morning.”
I look up before I can decide not to.
Cruz Jackson is on his deck with a mug of his own, leaning against the railing in a t-shirt and shorts, hair still carrying the evidence of sleep in a way that should look careless and unfortunately looks the opposite.
He’s not looking at me —he’s looking at the water, the same way I was— and the greeting was easy, unhurried, not angled toward anything.
“Morning,” I say, because I’m not rude.
I look back at my book.
He stays quiet.
This is, I realize after approximately ninety seconds, more disarming than conversation would’ve been. I’m aware of him the way you’re aware of weather. Not intrusively, just as a fact of the environment. And this awareness makes it difficult to remember what I was reading, which I resent mildly.
I almost go inside.
But… I stay.
It starts because he’s sketching.
I notice it because I’m not reading my book, I’m looking at the ocean, and in my peripheral vision his posture has shifted.
He’s leaning forward now, forearms on the railing, something in his hand that catches the light.
A pencil. And a notebook that is clearly not the kind you use for grocery lists. It’s wide, flat, the pages thick.
I watch him sketch for longer than I intend to.
“What are you drawing?” The question comes out before I’ve approved it.
He looks up and there’s that expression again. Not the grin exactly, something quieter than that, like he’s pleased but trying not to show it by being obvious about it. “The house three down. The one with the bad addition on the left side.”
I look. There is, in fact, a house three down with what appears to be a sunroom bolted onto its left side with no architectural consideration whatsoever.
“You draw houses.”
“I design them.” He says it simply, no setup, no redirect. “The influencer thing funds it. The architecture is the actual job.”
I recalibrate without meaning to. “I didn’t know that.”
“You googled me and it didn’t come up?”
I feel heat climb my neck and I refuse to give it the satisfaction of showing. “The bio said architect.”
“And lifestyle,” he says, “which is the part most people focus on.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he says, and looks back at his sketch, “you’re really not.”
I drink my coffee and decide not to unpack that.
We talk for an hour and a half and I don’t notice until it’s over.
It happens the way conversations sometimes do when you’re not guarding against them.
Incrementally, one thread pulling the next, until you look up and the sun has moved and your coffee is cold and you’re in the middle of saying something you hadn’t planned to say to someone you met yesterday over a grill fire.
He asks about me with the specific quality of someone who is actually curious, not performing curiosity.
What brought me here, what I do, whether I’ve been to the Outer Banks before.
I give him the resume version because it’s what I default to.
Twenty-four years building the firm, two daughters, the particular satisfaction of winning an argument in a courtroom.
He asks follow-up questions.
Good ones. The kind that requires him to have actually listened to the previous answer, which is rarer than it should be.
He asks why family law specifically— not what made me choose law, but why that corner of it, and the question catches me enough that I answer honestly instead of efficiently: because when my ex left, I couldn’t find a lawyer who made me feel like anything other than a problem to be managed, and I decided that if I was going to spend my life in a courtroom it was going to be fighting for people in the worst moments of theirs.
He’s quiet for a beat after that. Then: “How long ago?”
“Fourteen years.”
He nods like he’s filing it carefully. Not with pity —I would have ended the conversation immediately— just with the particular attention of someone taking something seriously.
“Your daughters,” he says. “They turned out okay?”
“They’re extraordinary,” I say, and I mean it the way I mean very few things. “Mia’s in grad school. Older one, Cara, just made partner at her firm.” I pause. “She’s thirty.”
I don’t know why I say it. It comes out and I hear it land and Cruz hears it land too. The implicit math, the implicit point. He holds my gaze for a moment with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Good for her,” he says, simply, and looks back at the water.
That’s it. No acknowledgment of the subtext, no reassurance, no awkward redirect.
Just —good for her— and the conversation moves on, and I’m left sitting with the strange feeling of having thrown something into the space between us and watched him decline to catch it, not because he missed it but because he chose not to make it a thing.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I excuse myself around nine-thirty because I have nothing I need to do and no reason to leave except that I’ve been sitting here for ninety minutes talking to a thirty-four-year-old man who sketches bad architecture and puts out fires with better wine than I buy for myself, and something in my chest is doing the loosening thing again and I don’t trust it.
“I’m going to go read,” I tell him.
“You’ve been outside for two hours,” he says, “and I don’t think you’ve opened your book once.”
“I’ve been reading,” I say, with the dignity of a woman who has argued cases in front of judges, “internally.”
He laughs, real one, and I take that small victory inside with me before I can let myself enjoy it too much.
Mia calls at eleven.
We talk for forty minutes about her thesis, her roommate situation, a boy she’s not sure about, and the best way to negotiate a lease renewal, because I am a lawyer and my daughters have learned to use this efficiently.
I make her lunch recommendations for a neighborhood I’ve never been to and promise to actually read the novel she sent me and tell her I love her three times because she’s my kid and I can.
She asks how the vacation is going.
“Quiet,” I tell her. “Exactly what I needed.”
“Met any interesting neighbors?”
There’s a pause that I manufacture specifically to be the length of a normal pause and not the length of a pause that means something.
“No one remarkable,” I say.
After we hang up I go back to the deck and find, positioned precisely beside my Adirondack chair, a second Adirondack chair that was not there this morning.
Cruz’s deck is empty. He didn’t say a word about it.
I sit down in my chair and look at the one beside it for a long moment.
Then I look at the ocean.
Then I open my book and, this time, actually read it.