Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The alarm went off at five-fifteen and Tyler’s first thought was that he’d only been asleep for an hour. His second thought was that this was mathematically unlikely but emotionally accurate.
He’d been at the Shack until nine last night.
Home by nine-thirty. Ate something standing up—he couldn’t remember what, possibly cheese on bread, possibly just bread.
Fell asleep on the couch editing photos he’d shot three days ago and hadn’t had time to process.
Stella had put a blanket over him at some point.
He’d found it when the couch woke him at two AM and he’d shuffled to bed.
Five-fifteen. The grill needed him by six.
He pulled on jeans and a shirt that may or may not have been the same shirt as yesterday — the sniff test was inconclusive and he didn’t care — and stood in the bathroom mirror.
The face looking back at him had bags under its eyes and a jawline that needed shaving.
He splashed water on his face. It didn’t help. He splashed more. Still didn’t help.
His camera bag sat in the corner of the bedroom where it had been sitting for four days.
He had two shoots booked this week — a surfer portrait session and a real estate listing for a house on Bluebird Canyon — and he’d canceled both.
The surfer had been understanding. The real estate agent less so.
She’d sent a follow-up email with the subject line “Reliability Concerns” which Tyler had read, closed, and not opened again.
“You’re losing clients,” Stella had told him last night, not unkindly. Just factually.
“I’m keeping us fed.”
“You’re keeping other people fed. We’re eating cereal again.”
She wasn’t wrong. The eggs Benedict had become his identity at the Shack—Tyler at the breakfast station, poaching and plating, getting better every day. The regulars liked it. The boardwalk crowd came back. Joey’s muffins and Tyler’s eggs and Meg’s hollandaise—the breakfast menu was working.
But the hours were eating him alive. Up before dawn, at the Shack by six, cooking until noon, then straight to dinner service because they didn’t have enough staff to cover evenings without family.
His photography—the thing he’d built a career on, the thing that paid actual money—sat in a camera bag gathering dust.
He made coffee. Stella’s door was closed. She’d been up late doing homework she hadn’t had time for during the week because she’d been helping with dinner service after school. He let her sleep.
The drive to the Shack took four minutes.
The October morning was grey—no marine layer, just overcast, the kind of sky that made everything look flat and tired.
The ocean was the color of old pewter. No surfers out, which meant the waves were wrong, which meant nobody would be walking the boardwalk until the morning dog crowd at seven.
Tyler parked and sat in the truck for a moment, looking at the dark restaurant through the windshield.
The CLOSED sign hung in the window. The patio chairs were stacked.
The string lights Anna had hung for the art night preview were dark.
He went inside and the Shack was cold. The grill took time to heat. He turned it on and stood with his hands two inches above the surface the way Margo had taught him—counting the seconds before the heat pushed his palms away. The cast iron needed time. Everything needed time that he didn’t have.
While the grill heated, he set up the breakfast station.
English muffins on the cutting board. Canadian bacon in the pan.
The poaching pot filled, vinegar measured — he didn’t need to measure anymore, his hands knew the amount, which was the one victory of this whole experiment.
He could poach an egg with his eyes closed now.
He could probably poach an egg in his sleep, which at this rate he might have to.
Meg’s hollandaise arrived at six-fifteen.
She texted from the parking lot—left it at the back door, running late for Margaret, good luck—and Tyler retrieved the container and set it in the warm water bath she’d taught him to prepare.
The hollandaise was perfect every morning.
Meg had conquered it the way she conquered everything: through research, repetition, and the absolute refusal to be defeated by a French sauce.
The first customer came at seven. Then three more.
Then a rush at seven-thirty — the boardwalk crowd, the coffee-before-work crowd, the couple who’d been coming every morning since Tuesday and now had a “usual.” Tyler plated eggs, toasted muffins, heated bacon, drizzled hollandaise.
His hands moved through the process without his brain’s involvement, which was good because his brain had left sometime around Wednesday.
Dante arrived at eight. He was getting better — the register no longer challenged him, and he’d learned to make coffee that didn’t taste like dirt. Joey had texted Dante a fourteen-point checklist for the morning shift that Dante kept folded in his apron pocket and consulted like scripture.
By ten Tyler’s back ached from standing.
His hands smelled like vinegar and butter.
The burn on his left wrist from Wednesday’s bacon grease had scabbed over and cracked open again when he reached for the muffin bag.
He put a bandage on it and kept going because that’s what you did.
That’s what Margo had done for fifty years—showed up, lit the grill, and kept going.
But Margo had loved this. Tyler loved photography. The distinction was becoming harder to ignore.
Anna arrived at ten for the lunch transition. She looked almost as tired as he did—shadows under her eyes, hair pulled back in a knot that had given up being a knot and become something else.
“Go,” she said. “I’ve got it.”
“Dinner—”
“I’ve got dinner too. Go home. Take a nap. Shoot something. You look like you haven’t held a camera in a week.”
“I haven’t held a camera in a week.”
Anna pushed him toward the door. “Go.”
He went. But instead of going home, he drove to the high school. Stella’s pickup wasn’t for another hour, but he parked in the lot and sat there with his cold coffee and his phone and the heaviness of someone who had been doing two jobs and doing neither of them well.
The parking lot was quiet. A few teachers crossing to their cars. The calm of a school in the middle of a class period—everyone accounted for, everything in its slot. Tyler leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. Just for a minute. Just to stop moving.
His phone buzzed and he jerked awake. He’d been asleep. In the school parking lot. In the middle of the afternoon. He checked the time—twenty minutes gone. Twenty minutes of sleep in a truck with the window cracked and the October sun warming the dashboard.
The buzz was nothing—a news alert, something he swiped away. But opening the phone showed him Lindsey’s name, three days back, unanswered. He’d forgotten to respond. Three days.
Hope the new hours are going well! Still up for rescheduling when things settle down?
Three days. He’d left Lindsey Matthews on read for three days because he’d been too tired to form a sentence that wasn’t about eggs.
He typed a message.
Things are settling. Sort of. Coffee this week?
Her response came fast—she must have been between appointments.
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow. He could do tomorrow. He would do tomorrow. He’d show up and be a person and drink coffee and have a conversation that didn’t involve hollandaise temperatures or napkin fold specifications.
Yes, he typed.
Tomorrow.
The pickup line filled. Parents in SUVs, most of them looking at phones, some of them looking like they’d slept a full night, which Tyler found personally offensive.
A woman two cars ahead was applying lipstick in her visor mirror.
A man in a Tesla was eating a sandwich with both hands.
Normal people with normal energy doing normal things.
Stella appeared at the passenger door with her backpack and her camera bag—she still carried the camera bag every day, which was something.
“You look terrible,” she said, climbing in.
“Thank you.”
“Like, significantly worse than yesterday.”
“I appreciate the specificity.”
“Have you eaten today?”
Tyler thought about it. “I ate some Canadian bacon. The batch I burned. Parts of it were salvageable.”
“You ate burned Canadian bacon.”
“The inside was fine.”
Stella buckled her seatbelt and looked at him. Really looked—the photographer’s look, the one that catalogued every detail. The bags. The bandage on his wrist. The shirt he’d worn yesterday.
“Dad. This isn’t sustainable.”
“It’s been a week.”
“It’s been a week and you’ve canceled two photography jobs, you haven’t shaved, and your breakfast today was meat you burned at work.” She pulled her knees up on the seat. “The Shack’s doing great. You’re not.”
Tyler pulled out of the lot. She was right. She was always right in the way that sixteen-year-olds are right—clear-eyed and unfiltered and completely unwilling to let you lie to yourself.
“I texted Lindsey,” he said.
Stella’s whole posture changed. “You did?”
“Coffee tomorrow.”
“Good. That’s good.” She looked out the window. “Your ears aren’t even red.”
“I’m too tired for my ears to do anything.”
“That’s concerning.”
“It’s temporary.”
“Is it?” She turned back to him. “Because Anna looked terrible too. And Joey’s been texting me about his study group schedule, and I think he’s missing things. And Bea’s portfolio deadline is next week and she was at the Shack until eight last night.”
Tyler pulled up to a red light and sat there, hands on the wheel, the bandage on his wrist catching on the leather. The Shack was working. The numbers were going up. But the people were going down.
“One more week,” he said. “Let’s give it one more week.”
Stella looked at him. She didn’t argue. But she didn’t agree either, and the silence in the truck said more than words would have.
They drove home. Tyler parked and reached for his camera bag—first time in days. It was dusty. He wiped the lens cap with his shirt and slung it over his shoulder. The weight of it was familiar and strange at the same time, like putting on a coat he’d forgotten he owned.
“I’m going to shoot the sunset,” he said.
“Good.”
“Want to come?”
Stella already had her camera bag over her shoulder. “Obviously.”
They walked to the overlook at the end of the street and stood in the last of the October light, cameras raised, shooting the ocean going gold.
The sky had cleared during the afternoon—the grey burned off, replaced by the kind of copper-and-pink sunset that made photographers grateful and painters furious.
Tyler’s shoulders loosened for the first time in a week.
The viewfinder against his eye. The shutter release under his finger.
The ocean filling the frame in ways that a pot of simmering water never could.
He shot until the light went purple. Stella beside him, working the same sunset from a different angle, her camera clicking in a rhythm that matched his.
They didn’t talk. They didn’t need to. This was the language they shared — the one that had brought them together before they knew how to be father and daughter.
Light and timing and the decision of what to keep.
“Do it,” Stella said, lowering her camera as the last color faded. “Coffee with Lindsey. Don’t cancel.”
“I won’t cancel.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Good.” She raised the camera one more time. “Now hold still. The light on your face is doing something good, and you look like a person who needs evidence that he’s alive.”
Tyler lowered his camera as the last color drained from the sky. His shoulders felt different. Looser. The viewfinder had done something an hour of sleep couldn’t.
A figure appeared on the path from the beach, wetsuit half-zipped, board under one arm. Luke. Of course. October evenings with decent swell—Luke would be checking conditions the way other people checked their phones.
Luke spotted them and detoured up the slope. "Thought I saw you two up here." He looked at Tyler. "You look terrible."
"So I've been told."
"Waves are good. Glassy. Nobody out." Luke nodded toward the water. "You coming or not?"
Tyler looked at the ocean. At his truck, where his board and wetsuit had been riding around untouched for weeks.
"Go," Stella said. "I'll shoot you from the beach. Two middle-aged guys trying to remember how surfboards work—incredible content."
"Middle-aged," Tyler said.
"Go."