Chapter 3
Once Kate and Vivien came back with tales of a sweet civil service, Eli felt like the whole day got even sunnier.
After dashing upstairs to chat with her daughter, Kate returned to the crowded kitchen. She leaned against the counter with a glass of water she hadn’t touched and laughed at something Peter said while Eli surreptitiously enjoyed the mere sight of her.
Deep mahogany hair hung loose around her shoulders, soft as she moved. The sun picked up auburn strands, and her bangs brushed glasses that she miraculously hadn’t misplaced. She looked beautiful and tired and…like she was trying to seem fine but really wasn’t.
They’d spoken for a few minutes when she got back, hugging and holding hands to reconnect. She told him about the courthouse wedding and he filled her in on Lakeside. But people were everywhere and their conversations were surface-level.
Still, his instinct told him something wasn’t right in her world—and his instinct also told him to fix it. Unless…he was the problem.
Had she changed her mind? Had she run off to Cornell to think through this relationship and decided…it was a no-go?
He sure hoped not, but the Summer House in high prep for a dinner was not the place to press her on it, especially with the air of celebration sparking everywhere.
After a month of phone calls that felt too short and texts that couldn’t carry the weight of what he wanted to say, he realized he’d missed Kate in a way that startled him.
After losing his wife, Eli Lawson had spent fifteen years learning how to be alone and he’d gotten good at it. Maybe too good.
Then Kate Wylie walked into his life and the aloneness stopped making sense. As a teenager and young man, he spent the seven years their families vacationed together in Destin with a debilitating crush on the more glamorous Wylie twin. But as an adult, Tessa held no allure for him.
Kate, however, had blown him away from the day she showed up at this house and mistook him for a gardener.
She caught his eye across the kitchen and gave him a small smile. He tipped his head toward the deck. She nodded once, reading the silent question.
Of course. They needed to walk. It was their date of choice, their ending to every day. They’d always done their best talking on the beach and this afternoon, they’d pick up where they left off.
He hoped.
“Hey, Mer,” he said, touching his daughter’s shoulder as she typed furiously on her laptop. “I’m going to take a walk. You good?”
Meredith didn’t look up. “Never better, Dad. I’m building a preliminary project timeline and a list of what we need in the office.”
He smiled. His girl was in her element, and watching her light up over Lakeside was one of the best moments he’d had in a long time.
“You can start on Monday,” he said. “We’re celebrating tonight.”
“This is me celebrating,” she said, which sounded so much like something Melissa would have said that it caught him off guard for a second.
He squeezed her shoulder and headed for the sliders, where Kate was waiting, having slipped out ahead of him.
The late afternoon sun sat low over the Gulf, turning the water that incredible shade of turquoise that postcards couldn’t capture. The boardwalk was warm under Eli’s bare feet as they crossed the dune, the sounds of the house fading behind them.
Kate walked beside him, her sandals dangling from one hand. She’d changed into shorts that showed off her long and very pale legs. They stepped off the boardwalk, dropped her sandals, and together sank their toes into the soft white sand.
She let out a sigh, but for a few steps, neither of them spoke.
That alone made him think something was up.
They fell into step, their arms close but not touching, and made their way down to the waterline. The surf was gentle, barely lapping at the packed sand, and a few pelicans drifted overhead in that lazy formation that always amazed Eli, but then he remembered who created them.
Everything God did amazed him.
He let the quiet settle a little longer, then glanced at her. “You seem distracted.”
Kate pushed her glasses up her nose. “I am,” she admitted.
He liked that there were no games with her, but he’d need more than that to feel better.
“Is it the lab?” he asked.
Kate exhaled slowly, and just that sound told him it was serious. “Our grant—and every penny of funding—is officially pulled.”
He froze mid-step. “Kate. I thought they were still deciding.”
“They decided.” She nudged his arm. “Walk. It’s easier to talk about terrible things when you’re in motion.”
He resumed, staying close. “And there’s no chance they’d change their mind? What happened?”
“Financial cuts. Or politics. Or both. The new review committee announced that our research isn’t a priority anymore.
” She said it with the controlled tone of a scientist reporting data, but he could hear the crack beneath it.
“Cornell canceled the battery lab projects. The program I’ve spent the last seven years building is now… defunct. Goodness, I hate that word.”
His heart hurt for her. Losing that lab wasn’t just a career setback.
It had to feel like someone had turned off the lights in the room where she felt most like herself.
She glowed when she talked about her byzantine experiments, her team of seasoned chemists, and her high hopes for a battery that would extend the life of EVs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s a real loss, Kate.”
She glanced at him, and something in her expression softened. “Thank you for calling it that. Everyone else keeps saying ‘it’ll work out’ or ‘a better project will come along.’ Which is nice but also makes me want to throw something.”
“I won’t say either of those things.”
She looked up at him. “I know I can count on you to say the right thing.”
“No pressure or anything,” he joked, making her laugh, which always made her even prettier to him.
“What about teaching?” But even as he asked it, he knew that the professorial aspect of her job was always a much lower priority than the lab work.
Her father, a law professor at the same university, had loved teaching. Kate loved academics and research, describing herself as happiest in a lab with goggles on.
“My grad students can handle everything online. I don’t need to be at Cornell right now.” She paused, looking out at the horizon. “Which is strange to say, considering I’ve needed to be at Cornell for…ever.”
He heard the ache in her voice. She might as well have said she’d been physically unmoored from a life that had anchored her—a job that had been her plumb line after her divorce, then her father’s death.
“Does that mean you’re staying in Destin?” he asked. “Because…silver lining.”
She smiled. “I’m staying for a while,” she said.
“Emma needs to be…away from Ithaca. I need to figure some things out,” she added quickly, as if she didn’t want to elaborate on Emma.
“And Vivien and I decided that Tessa’s getting a real wedding before summer ends whether she likes it or not, so apparently, I have a job. ”
“You and Vivien are planning that? Tessa’s the event planner.”
“She’s got Olive and a house renovation, plus a real job, so Vivien and I will handle it.” She gestured back to the Summer House. “We have a venue and a vision that, oddly enough, came from one of Viv’s old diaries.”
Laughing at that, he reached for her hand. When her fingers laced through his, the month apart compressed into nothing.
“I’m selfishly glad you’re here, even if the reason is lousy.”
“The reason is lousy,” she agreed. “But being here isn’t.”
They walked for a while, hand in hand, content and quiet.
A family with little kids worked furiously on a sandcastle near the shore, the father patiently rebuilding a turret every time the smallest child knocked it over. Kate watched them with an expression Eli couldn’t quite read.
“I’ve missed you,” she said quietly, not looking at him. “More than I expected to. More than I wanted to, honestly.”
His chest tightened at the subtext in that last admission. “You did leave in a hurry, Kate.”
“Don’t read too much into that, Eli. I knew deep down this grant review could end badly. But, yeah, you and I were moving fast and that was…scary.”
She said it simply, and he didn’t bother to argue. New relationships, especially for people in their fifties with lives, kids, and jobs, were hard. Maybe not scary, but challenging. Theirs was no different.
“When I was in Ithaca,” she said, “I kept thinking about what it would be like to come back here and see you.”
He hated that he held his breath, waiting for the rest.
“And in every version,” she finished, “I realized I’m…not okay without you.”
And he exhaled. He stopped walking and turned to face her. “Neither am I,” he confessed.
The breeze caught her hair and pushed it across her face, and he tucked it behind her ear without thinking. She leaned into his hand for just a second.
Yes, they had things to work out. But at the root of this relationship was respect and love, and surely they could grow something lasting from that.
“Kate.” His voice was rougher than he intended. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you left. I’ve prayed about us more than I’ve prayed about anything, and that includes Lakeside.”
He added that last bit to soften the mention of prayer, but he saw the small shift in her expression anyway. Not a flinch, not quite, but a flicker of something that dimmed her eyes.
“You’ve been praying about us?”
“Of course I have. I pray about everything that matters. You know that.”
She nodded slowly, looking as though she didn’t want to wade into this but had to.