Chapter 8 #2
“Don’t even think about it,” Grace tells herself, remembering Meg’s offer.
The Beachcomber. Dinner. Although the vintage motel’s waterfront restaurant was once one of Grace’s favorite spots to catch a late meal, there’s no way.
A casual run-in was one thing, but having to sit face-to-face for an extended period?
There’s too much history she’ll be forced to cover, too many life updates she doesn’t want to give or hear.
“Absolutely not.” She pulls open a drawer, only to find chopsticks and a ketchup packet. “You’re better off starving.”
In the living room, her phone rings, ripping through the quiet. Grace jumps at the sound, then slams the drawer shut. She moves to the sofa and grabs her device, not sure whose number she expects to find flashing across her screen.
“Adam?” She says his name like it’s a question. “Hi.” Her pulse picks up, her mind conjuring up potential reasons for his call, their days of casual check-ins long behind them. “What’s going on?” she asks, already assuming the worst. “Is everything okay?”
“Do you remember the first time we came up here together?” Adam asks, a complete curveball. “To the lake?”
“What?” Her heartbeat settles, then lifts in a different way.
“Uh, yeah.” Realizing he’s fine, Grace heads back into the kitchen and rummages through a cabinet, though all that’s there is a box of baking soda.
She shakes it, like a slice of pizza might fall out.
“It was our first summer together, right? A few weeks before my thirtieth.”
“It was.” His tone is uncharacteristically nostalgic.
“We sat out on the dock one night and talked about the future. If we both wanted to stay in the city forever. Where we saw ourselves in five years.” He clears his throat.
“We were so young—too young to realize all our plans might not work out.” A quiet beat passes. “It’s not fair that they didn’t.”
Grace sets the box back on the shelf as memories of that night flicker to life, reel by reel, in her mind. The moonlight on the lake. The warm glow of the house behind them. Adam’s hand wrapped 69around hers. It was a version of herself—her whole life—she was sure would last.
“Wh-why are you bringing this up right now?” she asks, confused and caught off guard.
“Ready to laugh?”
“I don’t know.” Grace is cautious. “Am I?”
“I’m out on the dock, having a drink,” he explains.
“I was thinking about you. About us.” He stops himself, like he’s embarrassed to go on.
“Anyway, I felt something on my hand. When I looked down, I saw a ladybug—completely random—sitting on my knuckle.” He chuckles, soft and melancholy and forced.
“A sign, you know?” His voice is laced with uncertainty, as if he’s feeling out how this will land.
“Thought it meant I should give you a quick call.”
Grace’s pulse stutters again. Her fingers fumble for her lost necklace—a phantom comfort—though, of course, it’s not there.
For a second, her thoughts drift. The two of them, their feet flirting with the water’s surface.
The conversation. Grace admitting that maybe she wanted to leave Manhattan soon, then ever so hesitantly adding that perhaps she’d like to get married one day, try her hand at being a mom.
“Well, look at that,” Adam had joked that night, shortly after Grace divulged these things. “I found a sign.” He reached into his pocket, set something between them. “A penny. Guess that means it’ll all work out, right?”
“Very funny.” Grace laughed. “Coming from a guy who’s too logical to believe in those sorts of things.”
Adam picked up the coin and flicked it into the lake. One plop and it disappeared. “I believe I’d like to be with you for a long time,” he said, his eyes on the water. Grace ignored the fact that he didn’t mention whether he wanted to be a parent, too. “Does that count?”
Back then, it did.
At the beginning, things between them felt ideal, like a hard-to-put-down story—the pacing, the ways the characters interacted, all of 70it just right. It was the middle—the part that followed the courtship and dreamy honeymoon phase—when everything began to feel so hard.
“I don’t even know you lately, Grace!” Adam had shouted one summer night two years earlier. “You’ve completely lost yourself—your whole identity—to this process!”
They were home, eating Chinese takeout. Though eating was a generous term. Grace hardly took a bite, instead carefully extracting every mung bean sprout from her meal, after an article she’d read claimed they were detrimental to early pregnancies if not properly cooked.
“Look what you’re doing!” Adam continued, their dinner apparently done. “You’re picking your meal apart like it’s a crime scene and you’re not even pregnant right now.”
He was right. Grace wasn’t pregnant. She’d taken a test two weeks prior to confirm as much. Still, she often found herself caught up in fertility math (this cycle, plus this day, added to this many weeks could mean . . .). Grace couldn’t help it. She always wondered what if.
“You never know.” She didn’t want to tell him about the dream she’d had the night before. A baby boy. The sound of coos. Or about the ladybug she saw on her nightstand the second she woke up. He’d roll his eyes, say it was irrelevant. “I could be really early or—”
“Look at this.” Adam gestured to a dozen vitamin bottles on the counter.
“You’ve bought every possible supplement.
” He pointed to a calendar on the fridge, the dates marked with red circles and X’s, like a strange game of tic-tac-toe.
“You’ve plotted out our entire life based on your ovulation dates.
” He raked his fingers through his hair.
“Is this what we want? You? Me?” He gripped the counter.
“Our entire life has become so tangled up in this. I don’t want this.
” Adam met her eyes, and Grace saw it: an early shift in his gaze, one that looked like two train cars starting to head in different directions on the tracks. “Do you?”
Grace looked down. She didn’t answer. What was the point?
“You’ve heard the doctor,” Adam said, releasing an exasperated sigh. “There’s nothing clinically wrong.” It was true. She’d had every test, 71only to learn she was fine. “You have to stop obsessing and trying to force it. It’s a matter of chance. When it’s supposed to happen—”
“It will,” she said, though it never did.
Now, back inside the beach house, Grace’s tone quiets. “So . . . a ladybug, huh?” she questions as though she’s testing him. “I thought you didn’t believe in signs. Too woo-woo.”
“It’s been a long few months.” Adam sighs. “I’m not sure what I believe anymore.”
“I need to go,” Grace states, confused and not wanting to fall into this rabbit hole. “The market up the street closes soon, and I haven’t even had dinner yet.”
“The market?” he asks, sounding confused. “Isn’t Whole Foods in town open until ten?”
“I’m not at home,” she states, recalling that he’s unaware she left. “I’m in Sea Drift.”
“Sea Drift?” Adam echoes, like he hasn’t heard her right. Or like he hopes he hasn’t. “Since when?” His voice tightens, as if he’s trying to squeeze some thought tight enough that it won’t come out. “With who?”
Grace lets his question hang in the air. “Since today,” she finally says. “And I’m not here with anyone, Adam,” she says, understanding his subtext. “It’s just me. I got a call late yesterday. An opportunity for me to come down just sort of presented itself out of the blue.”
“Huh,” he says, almost to himself, still working something out. “You haven’t been there in years,” he adds, his statement coming out slower this time.
“I know,” she says, wondering if that, in and of itself, is why she came.
A silence forms between them, one that nearly stretches too long.
“Well, then, I’m sorry for bothering you.” Adam swallows, as though he’s trying to push something that’s risen to the surface back down into him. “I hope you enjoy yourself.” His tone evens out, but his words don’t quite ring authentic. “How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, not even sure why she’s telling him. “Still undecided.”
72
Adam breathes. “Well, if you need anything, you know how to reach me.”
By the time Grace arrives at the market a few streets away, it’s night.
She leans the seafoam beach cruiser, one of the two that come with the house, against the building’s chipped white clapboard siding and hurries up the steps two at a time, knowing from her many past visits that the place never stays open late.
A bell jingles as she pulls the door wide and steps inside.
The market is less of a grocer and more of a vacation-inspired hodgepodge of things.
Wine displays and imported oils. A barrel of pool floats.
Baskets of overpriced fruit. Bottles of bright-green aloe vera gel.
A freezer full of ice cream bars, but not a single loaf of decent bread.
Grace wanders, gathering assorted odds and ends in a basket. Crackers. Gummy candy. A box of sugary cereal she loved as a kid. At the last minute, she takes a few items out and puts them back, telling herself she’s buying too much. She’s still not sure how long she plans to stay.
A moment later, she finds the register and sets the basket on the counter. Just as the front bells chime again, she shifts her weight and bends to check her heel. The splinter is tiny, almost invisible, but still the skin around it gently throbs. Just another quiet, buried ache for her to carry.
“One second. I forgot something,” she tells the cashier, an older man who just nods, like he’s watched this scene unfold a thousand times. She spins, prepared to go find a pair of cheap tweezers.
But she turns too fast.
Her sandaled foot catches, sending her off-balance. She stumbles and crashes softly into the patron behind her in line. Her face collides with his warm, solid chest.
“O-oh, my gosh.” Grace trips over her words, trying to redeem herself.
She takes a breath but quickly realizes that doing so was a mistake.
The 73scent hits her nose, then travels through her whole body.
The fragrance fills her like helium—an invisible chemical capable of making her feel like she’s physically lost contact with the ground.
Slowly, she pulls her face off his body, telling herself she’s wrong.
“I-I’m so sorry.” The words continue to fall from her mouth. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
She steps back and tilts up her chin. Time halts. Her body registers the moment before her brain. A flash of heat overwhelms her as her hands gently shake.
“Ray,” she says through a gasp, the first time his name—once like a song she couldn’t stop singing—has touched her lips in years.
She should say something else. Or move. Maybe blink.
Instead, she just studies him, as if she’s working to see if her mind is tricking her.
Her sight follows the line of his jaw, the shape of his face, the curve of his mouth.
Everything feels familiar. He’s still him.
“Hi, Grace.” His dark eyes fall in line with hers, like he never stopped looking at her.
I like your eyes, she told him that first summer when things between them started to change. Thirteen. A summer crush. A shared soda. A bench on the bay. They’re . . . cool, she said, still too young to have more grown-up words to articulate what she meant. They shine gold around the rims.
I didn’t realize you were looking that closely, he said, only half joking.
The truth was, until that moment, neither did she.
“I—I . . .” Grace’s eyelids flutter. She reaches for a coherent thought but can hardly speak.
Ray lets her unfinished sentence hang there, like an old photograph nailed to a wall.
His chest—still sturdy from all those youthful years spent surfing—rises and falls beneath his black T-shirt like a wave.
He adjusts his backward baseball hat, a near replica of the one he’s worn practically his whole life.
His gaze stays on her while they both stand, just inches from each other, and wait.
“Did you forget something?” he finally asks. “Looked like you were running off to search for something else.”
74
If Grace once knew how to breathe, she no longer remembers how. Her lungs, as well as every other part of her, tenses up. “Ray, I—”
“Your basket, Grace.” He gestures down at her provisions. “Thought I overheard you mention you had to grab something else before you checked out.”
She shakes her head, as if such a simple movement might help the feelings that now pulse inside her to go away. “I, um, I have a splinter.” She licks her lips, which have gone dry. “I was going to see if they had anything to help me get it out.”
“Tweezers.” He nods. “Aisle three,” he tells her, clearly knowing this place. Knowing her and what she needs. “Bottom peg.”
The man at the register clears his throat. “Actually, we’re all out.” The bells chime once more, another customer walking in. “Delivery delay. I’ve got a shipment of things coming from the mainland early next week.”
His eyes still locked on Grace, Ray slowly lifts a brow. “Guess you’ll have to deal with it the old-fashioned way,” he says through a subtle smirk.
A memory. The two of them. Sixteen. The boardwalk. A three-inch shard of wood in her foot.
Who walks barefoot on the boardwalk? he said, smiling, her leg in his lap like it belonged there.
I can’t watch, she said, twisting to look toward the Ferris wheel when he pulled out the small pocketknife he always carried for fishing and surfing emergencies. Please don’t hurt me.
I’d never hurt you, Grace, he said, and before she even had a chance to realize what was happening, the splinter was out, his word—like always—kept.
The recollection fades away just as quickly as it flowed in.
“Well, good luck with that,” Ray says now. “And with everything else, I guess.”
Grace swallows, her insides still quivering. “Thanks.”
75
Ray takes a step toward an aisle to go find whatever it is that he needs. Before he gets too far, he turns back. “It’s funny.” Some hard-to-read emotion passes over his face. “I’ve never been one to believe in rumors.” He shrugs. “Turns out, one of them was actually true.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
Ray bites his plump bottom lip, then waits, like he’s deciding if he wants to state what comes next. “Nothing.” He laughs, though it’s hard for Grace to tell if the sound is rooted in amusement or something else. “It’s just, well, a little birdie told me I might bump into you again this week.”