Chapter 5
August
He called me beautiful.
He said it out loud. With his mouth. In front of people.
I was staring at the sandcastle, and all I could hear was she looks beautiful in anything she wears going around in my head like a song stuck on repeat. I had heard that correctly. I had not imagined it.
I looked up at Callie.
Callie was already looking at me. Her eyes were doing the thing they did when she had approximately forty things to say and was physically restraining herself from saying all of them at once. She cleared her throat. Short, pointed, deliberate. She wanted me to step aside.
I looked at Poppy.
Poppy cleared her throat. Same sound. Same energy.
I stared at Poppy. She was nine years old. How did she know our throat-clearing code? We had never taught her our throat-clearing code.
Poppy looked back at me with an expression that said she knew many things and this was the least of them.
“August,” Callie said in a loud voice, meaning it was my clue to join her wherever she was going to go. She looked at me hard. “Do you want to take a dip?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. Absolutely.”
“I feel like a dip too,” Poppy said, already standing up and brushing sand off her knees.
The three of us walked toward the shoreline. I didn’t look back. I could feel eyes on my back the whole way down to the water, like a hand pressing between my shoulder blades.
The water was cold enough to be a shock and warm enough to stay in. We waded in up to our knees and stood there, the three of us in a line, the waves coming in low and easy.
“Why,” Callie said, “did my brother have to bring her.”
“Because he likes her,” I said.
“He does not like her.”
“He’s dating her, Callie.”
“He’s punishing himself with her,” Callie said. “There’s a difference.”
“He loves August,” Poppy said.
We both looked at her.
She was looking at the horizon. She said it the way she said most things — like she was reporting the weather. Like it was a fact she had verified from multiple sources and was simply sharing for the benefit of the group.
“Poppy, how do you—” I stopped. “What makes you say that?”
She turned and looked at me. She looked at me the way a very old person looks at a very young one, which was impressive given that she was nine and I was twenty-four.
“Everyone on this beach can see it,” she said. “By how he looks at you.” She paused. “He’s looking at you right now, actually.”
Callie and I both turned at the same time.
“Not together!” Poppy said, too late.
We had already turned together. Fletcher was sitting in the sand next to the half-finished sandcastle, and the second we turned he looked away, fast, his eyes going somewhere out to sea.
I turned back to the water.
My heart was doing something completely unacceptable.
“He looks miserable,” Callie said, also turning back. “Did you hear them earlier? That whole argument about the gala and the woman in the red swimsuit and that poor little boy in the bucket hat?”
“I heard some of it.”
“I heard all of it,” Callie said. “I was sitting right there pretending to drink my lemonade. He looked like a man eating food he doesn’t like because he ordered it and now he has to finish it.
” She shook her head. “He does this to himself. He finds some twisted way to make himself suffer and then he just— leans into it.”
“Maybe Margaux isn’t all bad,” I said. “Maybe she just says things without thinking. Maybe she means well.”
Poppy turned to look at me.
“What evidence do you have,” she said, “that she means well? To anyone. So far today.”
I opened my mouth.
I closed it.
“I don’t like her,” Poppy said. “She looks at me like she doesn’t want me here.” She said it without any particular emotion, like she was noting an observable fact. “I like you. You always want me here. Fletcher should marry you.”
“Poppy.” I almost choked on a wave. “That is a very large leap.”
“It’s not a leap. It’s a logical conclusion.” She waded forward slightly, the water hitting her waist. “He will marry you. After he figures out that Margaux is only here for the Calloway name.”
“How do you know things like that?” Callie said. She was looking at Poppy like she was a puzzle that kept adding pieces. “You’re in fourth grade.”
“Trivia books.” Poppy waded a little further. “And history. History is full of women who married rich men for their family names and not for love. It says so in many books. It happened a lot. And as the saying goes, history repeats itself.” She nodded once, confirming her own point.
Callie and I looked at each other.
“She’s going to be terrifying when she grows up,” Callie said quietly.
“She’s already terrifying,” I said.
Poppy accepted this as a compliment.
We waded deeper, the three of us moving further out, the water rising to my hips. I was still thinking about Fletcher looking away when I caught him. About his ears going pink when he called me beautiful.
I had spent five years telling myself I had imagined the way he looked at me.
The Tuesday coffees, the Thursday flowers, the farmer’s market rescue, the way he always seemed to appear exactly when something went sideways — I had filed all of it under Callie’s older brother, protective instinct, means nothing.
But you don’t call someone beautiful because you’re protective.
You don’t buy someone’s entire flower stock every week because you’re protective.
Or maybe you do. If you’re Fletcher Calloway.
I pushed my hair out of my face. I should not let myself think this way because I had been here before and it had not gone anywhere. Afterall, a man who wanted you did not bring his girlfriend to meet his family.
A wave hit me sideways.
I didn’t see it coming. It caught me right in the hip, hard and fast, and my feet went out from under me like someone had pulled a rug. I went down. Salt water in my nose, in my mouth, spinning for one second where I couldn’t tell which direction was up.
I came up laughing.
I couldn’t help it. It was too sudden, too ridiculous. I broke the surface laughing and Callie was already laughing and Poppy was laughing with both hands over her mouth.
“Are you—” Callie started.
Another wave.
This one caught me before I’d fully gotten my footing, and I went down again, and I was laughing so hard underwater that I swallowed half the ocean on the way back up.
I was still laughing when a pair of hands wrapped around my waist and pulled.
Strong hands. Both of them. They pulled me up fast and steady and I came up out of the water and found myself face to face with Fletcher.
Very face to face.
His hands were on my waist. My hands had landed on his arms. We were close enough that I could see a drop of salt water on his jaw. His eyes were right there, looking at me, and for one full second neither of us moved.
The ocean kept going around us.
He stepped back. His hands dropped.
“Are you okay?” His voice was slightly rough. Like he’d run to get here, which, looking at him, I was pretty sure he had.
“Yeah.” I pushed my hair out of my face. “Just got knocked over. I’m fine.”
“It is literally impossible to drown at this depth,” Poppy said helpfully, from three feet away. “The water is four feet deep maximum. A person would have to work very hard to drown here.”
Fletcher looked at Poppy. He looked back at me. His ears had gone pink again.
“You’re fine,” he said. He nodded, once, like he was confirming it for himself as much as for me. “Enjoy your swim.”
“Thanks.”
He turned and walked back up the beach.
I watched him go.
Behind me, Callie made a sound that was not quite a word.
I turned around. She was pressing her lips together. Poppy was smiling at the sky.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything,” Callie said.
“Don’t.”
I turned back to the water.
I am not fine, I thought.
The water was cold and my heart was going too fast and Fletcher Calloway had just pulled me out of the ocean with both hands and looked at me like I was the only thing he could see, and he was going to go back up that beach and sit next to Margaux in her Zimmermann dress and I was going to stand here in the Atlantic Ocean and be completely, totally fine.
I looked up at the beach.
Margaux was watching from her chair. Her sunglasses were on. Her arms were crossed over her chest.
She was looking right at me.
I turned back to the water and waded in a little deeper.
***