wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“Our first date,” Annalise said. “How could I forget?”
“I was so nervous,” Curt said.
That, she hadn’t known. “You were nervous?” she asked. “What were you nervous about? You were Curt Slade, and I was just some teacher!”
He laughed. “You haven’t referred to me that way in a long time,” he said.
“Yeah, well, that’s not how I think of you now,” she said. “Now you’re just… you know. Curt. My Curt.”
“That’s right,” he said, satisfaction in his voice.
“But back then… you were this big movie star. You were way out of my league.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “I thought just the opposite.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I mean it,” he said. “You were so cool and successful. You were someone who had found a happy life in the regular world. You have to remember that before I got my acting break, I was struggling all the time. I was working odd jobs to get by. And I was never satisfied.”
“Well, that’s because you were meant to be an actor!” Annalise said. “You couldn’t have been happy until you achieved your dream. It wasn’t any different for me. I wouldn’t have been satisfied if I wasn’t in a classroom.”
“I worried that you might see me as shallow,” Curt said. “I was afraid you might think I was too superficial for you to bother with.”
“I never thought that,” Annalise assured him.
He nodded. “I know,” he said. “That first date was magical. I think I started falling in love with you that very day.”
“I feel the same way,” she admitted. “It’s crazy. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that of course I wasn’t going to develop serious feelings for you.”
“Really?”
“I did say that, actually.” She laughed, remembering. “When Janette and I got together and watched one of your movies. She wanted all the gossip.”
“And you told her we weren’t going to be serious?”
“Well, I didn’t think there was any way we could,” Annalise said. “You were this famous actor, remember? And I was just a schoolteacher. I had no way of knowing what would happen between us. At the time, I thought you just wanted a one-off date with someone outside the Hollywood scene, and I was fine with being that for you. It was exciting.”
Curt shook his head. “That was never what I wanted,” he said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “Don’t you remember what you put in your dating profile?”
“I said I was looking for true love,” she remembered.
“I wouldn’t have messaged you in the first place if I didn’t want the same thing,” he said. “I wouldn’t have matched with you if I didn’t want to find love.”
Annalise leaned her head on his shoulder and watched their children play in the sand. “I never would have imagined it would happen like this,” she said. “Not in my wildest dreams.”
“Neither would I,” Curt agreed. “But I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”
She turned in his arms and stood on her toes to kiss him.
Raúl and Curt spread the picnic blanket on the sand and weighed it down at the corners with rocks from the beach as Janette and Annalise rounded up the children. They handed out sandwiches and bottles of juice for the children and sodas for the adults. Raúl dug a little cupholder in the sand for his drink. Will picked the lettuce off his sandwich and buried it.
“Thanks for bringing us out here, Curt,” Janette said, tearing the crust off of a piece of bread and handing it to Carter to nibble on. “This is such a fun day. We should do it more often.”
“I’d love that,” Curt said genuinely. “It’s a great way to celebrate special occasions, coming to the beach at Catalina.”
Annalise nodded. “I can’t believe the triplets are two already,” she said. “That really is a cause for celebration.”
“That’s not all we have to celebrate,” Curt said.
She looked at him. “It isn’t?”
“I’m hoping not.”
He looks nervous, she realized suddenly.
She opened her mouth to ask him whether everything was okay—and realized that her sister was grinning widely.
“What’s up?” she asked, looking suspiciously from Curt to Janette. “What’s going on?”
Raúl fumbled in his pocket, pulled out his phone, and held it up as if readying to take a picture.
“Raúl, what are you doing?” Annalise asked.
“Get up for a minute,” Raúl said, getting to his feet. “I want to show you something.”
“Okay…” Annalise stood and brushed the sand off the legs of her pants. “What do you want to show me?”
Smiling,