Is It Any Wonder (Nantucket Love Story #2) - Courtney Walsh Page 0,31

of those tents. The reason you went to the beach was to be in the sun, wasn’t it? He and Louisa were tired and quiet, and they could overhear their parents’ conversation, reminiscing about a summer years before when they’d all first met.

It wasn’t uncommon for them to retell this story. They told it to Cody and Lou. They told it to each other. They loved to think about—and romanticize—the way they’d become “the Fab Four.”

“You all have me to thank,” Louisa’s mom said, her Southern drawl so lazy he thought it might put him to sleep. “If I hadn’t dumped Danny, none of us would be here.”

Cody’s dad let out a hearty laugh. “That’s not how I remember it, Joey.”

Louisa squinted at him. “Why does she call him Danny?”

“Why does he call her Joey?”

They both rolled their eyes then at the silliness of their parents, who were all good-natured about the way their friendship had begun.

Daniel and JoEllen met in a business class at Boston University. They were assigned to work together on a group project and hit it off right away.

“He was smitten with me,” JoEllen said.

Cody didn’t say so, but he thought it was rude of her to talk like that in front of his mom.

Louisa groaned. “She’s so full of herself.”

“Not too smitten, or he wouldn’t have set you up with me.” Warren laughed.

JoEllen swatted her husband on the shoulder, and Cody noticed his mom stayed quiet. She didn’t like thinking or talking about Daniel and other women. His father must’ve sensed it because he wound his arm around his wife and squeezed.

“Everything worked out just as it was supposed to,” he said, placing a tender kiss on Marissa’s temple.

JoEllen smiled at Marissa. “I knew you two would be perfect together.”

Daniel and JoEllen had apparently realized they were better off as friends, and they stayed that way for months. And then they set each other up with their now spouses, Warren and Marissa.

Marissa had been a roommate of JoEllen’s, though she confided in Cody once that they were great roommates because they had so little in common. Warren and Daniel were fraternity brothers. The rest was, as they say, history.

They weren’t the normal kind of family friends, however. They were so much closer. Cody was positive that Daniel would’ve jumped in the ocean to save every single one of them if they were being overpowered by the waves.

Why couldn’t it have been someone else he’d been saving that night? Why did it have to be Cody?

He shook aside the memories, the sound of his father’s laughter dancing on the waves, and turned his attention back to the cross in front of him, the note in his hand.

Lots of people loved his father, but only one person that he could think of called him Danny. JoEllen Chambers.

What if . . . ?

He shouldn’t have come here. He didn’t need anything messing with his memory of his father. In his mind, his father was the real hero. His father was the one who jumped in to save him in the middle of the choppiest waters they’d seen that summer. His father was the one who gave no thought to the fact that he’d warned Cody not to swim, no thought to the fact that Cody had disobeyed. He was the one who braved the waves and the rip currents and the darkness to save his son’s life.

He was the one who died.

Cody stood, tucked the card in his pocket, and gave the cross one last, lingering look as if staring at it could provide answers. Whoever had been here had known his father enough to want to keep his memory alive. They missed him enough, even all these years later.

He turned toward the road and started running again, unsuccessfully willing the questions to stop. So much for clearing his mind. All this run had done was create more confusion.

Unfortunately, he could come up with only two people on the island who might be able to help him.

And he was in no hurry to dredge up the past with either of them.

CHAPTER TEN

“WHAT DID THE COASTIES WANT?” Alyssa had returned from the Cape and now stood in the office where Louisa had set up her Big Dream whiteboard.

The whiteboard had been with her for years—it was a staple in her creative process. Anything and everything she thought of could go up on the whiteboard. Even if an idea didn’t make it past the board, it often cleared the way