cost. Came with the waves. “Some people try to see silver linings,” he said. “They talk about God’s plan or God opening a window or some shit.”
She moved her hand to pick up her lemonade. He kind of wanted her not to do that. He kind of wanted her to keep resting that small, capable hand on top of his.
She took a sip of her lemonade. “Well, fuck those people.”
He smiled. Exactly.
When Jake got home late that night, Eve and Sawyer were swimming in the lake near his house. Jake lived in a little cottage on the beach in a small, hidden cove. His grandparents had built the place back when the town was a lot smaller than it was today. They, and later his parents, had treated it as a sort of getaway, visiting mostly on the weekends. Probably because getting to Paradise Cove was a bit of a production. The only way in was on foot, and you had to walk out and around a rocky outcropping that separated the cove from the lake proper.
He had followed in their footsteps initially, keeping a place in town and coming to the cottage with Kerrie and Jude to watch the odd sunset. Kerrie had always been more of a people person, and the isolation got to her. The same way he needed quiet to feel okay, Kerrie had thrived off the energy of other people. But once she’d gone back to work, he and Jude and Daisy had come here almost every day, splashing in the shallows and retreating inside for stories and lunch when the sun got too strong.
Then, when Jude and Kerrie were both gone, he’d moved out here for good.
“Hey.” Sawyer was wading in to shore.
“Don’t mind me,” Jake said, heading for the cottage. He, like his parents before him, didn’t mind townspeople using the beach. Sawyer had taught Eve how to swim here last year, and he suspected the two of them had mushy feelings about the place—which he had no desire to know about. He was all for them taking a moonlight swim, but he didn’t need to witness it.
“We missed you at the bar tonight.”
Oh, shit. It was Friday. He’d completely forgotten.
Well, he hadn’t forgotten. He’d known it was Friday—or he’d started the day knowing it was Friday, anyway. He’d finished installing some built-in shelves in Bayshore and had gone to Nora’s place intending to finish the fence and head downtown to Law’s.
But then Nora’s family happened. She happened. And apparently, all his plans just evaporated from his brain.
“Yeah, I didn’t feel like it tonight.”
Which wasn’t really a lie. What he had felt like doing tonight was sitting on Nora’s deck, the deck he’d built for her, and listening to her say, “Fuck those people.” They’d spent the whole evening out there, talking as they watched the stars come out.
“A bunch of us are going out on Law’s boat tomorrow. We thought we’d introduce Nora Walsh to some people beyond the usual Friday-night crew. Make her feel welcome. I know you never want to come to this kind of stuff, but you know I’m going to persist in inviting you.”
“What time?”
Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Four. At the marina.”
Eve splashed up. “Are you coming?” She and Sawyer shared a look Jake couldn’t decode.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I don’t have anything better to do.”
By the next weekend—the long Labor Day weekend—Nora was beginning to think that there were two versions of Jake. There was Friend Jake, who, although he was far from chatty, was thoughtful and, she would even go so far as to say, charming in his own quiet, low-key way.
Then there was Public Jake. Public Jake didn’t talk unless he was asked a direct question. On the boat ride last weekend, for example, he’d been as silent and grumpy as the one time they’d overlapped at the bar.
And today, the day of the infamous Mermaid Parade, he was practically mute, to use Maya’s characterization.
But to be fair, maybe that was because he was busy. On the boat ride, he had agreed to be the brawn to Maya’s brains—Maya had been cooking up schemes for the vaccine information table Nora was planning for outside the clinic. She was really gung ho about designing it, and frankly, Nora was happy to let her run with it.
The funny thing was that there were a few different ways a person could interpret vaccine information table. Nora had—call her crazy—imagined a table. With some information. And yes, probably some