said. “Aunt Jess, can we build another one in our sandbox when we get home? I want to play with my princess toy in it.”
“Our sandbox is too tiny for a castle like this,” Grace informed her. “Plus Silas will only smash it the minute we build it. He smashes everything.”
Jess didn’t know how to answer that, sad all over again at the challenges her sister’s family had to face.
“It really is a great sandcastle,” Sophie said. “I haven’t built a sand sculpture in a long time. Since my grandpa got sick, anyway. This was fun.”
Better than surfing with a cute boy might have been? Jess highly doubted it.
“Thanks for helping us,” she said.
“We should add some water to our moat,” Grace said.
“Right. What good is a moat for keeping out invaders if it doesn’t have any water in it?” Jess said with a smile.
The girls hurried to the ocean’s edge again to scoop up more water.
Just as they finished, Jess spotted someone coming down the path. For a minute, she thought it might be Sophie’s absentee friend, finally here, but this figure was too tall and didn’t have a surfboard.
Nate.
He looked big, tough, gorgeous...and upset. His expression was tight, his eyes stormy.
“Sophie. Here you are! You scared us. I came home early and you weren’t there. Your grandmother didn’t have any idea where you might be and you didn’t answer your phone, even though we both called and texted.”
“I never got any calls or texts. I would have answered if I had. I probably didn’t have cell service down here,” she muttered, unrepentant.
“It’s a good thing I thought to look in the garage and saw your board missing, though I can’t believe you would come down here by yourself. You know the rules.”
She looked annoyed at being called out. “I didn’t even go into the water. We made a sandcastle instead.”
“So why are you wearing a wet suit and why is your surfboard down here? Were you planning to go out on your own?”
She lifted her chin. “I’m thirteen. I’ll be fourteen in five months. I’ve been surfing since I was younger than Grace. I’m old enough to go by myself. You do,” she pointed out.
Nate frowned. “That’s not the same thing at all. I have been surfing the cove for much longer than you have. Regardless of what a great surfer you are, the more important point is that we have a rule and you were going to break it.”
“I wasn’t going to be by myself. A kid from school was going to come check out the break at Sunshine Cove. I guess he couldn’t come.”
“Then you should have put your gear away when he didn’t show up. If you’re not responsible enough to follow that simple rule, maybe we need to go back to you staying with Grandma Eleanor after school instead of being on your own.”
“I’m not a baby! When are you going to stop treating me like one?”
“I hate to state the obvious but maybe when you stop acting like one.”
Sophie made a sound of deep frustration. “I didn’t break any rules. Maybe I thought about it but I changed my mind when Jess asked me to build a sandcastle with her and the girls, okay? I am so tired of you treating me like I’m some dumb baby all the time. I hate you.”
She grabbed her surfboard and marched up the path toward home without another word, leaving a long, awkward silence in her wake.
15
Nate
There it was.
The H word.
How many times had he flung it at his own father when he was frustrated at some rule or other?
Raising a teenager was hard. He wasn’t sure if he had the stamina to make it through another five years of Sophie flaunting the rules and then snapping at him when he called her on it.
Okay, maybe he had freaked out a little when he saw her surfboard gone and couldn’t reach her, imagining all sorts of grim scenarios. It was just Sophie’s bad luck that a college student had drowned just a few weeks earlier while surfing alone down the coast, leaving Nate slightly more paranoid than usual about water safety.
“Sorry,” he said now to Jess. “We’re having some boundary issues, if you couldn’t tell. Namely that Sophie seems to be pushing against every single one of them.”
“For what it’s worth, she never did get in the water. I didn’t want to let her come down alone so we decided to build a sandcastle as a