Sam sat up, reaching to brush the damp chill of the lawn off his back. “I dunno. Just walk around. Talk more like this, but in the daylight so I can see you properly.” He turned and looked down at me, a smile slowly lifting the corners of his mouth. “Lie down together on a different lawn somewhere.”
“You want to spend the day alone?”
I didn’t miss the edge of hurt in Nana’s voice.
“Not because I don’t want to be with you,” I insisted. “I’m leaving soon, to school in Sonoma, and I like the idea that I can walk around a big city alone and navigate it by myself. I just . . . want to try for a few hours.”
I held my breath while she lifted her arms, clasping pearls at the back of her neck. “I suppose I could visit Libby tomorrow without you.”
Libby, from deep in Nana’s past, owned a tiny London hotel. Even the way my grandmother said Libby with a particularly lilting emphasis on the first syllable made me see that she thought her old high school friend must be impressively cultured.
“Exactly,” I said, exhaling at the appearance of this convenient excuse: an old friend. “You wouldn’t want me there, either. I’m sure I’d keep you from gossiping your faces off.”
Nana laughed, swatting at me with her sock before sitting to put it on. “You know I don’t gossip.”
“Sure, and I don’t like pie.”
She laughed again, and then looked up at me from where she sat at the edge of the bed. Her expression straightened from her brow to her mouth, and, at rest, her lips pulled down in a natural pose of displeasure. “Where will you go?”
I tried to look undecided, but the plan flashed in my head like a marquee. Gambling that she wouldn’t follow to check up on me—I didn’t think even Nana was that paranoid or controlling—I said, “Not sure. Maybe Hyde Park?”
“But hon, we’ve planned that for next Tuesday.”
“Maybe I could go out on a paddleboat?” I tried to make it sound more like it had only just occurred to me, and not that Sam and I had already discussed the idea. “It looks fun, but I don’t think you’d want to do that with me.”
Nana wouldn’t step foot on a paddleboat, but wouldn’t want to stop me from doing it, either. She nodded slowly, bending to pull on her other sock. I could see I’d won.
“I guess you’d be fine.” She looked up. This was such an enormous leap of faith for her. She would never let me even go to San Francisco or Berkeley alone.
And here I was, asking to walk around London alone—as far as she knew, that is. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”
I nodded quickly, working to speak past the sun rising in my chest. “Totally fine.”
five
“YOU ARE A MASTER manipulator.” Sam handed a few pound notes to the man at the Bluebird Boats rental kiosk and looked over his shoulder at me. “I thought for sure she’d say no. How did you get Jude to go for it?”
“I told her I wanted to be independent and ride a boat. I knew she didn’t want to go on the lake, so . . .”
He reached out for a high five, and we followed the man along the dock to where our blue paddleboat was tethered to a wide metal hook. The mechanics of powering the boat with our feet seemed pretty straightforward, but the man explained it anyway: how the pedals worked, how to steer, what to do if we got stuck far out and the wind picked up across the lake. Had he not looked up and seen the freight engine that is Sam, standing right in front of him?
“If we get stuck,” I said, hooking my thumb toward the mountain of a man beside me, “I’ll just make him climb out and tow me back to the dock.”
The man sized him up with a raised brow. “Well, off then. Stay on this side of the bridge, all right?”
Sam steadied me with his hand on my arm as I climbed into my seat, before following me in. The boat dipped noticeably under his weight. “We’re going to be paddling in circles,” I joked. “Maybe you should only use one foot.”
He looked at me, eyes glimmering. “You’re in an especially good mood.”
I liked that he saw it. He was right, too. I was nearly light-headed I was so giddy to be