his clavicle to his shoulder. Though she had no idea where it came from, she could only imagine. And instead of letting the scar sadden her, it only served to make her feel even more compassion for him.
After walking a little farther, they sat in the sand. A couple was setting up a University of Florida Gators tent behind them.
Claire tapped his arm with the back of her hand. “Hey, I had an idea the other day. I want to start a foundation in David’s name to support foster children in the area.”
“That’s pretty cool.” He was digging a hole with his heels.
“I thought you might be interested in being the spokesperson.”
Oliver tossed a shell toward the water. “What do you mean?”
“I’d need someone who can speak from experience, tell people what it’s like for you. You could be that young man. You can help me raise money and bring awareness to all the children in need. I think you’d be great at it. And it would be awesome for your résumé—especially a Duke application. What do you think?”
He picked up another shell. “Would I have to talk to, like, a lot of people? Like public speaking?”
“If you wanted to. Public speaking is something you get used to. Might as well get it over with before college.”
He dug the shell into the sand. “I hate getting in front of people.”
Claire turned to him. “What? You’re a pitcher, standing all by yourself on the mound.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. I’m just throwing a ball.”
“Public speaking is basically throwing fastballs with your mouth.”
Oliver rolled his eyes.
“Seriously.” Claire wiped a bead of sweat off her forehead. “I know you’d be good at it.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course you can. There’s no pressure. It was just something I thought you might enjoy.”
He stopped moving his feet. “I guess you’re right. I do need to get over the public speaking thing at some point.”
“We can take baby steps,” Claire said. “You don’t have to go address Congress. I was thinking we could visit some of the other foster homes to start out. I bet some of the kids newer to the system would love to hear how you’ve figured out your way. It could make a big difference. They’d look up to you.”
A thread of excitement ran through his words as he said, “Yeah, I could do that.”
Claire pushed up from the sand and offered him a hand. “Let’s get dried off and go do something fun.”
As she pulled him up, he asked, “Like what?”
“We could go annoy Whitaker while he’s trying to write.”
Oliver snorted. “That sounds kind of fun.”
Chapter 39
LET’S GO, YANKEES
Two months later and the Florida sun had officially baptized August with its first one-hundred-degree day. The humidity hung thick in the air, slowing everything and everyone down.
Whitaker and Claire had been spending a lot of quality time with Oliver, visiting his foster family’s house, taking him on adventures, even slowly introducing him to the Grant family, starting with Jack and Sadie—who’d welcomed him with open arms (or, as Whitaker had halfway joked, welcomed him with the Grant family’s vampiric bite). Oliver was not nearly as reserved as he had been when they’d first met him at the park. There were still hints of skepticism in his eyes and body language, but he’d come a long, long way.
Whitaker had secretly been writing, but he wasn’t worried about word count or delivering the perfect ending. He was having fun, writing from the heart. He wrote when the moment moved him, and he went where the story pulled him. But the pressure wasn’t there. He didn’t wake feeling the need to impress anyone. He didn’t wake feeling constrained by his ego.
He woke excited about telling the story that was coming alive before his very eyes, the breakthroughs of an egocentric man and the waking of a boy who has every reason in the world to keep on sleeping.
It wasn’t hard to put that on paper.
When Claire asked how things were going, he’d say with a grin, “I’m getting there.”
When she’d asked him this morning, he didn’t admit that he was only paragraphs away from typing “The End.” What only he and other writers could know was that typing those two words was the same as a mountaineer stabbing his flag into the peak of the mountain he’d just traversed, and he felt it coming.
Regarding that brunette librarian with a sword and shield that he called the muse, he’d been reminded of the most important lesson