what they meant—hit me differently. This time, I didn’t deflect them. This time, I let them in.
They swirled in my chest in a way that almost made me dizzy.
I closed my eyes.
Duncan took a step closer. “Actually, if I’m honest, it did change how I feel about you.”
I opened my eyes to find his.
And then he said it almost sadly. “I think it made me love you more.”
“You love me,” I said.
He nodded. “Hope that’s okay.”
And so I reached up around his neck, pulled him to me, and kissed him.
The cops, still waiting to take Duncan back wherever they were going, all honked their horns.
When Duncan pulled back, he looked intensely into my eyes. “So it’s okay, then?”
And then, because joy is fleeing, and nothing lasts, and even what you get, you don’t get to keep, I didn’t waste any more time. “I love you, Duncan,” I said. “I’ve loved you for a long, long time.” I said it to be brave. I said it to be better.
But more than anything, I said it because it was true.
And then Duncan leaned down again, and I stretched up, and even though the cops were waiting, we let ourselves have a simple, easy, perfect kiss.
But we sure had earned it.
Halfway through, Duncan broke away, held a finger out to me like, one second, and then trotted over to tap on the passenger window of the closest cop car. The window rolled down, and Duncan poked his head in.
When he stepped back, the cop cars all pulled away.
“What did you say?” I called.
He shrugged. “I just asked if we could finish up the paperwork later.”
And so he walked me back to my place, and we slept together.
Actually slept.
Because man, oh, man, were we tired. And man, oh, man, what a hell of a day-slash-night. But it was okay. Better than okay, even.
It was, in fact, the most better-than-okay either one of us had been in a very long time.
epilogue
Tina really went through with it. She did divorce Kent Buckley. We’d all worried that the momentum of her old life might make her chicken out, but she did it. And while in theory, a divorce is a sad thing—the real sad thing was the marriage that came before it. The divorce itself turned out to be a happy solution.
What I mean is, things got a lot better for Tina Buckley once she was free of Kent and all his demands. Tina and Clay wound up moving in with Babette for a while, which suited Babette just fine, while Tina went back to school to finish her degree.
Turned out one of Tina Buckley’s wifely duties had been to cook gourmet meals for Kent most nights, so Babette ate very well after Tina came home and started teaching her some skills in the kitchen.
And so did I. Because Tina—of all people—invited me to join them.
It turns out to be a funny thing about moms: once you help their children rescue whales in the middle of the night, they stop hating you so much. Or, maybe, once they get rid of the husbands they should have been hating all along, they can give you a break.
Either way, we made up.
She turned out to be a much nicer person than I’d given her credit for.
Tina did stop Kent from selling off our school. She must have had some really great dirt on him. He didn’t even put up a fight. His behavior at the beach—specifically, assaulting the school principal—also prompted his removal from the board.
Guess who took his place?
The beautiful Babette.
Kent Buckley moved to New Jersey, after that, and he turned out to be the kind of divorced dad who did not make a large effort—or, frankly, any effort—to see his kid.
And while we can all agree that it’s good for boys—in theory—to have a father around, we also agree that it really depends quite a bit on the father.
Which was fine. Clay wound up with a better family, anyway. Between Tina, Babette, and me, he had more than enough loving adults looking after him. I even gave him his own CLAY RECOMMENDS shelf in the library. Not to mention the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which gave him a medal and honored him at their annual fundraising dinner (he wore a little tux), as well as got him volunteering with them almost every weekend.
After Babette took her rightful place on the board, Kent Buckley was quickly forgotten. We moved forward with the Adventure Garden, at last, and