Page 86 of Just One More Thing

I turn my head toward him then.

“She made it sound simple,” he adds. “It isn’t simple. But she wasn’t wrong.”

I rub the back of my neck. “I told her I don’t want this to be another summer.”

“How’d she respond?”

“She squeezed my hand.”

He nods like that’s sufficient. Maybe it is.

Hank stands and shakes, ears flapping, then sits directly on my foot. He looks up at me, bottom teeth showing, one eye slightly more open than the other.

He’s ready for bed.

I stand slowly, and Hank rises with me. I clip his leash and hold it loose. He leans against my leg. “Willard,” I say.

He looks up.

“Thank you. For…” I gesture vaguely. At the bench. At the years. At all of it.

He waves it off. “Your mother used to bring me sweet tea.”

“I know.”

“Best sweet tea in Blue Crab Bay. Don’t tell Vera Duncan I said that.”

I huff a laugh. “I won’t.”

He tips his hat and settles back, tilts his face toward the sky like a man with nowhere he needs to be.

I take the long way back. Past the lighthouse. The fountain that will probably now forever be known as Fornication Fountain. Past Hart’s Landing. The curve in the shell loop where Mo and I have walked three times this week, each time less careful than the last.

The light above Holey Moley is on. Her room. I picture her up there with her water bottle. Overthinking and a smile she’s not letting anyone see yet. Wearing my hoodie or my old jersey she thinks I don’t know she kept.

She’s been keeping me close in the only way she knew how.

Hank makes a low grumble and bumps his head against my leg. “I know,” I tell him. “I know.”

I turn toward the boathouse. The water is calm. The channel marker is blinking.

One.

Pause.

One.

The mermaid’s heartbeat.

I think about telling Mo everything. The accident. The guilt that still lives quietly in the background. The shoulder that became a door I chose to walk through. The way coming home felt like relief and loss at the same time.

Hank trots ahead of me up the dock, bandana slightly crooked from the night’s chaos. He stops at the door and looks back.

Tomorrow, the tide will be right.

And maybe it’s time to tell her.

CHAPTER 24