Page 69 of The Beach Shack Legacy

Stella almost loved her too much to speak.

“But,” Bea said, through her fingers, and then took the hand down, and here was the thing nobody expected, because it came from Bea—“you two can’t do the money part. You know that, right?” She looked at Joey’s wiped-smooth patch of sand, the ghost of his equation. “You’ve been doing numbers in the dirt. You need a grown-up. A real one. Not a parent, they’re too close. You need somebody who does this for a job and won’t cry.”

Stella and Joey looked at each other.

“Michael,” they said, at the same time.

Bea nodded, pleased with the whole idea. “He’s exactly annoying enough to be right about everything. Call Michael.”

Joey was already somewhere else, though, already thinking, and Stella watched the systems come back online behind his eyes, but softer now, pointed at something real instead of spiraling.

“He can’t eat dairy,” Joey said. “Michael. He’s got the thing. The allergy. Your mom’s always reading labels for him.” He looked up. “I could make him something. For helping. A dairy-free thing, a good one, not a sad one—I’ve been wanting to crack a decent dairy-free almond cake anyway, and he’d be the—” He caught Stella looking at him. “What?”

“You want to pay the accountant in cake.”

“Free.” Joey shrugged, like it was obvious, like it was the only currency that made sense. “You don’t charge a man for helping you and then—you make him something. That’s how it works.” And it was so completely him, the boy who couldn’t accept a kindness without answering it, already balancing a debt that hadn’t even been delivered, that Stella laughed out loud for the first time since the green kite string and the lock giving and the whole impossible morning.

Down the beach the day was starting, the first walkers, a dog. Behind them the Shack ran without them, and would notice soon that it was short two people, and they’d have to go back and be normal and carry this enormous quiet thing around inside the ordinary day.

But not yet. For another minute they sat, the three of them, in the wet sand, and Joey built his small pile higher, and Bea started helping him, packing the sides, and Stella kept her arm where it was across Joey’s shoulders and looked up the hill at the little building leaning into the big one, and let herself, just for that minute, want it all the way.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Tyler had the gate propped so people could walk straight back without knocking. A year ago there hadn’t been anything back here worth walking straight back to.

Luke came through first, then Meg, then Lindsey. Tyler watched all three of them doing roughly the same double take in roughly the same order—gate, patio, fountain, ocean—and something settled in his chest that he wasn’t going to examine closely, on the grounds that examining things closely wasn’t really his sport.

“Tyler,” Meg said, taking it in. “There’s a fountain.”

“Yes, there is.”

“You built a fountain?”

“Stella built a fountain. I bought a fountain and stood near it while she installed it correctly.” Tyler had a spatula in each hand for no reason that made sense even to him. “I supervised.”

“He supervised,” Luke said, deadpan, dropping into a patio chair and reaching into the ice chest for a beer.

Meg turned in a slow circle, taking in the bougainvillea cut back to something with shape, the poured pad under the grill, the sightline to the water that hadn’t existed a year ago. “This is unrecognizable. I used to sit right there and lose entire afternoons to email.”

“I remember,” Tyler said, and did.

He’d decided, weeks ago, that he understood grills. He had ideas now—real ones, about heat zones and resting times—that he hadn’t had a month prior.

“I think I understand grilling now. At least I want to,” he told Luke, who’d wandered over to critique. “I’ve been practicing.”

“You understand a grill the way I understand knitting. Meaning you watched something once.”

“I’ve read.” Tyler flipped nothing, on principle, to prove a point. “There’s a technique.”

“There’s a technique to everything, Tyler. You’ve discovered cooking.”

Luke reached past him and nudged a burger two inches with his own tongs, unasked. Tyler nudged it back. Neither man looked at the grill itself for a good ninety seconds, both of them too busy being right at each other. More or less the whole friendship in miniature.

The flame caught while Tyler was mid-sentence about the resting time. He hadn’t looked at the grill. He’d looked at Luke, making a point.

Lindsey was up and past him before he’d finished the sentence—lid down, spray bottle in hand, the burgers moved to the cool side—and back in her chair with an ear of corn before he’d landed his conclusion.

“—which is why the resting time matters,” Tyler said, to a grill that had briefly tried to end his evening and been talked down without him catching it.