Page 5 of Where We Stay

Not traffic.

Not sirens.

Waves.

I close my eyes and listen.

Maybe being noticed doesn’t always mean being watched.

Maybe there’s a difference between being exposed and being known.

I’m not sure yet.

But lying here, with the doors locked and the ocean somewhere in the distance, I feel something I haven’t allowed myself to feel in a very long time.

Hope.

I haven’t even been in Hartwell for a full day, and already, it feels like exactly where I need to be.

Blair Morgan – 1

Blair Collins – 0.

Two

Dean

I’ve always preferred problems I could fix with my hands. Engines. Leaky faucets. The kitchen cabinet Aspen somehow managed to rip clean off its hinge last month. People and their emotions? Hard no. The last time I opened up to someone, I came home to an apology scribbled on a piece of paper and half the house emptied. Courtney left me with our three-year-old daughter and no idea how to explain why her mom wasn’t coming home.

Looking after Aspen was the easy part. Watching her wait for Courtney to return was not.

“DAD! Where is my pink ribbon?” Aspen yells from the bathroom. I look around the kitchen, knowing the last time she had it she was swinging and waving it around pretending to be an ice dancer. And there it is, hanging on top of the fridge. How on earth did she manage that?

“Here, baby girl,” I say, walking into the bathroom. I work through the tangles in Aspen’s brown hair, doing my best to keep the braid even before tying the pink ribbon around the bottom.

“Thanks, Daddy. I am going to take Beachy to school today. It’s Mrs. Ranford’s last day and she will want to see him.”

I can tell Aspen is anxious about her teacher leaving. Mrs. Ranford has been teaching at Hartwell Elementary for nearly as long as I have been alive. She is retiring early to spend time with her husband, who unfortunately has grown very ill. Aspen doesn’t do well with change. The last time there was a big change in her life, her mom left. Now she has barely anything to do with her besides the odd phone call or FaceTime here and there.

“Go put Beachy in your bag, Pen. It’s time to go,” I say. I collect the rest of our things, including Aspen’s water bottle which she of course forgot, and head toward the car.

I live along Hartwell’s southern river, far enough from Main Street that people can’t wander past without meaning to.

Privacy isn’t easy to come by when you’re an Ashford. My family’s name is stamped across half the town—the marina, the lighthouse, Salt & Oak and more properties than I can keep track of. People usually know who I am before I’ve had the chance to introduce myself.

When I bought this place, I wanted something that didn’t belong to the Ashford family.

Something that was mine.

Ours, now.

By my family’s standards, the house is modest. White clapboard, two stories and a wraparound porch overlooking the water. The backyard runs down to a private dock where Aspen likes to feed the birds, despite me repeatedly telling her they’ll never leave if she keeps doing it.

She doesn’t care.

Most evenings, after Pen’s asleep, I sit out on the porch with a cold beer and listen to the water. Engines make sense to me, but they aren’t exactly quiet. Neither are six-year-olds.

The water is.