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“I have been, or I will be, I guess. When they leave.”

“Anita doesn’t look like she’s getting much work done in there. Are you sure you’re making out okay?”

“Oh, goodness, Dalt. Did you walk in on the two of them kissing?”

“No.” I dragged out the word. “They were researching the Grand Canyon. Have you …”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh my God! Turner. You really should have been texting me about this. I’m dying.” And just like that, my tension was washed away with the tide, or so I thought, and I was laughing.

But Turner looked so serious as he slid back and got up, tapping the lid onto the paint and carrying the can and the tray to the center of the room. Maybe the ebb and flow had pushed my tension right onto him.

I leaned back and watched him. Turner was as handsome as ever even though he looked stressed and worried. Still, he was the same quiet person I remembered. The one who’d stumbled into the toy store years earlier, lost and alone. He had Anita, so I knew he wasn’t completely alone. And he had my brother, but Brett and Mallory lived over an hour away and were busy with their own lives.

And Turner was here, by himself in the days before Christmas, painting trim, counting the days until his only real family member hopped in an RV to drive across the country with her long-lost love.

I stretched my legs out.

“You’ve never gone home, have you, Turner?”

He gave me a sharp look. “Home? This is home, Dalton. I thought you knew that.”

“I mean, yeah, I know you love it here. But, like, don’t you have family? You know, besides Anita?”

He shook his head no. “Well, not no. My parents are in Wisconsin, and we talk occasionally. But they’re very religious. Anita is more of a mom to me than …”

“Oh. I get it.”

“No.” He smiled. “You don’t,” he added emphatically, “and that’s one of the things I love … about Breakwater. You probably don’t remember that first time I came to visit.”

I was quick to answer. Maybe too quick.

“I do.”

Chapter Ten

Turner at Twenty-Eight

Ilooked up from where I’d been staring at the mess of supplies in the middle of the room. He was dressed as he had been when he sat at the bar with Austin’s head on his shoulder, in a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater, a zip-up hoodie, and a pair of jeans that hugged his thighs and were torn at the knees. Light-brown hair peeked out of the rips in the jeans, but the hair on top of his head, which had since been pulled back into a messy bun, had even lighter streaks. Dalton may not have spent his summer at the beach, but he had still spent a lot of time out-of-doors on a research vessel in Alaska, and his long hair was still beautifully sun kissed. I assumed his time working on that boat with fisherman and researchers had something to do with the way the denim stretched tight around him and why that sweater looked like it was ready to unravel across his broad chest.

“I remember all of it,” he said, and I knew we weren’t talking about just that first visit. Since then there had been days working together in the store, moonlit holidays, dozens of chatty texts, and one memorable kiss.

He slid away from the area we’d been painting and leaned back on the wall in a dry section, patting the tarp next to him.

“I never outright asked your brother about it, but we weren’t really friends after freshman year.” I sat down next to him, leaving an inch or two of space between us, unlike he had earlier. Even so, I could sense him near me, feel the heat of him. While I talked, I imagined leaning ever so slightly so that our shoulders touched or reaching my hand out to grasp his. I did neither of those things, continuing my tale while we both sat with our legs stretched out, staring at our sneakers or at the opposite end of the store.

“He’d pledged the fraternity, and I hadn’t. I’d vowed when I went to college that I wouldn’t hide, and so I’d told your brother, even before we got to school, that I was gay. It never seemed like he cared that first year, and we hung out quite a bit, but then we drifted apart, and I got it. He was really busy with the fraternity and, like, the whole point of a frat is that you have built-in friends. He invited me to a few parties, and I even went once or twice, but then, at the end of the next year, all of a sudden we were friends again. Studying together. Hanging out. Did he ever tell you that he made me take him to a gay bar?”

“My brother? Brett? Brett Garner? At a gay bar?”

“Yeah.” I laughed. “I actually asked him if it was some kind of dare that his fraternity brothers put him up to. He assured me it wasn’t, though he didn’t deny it when I asked if visiting a gay bar was ever a challenge in one of their stupid games. He just laughed without answering that question and joked that he wanted to prove he could find a hookup even in a gay bar.”

“Oh, so he didn’t know?”

I shook my head. “Yeah, no. I had to clue him in on how many straight women accompany their GBFs to gay bars. Anyway, he insisted he was there to meet women, but he spent the entire night pointing at guys and asking, What about that one?”

“Jesus, I can just picture him! He’s such a goofball sometimes.”