Evan:Yeah. I’ll deal with you later.
My lips press together to keep from smiling too obviously, and I set my phone down just as Elle suddenly pops up in the doorway.
“What’s funny, Penny?”
“Nothing,” I say too quickly, turning back to the counter. “Just thinking about lunch.”
She narrows her eyes at me like she doesn’t believe that, but shrugs it off, already onto the next thing. And I lean my hands against the edge of the counter, letting out a slow breath.
Yeah. I’m fucked.
***
Their spot on the lake sits just far enough on the other side of town that the bustle of traffic drops away.
I notice it as soon as we step out of the truck. There’s just a low sound of water lapping against the shore, and the occasional call of something overhead.
Elle doesn’t pause long enough to appreciate any of that, though. She’s already halfway down the bank, sneakers skidding over loose gravel and damp grass, Gus bounding after her like he’s been waiting all week for this exact moment.
“Don’t go too far,” Evan calls after her, but there’s no real urgency in it. He knows she won’t.
He grabs the cooler from the back and a folded blanket, shifting both into one hand like he’s done it a hundred times before. Probably has.
I fall into step beside him, glancing out over the water. “So this is where you come to escape?”
“Reset,” he corrects. “Escape sounds dramatic.”
“Ah, right. Because this”—I gesture vaguely at the lake, the trees, the complete lack of chaos—“is very low-key.”
“It is,” he says with a shrug. “This place just… quiets things down. It’s hard to spiral out here.”
His tone makes me look at him for a long moment, but he’s already moving ahead, nodding toward a patch of grass near the edge of the water.
“That’s the spot.”
Elle’s beaten us there, because of course she has. Evan sets everything down with the kind of ease that tells me this is a routine. The blanket gets shaken and laid out, its corners smoothed without thought. The cooler goes in the shade.
It’s so simple. A blanket, a cooler. A patch of grass beside the water. It feels strangely intimate standing here watching them move through it so easily, something carefully kept.
I hover for a second longer, watching the way he moves. The way Elle fits into it without needing direction, and the way Gus circles once before flopping down as though this is as familiar to him as it is to them.
This existed before I got here. It’s theirs. And now they’re sharing it with me.
“Penny!” Elle pops up suddenly, holding something out in her hand. “Look!”
I crouch down beside her. “What’ve you got?”
She stretches her hand out toward me to show the rock perched in her palm.
“That’s a very nice rock.”
“It’s notjusta rock, though,” she insists. “It’s a pebble.”
“Ahh,” I say solemnly. “Big difference.”
She nods. “Penguins give pebbles to their wives.”
I glance up at Evan, who’s watching us with a faint smile tugging at his mouth.
