Heard from Sawyer you've got a woman at your place.First, congratulations.Second, if you screw it up, the whole town is going to have opinions and none of them will be on your side.Fair warning.
I stare at the message.Then another comes in.
Ryan Cole:
Mira says if you let Lydia leave without telling her you love her, she's going to drive to your cabin and "have words."Her words.I'm scared of her when she's like this.You should be too.
And then a third.
Drew Briggs:
Brother.Whatever's happening.Don't be the man who walks away from the best thing that ever showed up at his door.Trust me on this.Some of us almost made that mistake.
I put the phone down.Sit on the kennel floor with my back against the wall and my forearms on my knees and my head bowed.
Forty-seven people I pulled from the ocean.
Two I couldn't reach.
One I just let walk away.
The evening goes dark.I feed the dogs.I check the perimeter.I do every single thing on my routine list with the mechanical precision of a man running a protocol because the alternative is feeling, and feeling right now means acknowledging that Lydia Brooke told me she loved me in a dog kennel and I said I need time.
I need time.
Like time is going to change the math.Like time is going to make me less afraid of losing someone.Like distance ever healed a single thing in my life.
Distance is what I do.Distance is what I've always done.When my father died, I put distance between myself and the coast.When Thomas and Caleb drowned, I put distance between myself and the ocean.When the nightmares started, I put distance between myself and every human being who tried to get close.
And now I'm putting distance between myself and the first person who's ever made the distance feel like what it is.
Not safety.
Punishment.
I sit on my porch at midnight with a cold cup of coffee and the mountains black against the stars and Lydia's pillow still on my bed and her book on my nightstand and her scent in every room of my cabin.
Her flannel is draped over the back of the kitchen chair where she left it this morning.
I pick it up.Press it to my face.Breathe her in.
And I know.With the same certainty I used to know the water, the same way I used to read the current and the swell and know exactly where a drowning person would surface.
I know where she is.
I know I need to go to her.
I know that going to her means going into the water.Not literally.But every way that matters.It means letting go of the shore.It means trusting that if I reach for her, she'll be there.
It means being the partner she asked for instead of the rescue swimmer she didn't need.
My phone sits on the porch railing.I pick it up.
Me:
What time is your flight?
Three dots.Then:
