Sunny hooked a finger through the life vest’s back strap and reeled her in.
“Boat,” Chloe announced, betrayed.
“Boat soon.”
The crossing was its own kind of production.Sully had rented a pontoon boat for the occasion and he, Cash, and Boone had it idling at the dock.The WoWS arrived at the dock in twos and threes, carrying coolers and folding chairs and, in Grace’s case, a pie carrier held with both hands like she was transporting a sleeping infant across a minefield.
“Nobody touches it,” Grace said to the dock in general.“Nobody breathes on it.I worked on this lattice for two days.”
“It’s a pie,” Reno said.
“It’s pie art.My entry in the pie-baking contest.”
Hank and Dillon handed the women onto the boat one at a time, a hand under each elbow, unhurried, and steady.Sunny watched him do it and felt the small private click of recognition.He was exactly as he had been Thursday afternoon when he’d stepped out of his exam room and put himself between her and Marlene Bray: steady, quiet, and certain in a way that asked nothing back.
She’d spent three weeks waiting for the catch in him to surface.The fatal flaw.The flip side of the coin.But she was starting, against her better judgment, to suspect there wasn’t one.
When it was her turn, his hand closed warm around her elbow, and she stepped down into the boat.He didn’t let go until she’d found her balance on the very slightly moving deck.
“Thank you,” she said to both men.
“Mm,” said Dillon, apropos of nothing.Sunny bit back a smile as Tessa elbowed him.
They set out across the lake with the whole loud cargo of kids hanging over the rail to watch the wake unspool behind.The mountains laid out blue and clean against a sky that hadn’t yet decided to be hot.Sunny found a seat on a bench by the rail and Chloe sat in the circle of her arm and pointed at everything.
Halfway across a great blue heron lifted off from the shallows and flew low over the water ahead of the boat.The whole stampede of kids went silent at once, watching its majestic grace.These were the sorts of memories she wanted her kids to make.Lasting and real.Moments of joy and wonder that should define childhood.
She’d begun to despair of ever being able to give her children this sort of life, but somehow, her steps had led to Cobbler Cove.To these people smiling and talking and laughing around her now.And to a man who was the exact opposite of Winston and quietly looked out for her and the kids in a way Winston had only ever pretended to do.
Apple Pie Creek had given its main street and town square over entirely to the festival.Booths ran the length of downtown under strings of pennant flags gone limp in the heat.The smells of kettle corn, fry oil, and a meat smoker hung over the whole thing like weather.A banner over the bank read FOUNDER’S DAY in letters that had clearly been repainted by a different volunteer every year since about 1952.
The herd dissolved into it within ninety seconds.Jack collected the under-twelves with a herding dog’s economy and a promise to keep them all alive.Madison, who’d announced at breakfast that she was too old for a children’s festival, held out until Makayla spotted the funnel cake stand, at which point fourteen discovered it was not, in fact, above funnel cake.
Sunny let them go.The old vigilance, the constant threat of a journalist sticking a microphone under one of her children’s noses, the wariness of watching for the next snide remark or subtle dig, pulled at her like a hand on her sleeve.But not once since she’d been in this valley had someone come at her over her husband’s past scandal.Either they didn’t know, or they didn’t care.Either way, this valley had shown itself to be populated by people who looked out for her and caught her children before she knew they’d fallen.
The booths lining the street were varied and charming, each in its own way.A man sold honey out of the back of a truck.A quilting club had a card table of pot holders.A 4-H club was running a petting booth with a pen of nervous rabbits being lovingly mauled by a queue of toddlers.
The WoWS set up a folding-chair encampment in the shade of the hardware store right beside the stage.They held court from the center of it with paper plates of somebody else’s cooking and opinions about all of it.
“I brought an extra chair for you.Sit,” Rose ordered as Sunny wandered up.Somebody pressed a lemonade into her hand.Somebody else relieved her of Chloe, who went without complaint into Natalie’s lap and began the grave business of eating a cookie larger than her face.For a few minutes Sunny just sat in the noise of women who had buried their husbands, kept going, and made room for one more in their circle of support and love.
She let herself be one of them, which was its own small unfamiliar thing she’d was having to get used to.
She leapt to her feet, though, at the sound she could identify across any distance: a twin in trouble.
It was Jenson, as it turned out, who’d bet Harris he could throw a ring from the ring toss booth onto the horns of a goat in the Goat Rancher’s Association booth next door.Jack had gotten distracted chasing down Owen and Olive, Charlotte’s nearly six-year-old twins, and wasn’t there to stop hers from cooking up trouble.
The goat was fine.The ring toss booth operator and goat owner were philosophical.
By the time Sunny arrived, Hank was already crouched at the boys’ level, and he had the entire situation in hand.The rings were retrieved, an apology delivered and, more impressively, her boysmeanttheir apology.
He didn’t lecture.He asked the twins several short questions Sunny couldn’t hear.The twins answered, looking chastened, then he stood and ruffled their hair, and the crisis was over.
He glanced up, saw her, and strolled over to join her.“They’re good boys,” he said casually.“Just high voltage.”
“That’s a generous diagnosis.”
“I’m a generous doctor.Go relax a while.Madison’s with Presley and Makayla, and the three of them promised me they’d stay together.I’ve got eyes on the twins.You’ve been wrangling kids since dawn.”
