Page 56 of Soft Serve

I look at the water.

I look at our hands.

Paloma:

Yeah. That's everything.

Lucia:

Well damn.

Mari:

Guess that billionaire learned how to stay.

I smile and put the phone away.

Charles glances at me. "Lucia and Mari."

"And Millie," I say. "And apparently Mrs. Calder has learned to text."

He makes a sound that is a full laugh, warm and unguarded, and it moves through the evening air and over the water, and I feel it in my chest the way I feel everything about him now, not as something new and startling but as something known.

Something mine.

He turns to face me, and I turn to face him, and he reaches out and tucks a curl behind my ear, the gesture so familiar now that it arrives like punctuation, like something we've always done, and I lean into it slightly the way I always do.

"Good day," he says.

"Good day," I agree.

He leans down and kisses me, soft and slow, the dock quiet around us and the water still below and the town glowing warm in the distance, and I kiss him back with the ease of someone who has stopped waiting for it to be taken away.

When we pull back, the evening is almost full dark, the first stars appearing, Hearts Bend lit up and winding down in the way of a place that knows how to end a day as well as it knows how to begin one.

"We should get back," I say.

"Yes," he says.

Every morning, I choose this, the shop, and the town, and the man beside me on this dock. I understand a little more completely what my grandmother knew when she looked at the camera in that photograph and decided exactly where she was supposed to be.

Here.

Just here.

That's enough.

That's everything.