Page 79 of Neap & Spring

“Oh yeah. The one that is better than anything you had in Paris?” she asks skeptically.

“Way better than anything in Paris.”

“That’s always been such a bold claim.”

“Try it sometime. You’ll see.”

She peers through the window. The shop is closed. They’re only open in the mornings, but you can still see the empty bread racks on the old wooden counter.

“You used to talk about this place all the time in school.”

I don’t remember talking about it that much. But I probably did. Westerly Point had a way of coming up in almost every conversation whether I meant it to or not. I’d talked about it so much our classmates had started rolling their eyes.

“Did I?”

“Constantly. You’d describe the bread like it was a religious experience.”

“It kind of is.”

She laughs, shaking her head, and the sound wraps around me. I’ve missed that laugh. I’ve missed it so much. I want to keep making her laugh. I want to keep seeing that smile spread across her face and light up her eyes. I want to find every stupid joke and story I can think of if it means I get to hear that sound again.

I point out other landmarks as we go. The bookstore where I used to hide as a kid when I needed to escape my brothers. The hardware store my dad and Wesley still get all their boat supplies from. The bar where my brothers and I got our first fake IDs confiscated. Hayes tried to argue with the bouncer using actual legal jargon, which somehow made it worse for us.

“You had a fake ID?” Vivienne asks, obviously delighted in me breaking the law.

“I was seventeen and stupid. Wes was nineteen and even more stupid. Beckett and Hayes were thirteen and somehow the worst of all of us because Hayes should have been smart enough to say no.”

“What happened?”

“The bartender was my dad’s friend. He took one look at the IDs, called Dad, and made us sit there until he showed up.” I can still remember the look on Dad’s face. Disappointed but trying not to laugh. “We were grounded for a month.”

“All of you?”

“Wesley was technically an adult so Dad couldn’t ground him. But he felt bad that we got in trouble, so he grounded himself in solidarity.”

“That’s actually really sweet.”

“That’s Wesley. Stupidly loyal.”

Vivienne asks questions about everything — what it was like growing up here, what my brothers were like as kids, whether I always wanted to be a chef.

And I tell her. I tell her about cooking with my dad on the boat, heating canned soup on a camping stove and making sandwiches with whatever we caught. I tell her about watching cooking shows late at night after everyone else was asleep, dreaming about kitchens that were nothing like our cramped house with its tiny stove and mismatched pots.

She asks, and I answer, and it’s easy. It’s so easy I forget for a while that we spent five years not talking at all. And that we’ve spent the last few weeks dancing around each other like strangers. Right now, walking down Main Street with the afternoon sun warm on our faces, we’ve found our way back to something that feels like us.

Almost like before.

“I always thought you just came out of the womb knowing how to cook,” she teases.

“I burned everything till I went to Paris, basically. Ask my dad. He still won’t let me forget the time I almost set the kitchen on fire trying to make pancakes.”

“How do you set a kitchen on fire making pancakes!?”

“I was twelve and confident. It’s a bad combination.”

She’s smiling, and it reaches her eyes for the first time in days. “I would have loved to see that.”

“You would have laughed at me.”