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“Ah, yes,” I said and cast my gaze to the black ocean bearded in white froth as it crashed and retreated. “Don’t remember.”
“You sure?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping you kicked him in the nuts.”
“Do tell.”
Miller thought about answering for a moment, then shook his head tiredly. “Not tonight.”
“Fair enough,” I said, glad that the subject was dropped.
Ronan went inside the Shack (with a Capital S) and emerged with beer bottles in his hands. I gratefully took one, but Miller passed.
“Still feeling low,” he said and took a bottle of orange juice from his backpack.
Twenty yards away, the ocean crashed and retreated, and the wind was cool and bracing. Calming.
An ocean, I decided, wasn’t like a lake. An ocean was alive and moving—energy flowing through it, rising up and crashing, washing against jagged, broken rock and leaving it smooth.
A lake was sinister. Still. Its cold, black water suffused your every pore, and if it sucked you down, it wouldn’t leave a trace.
I shivered and tried to do what Dr. Lange had always suggested—to ground myself in the present moment where the past couldn’t touch me.
“It’s nice here,” I said. “Really fucking nice. Like I can just…breathe.”
Miller nodded. “Same.”
“Same,” said Ronan from his rock chair on the other side of Miller.
On the drive over, I’d learned that Ronan had recently moved to Santa Cruz from Wisconsin, which meant he and Miller had only known each other for a handful of days and yet were already perfectly at ease. I glanced around at the fire, the Shack, the ocean, and the two friends sitting in companionable silence.
I have all the money in the world, but the things I want most cannot be bought.
“Do you guys hang out here a lot?”
“All the time,” Miller said. “You’re welcome to come here too. Anytime. Mi casa es su casa. Except it’s not a house. How do you say, our shitty shack is your shitty shack in Spanish?”
“Nuestra choza de mierda es tu choza de mierda,” I said quickly to cover the swell of happiness that threatened to turn me into a puddle of goop the way Beatriz tried to do with her lunch.
Miller’s brows rose. “You speak Spanish?”
“And French. Italian. A little Portuguese and some Greek.”
“You some kind of genius?”
Ronan asked.
“So they say. My IQ is 153.”
Miller whistled his disbelief.
“Sounds as if it could be helpful, right?”
“Helpful?” He scoffed. “That’s like having the answer key to life.”
“If only,” I said, relishing how easily I fell into conversation with these guys. “As far as I can tell, it just means the nonstop thoughts in my head are more cunning and can torment me in multiple languages.”
