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Buoyed up by possibilities, Rhys launches into a single verse of “One Day More” fromLes Misérables. His voice is rich and warm, and he imagines it traveling through the still air, across the water, across the village he couldn’t wait to leave. He imagines singing this same song night after night in the Sondheim theater amid rapturous applause. A standing ovation. He closes his eyes, letting the final note die before giving the tiniest nod of acknowledgment.
The doorbell goes as Rhys is making his way downstairs.
“Post for you.” Ceri hands him a fat padded envelope with his agency name on the return label. She doesn’t quite look at him, her eyes sliding away back to her van. She always was weird, even as a kid. “More autographs, is it?”
“The price of fame,” Rhys says, adding a self-deprecating laugh.
As Rhys joins the others on the Charltons’ deck, there’s a smattering of applause.
“What a voice!” Blythe says.
“Anhygoel, Rhys!” Clemmie stands, a solitary ovation that plays painfully into Rhys’s insecurities.
Dee raises her glass toward Rhys with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Not bad, Mr. Lloyd.”
Bobby’s Jet Ski is nowhere to be seen, but coming across the lake is Steffan’s motorboat, a small rowboat bobbing on its towline. Steffan raises an arm in a wave.
The twins have assumed their usual positions—arms and legs trailing artfully in the water—and are chatting idly with Caleb and a girl from the village. Rhys has seen her tagging after Caleb for the last couple of weeks. With any luck, Caleb will go after her now instead of panting after the twins. Unlike Tabby and Felicia, who change bikinis as though they’re on the catwalk, the local girl’s in the same shorts and T-shirt she always wears. No jewelry, no makeup. You’d mistake her for a boy were it not for the mass of red hair, the color of autumn leaves.
“Peas in a pod,” Dee says, coming up behind Rhys and making him jump. “Don’t you think?”
Rhys looks at Felicia and Tabby, technically identical yet so different in Rhys’s eyes. “If you say so,” he says churlishly.
Clemmie chimes in. “And both beautiful.”
“You’re a lucky man,” Dee says, and Rhys wonders how it is that only he can hear the hard edge to her voice. He walks back to his own deck on the pretext of helping Steffan, who has killed the engine of his boat, letting the vessel’s momentum push him toward the dock.
As Rhys crosses the Staffords’ deck, he hears Ashleigh’s loud voice drifting from the kitchen. “Honestly, babe, it’s in the arse-end of nowhere. I can’t do it no more. It ain’t worth it.”
No loss there. Ashleigh Stafford is easy on the eye, but her voice goes right through Rhys, and she’s far too quick to moan about The Shore. Last week, she bitched on Twitter about the lack of a hot tub, adding the hashtag #ShitShore. Bobby made her take it down, but the screenshots were everywhere.
Rhys climbs down the ladder to the pontoon between his own lodge and the Staffords’, where Steffan stands with his feet planted in the center of the boat, as easily as if he were on dry land. He throws the mooring rope to Rhys, who catches it and pulls the boat close to the dock, squinting into the sun.
Steffan’s face and arms are a rich walnut brown. “I just finished fixing up this rowboat. I wondered if your girls might like it.”
The boat’s nothing fancy, but it’ll do for the kids to mess about in. Tabby’s been nagging Rhys to hire a boat since The Shore opened, but one look at Steff’s price list was enough to put the kibosh on that.
“Oh, please, Daddy!” Felicia has paddled her flamingo over to the dock. Behind her, the local girl and Caleb are diving for stones.
“A boat would be marvelous,” Yasmin says. “I’ve seen some cushions that will look simply wonderful in it.”
It seems the decision is made. Rhys turns to Steff. “How much do you want for it?”
“Nothing. It’s yours.”
Rhys isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Fair play, Steff. That’s very generous of you.”
Steffan hesitates, then he pulls a leaflet from his pocket and smooths it flat. “The proper ones’ll be glossy, of course, with better photos.” The leaflet is an A4 sheet of paper, folded in three. The front reads:Boat hire and water sports, exclusively for residents of The Shore.
Rhys studies it.
“By the spring, you’ll have another twenty lodges, right? I can give your owners ten percent off rental fees, and I’ve been talking to—is it Blythe?—about stand-up yoga. We can definitely work out a good price for that. Then, look here…” Steffan takes the leaflet out of Rhys’s hands and flips it over. “Residents of The Shore can choose a free session when they collect the keys to their lodge. Windsurfing, paddleboarding, sailing…whatever they want. See?”
“I see. Great. Thanks for the boat.”
“That’s okay.”
“Great job.”
