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“Do you think it’s ridiculous that we couldn’t wait till later to see each other?” Amanda breathed, mostly to the stars.
“I think sometimes, when you know you want to spend your life with someone, it doesn’t matter when that starts.”
“So, we’re starting the rest of our lives today at three o’clock in the morning?” Amanda laughed.
“Something like that.” Sam kissed her cheek.
In the silence that followed, Amanda glanced back up at the beautiful Sheridan House, where her mother, Aunt Lola, and Aunt Christine had been raised by their parents, Grandpa Wes and Grandma Anna, until Anna’s untimely death.
“In marrying you, I feel like we’re becoming a part of the textured story of the Sheridan family,” Amanda said.
“Especially because we’re getting married in that haunted hotel,” Sam said.
“Exactly.” Amanda shivered, imagining what it had been like to be her Great-Grandma Marilyn all those years ago: in love with the stranger who owned the hotel, yet married to a terribly arrogant and selfish man named James. It boggled Amanda’s mind to think of all the women throughout time who’d been married to men who’d treated them like second-class citizens. Sam would never do that.
“Thank you, by the way,” Amanda said suddenly, surprising herself.
“For what?”
“For taking it slow when I needed it to be slow,” Amanda breathed, “and for knowing when to speed it up when it was time.”
Sam’s smile widened. “For a little while, I thought maybe I was wrong about you. I thought maybe you didn’t care about me at all.”
“Ha. You were literally all I thought about for months,” Amanda remembered. “I made every excuse to come see you at the Sunrise Cove. I even learned to make your favorite sandwich just so I could bring it over to you.”
“Reuben,” Sam remembered. “That was the biggest sign of all that you were into me.”
Amanda laughed, embarrassed at how obvious she’d been. “I was willing to make you hundreds of Reuben sandwiches, but I was never willing to tell you how I felt.”
“Some people get caught in sandwich purgatory forever,” Sam joked. “Luckily for us, we found a way out of that. And I still get plenty of Reubens out of you.”
“Lucky for me, you learned my favorite sandwich, too,” Amanda said gently.
“Goat cheese and plenty of green leaves,” Sam said, wrinkling his nose. “My soon-to-be wife is a health nut. I reckon we’ll live forever!”
Amanda laughed and cuddled him close. Before her, the moonlight flitted through the waves, the very top of a tremendous ocean, its depth impossible to know.
It was difficult to get Sam to leave, but eventually, Amanda confessed she needed one or two more hours of beauty sleep.
“Do you really want our guests to run out of the hotel screaming that they’ve seen a ghost?” Amanda said. “It won’t be the ghost of Great-Grandma Marilyn. It’ll be me, very sleepy Amanda.”
When Amanda returned to her bedroom, Audrey half-opened her eyes, watching as Amanda slid under the covers again.
“You two are obsessed with each other,” Audrey said sleepily. “I heard you down by the water, laughing like teenagers.”
“You and Noah are the same way,” Amanda told her, her heart very full as she drifted back to sleep.
Never one to sleep in, Amanda managed to rise by six-thirty to go for a run, shower, and make herself a green smoothie, all before Audrey and Max got up. Max babbled happily in his highchair as Audrey sipped her coffee, her eyes glazed.
“It’s too bad Grandpa can’t be here for your last morning home,” Audrey said, eyeing the boxes in the corner of the living room, which Noah had brought over yesterday. “Tomorrow, when Noah moves in, everything will be different.”
As though he’d heard her, Grandpa Wes suddenly barrelled through the back door of the Sheridan House, calling out, “Honey! I’m home!” as though he were a sitcom character.
Audrey and Amanda popped up, watching as he emerged from the shadows of the mudroom, wearing a devilish grin.
“Grandpa!” Amanda hugged him first. “We didn’t think you’d make it.”
“I told Beatrice to drive me,” Wes explained. “I couldn’t miss your last morning, Mandy.” He dropped back from their hug and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I’m just so dang proud of the young woman you’ve grown into.”
