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KYLE
Something was off.Though Tina wore a smile and pumped the kids up for a day on the lake, the lines around her eyes and the stoop of her shoulders hinted that it was an act.
Maybe the tension she carried was because the kids had been difficult. Teddy had been whining about not wanting to go all morning, and Callie had huffed and told her mother that the boat was lame. I’d chalked it up to kids being kids. They owned a boat, so surely they enjoyed taking it out.
I’d hoped that once we were out on the lake, their moods would improve, but it was clear pretty quickly that it wasn’t likely.
Once we’d puttered out past the no-wake zone, Callieinsisted I speed up, but twenty minutes in, Tina looked absolutely miserable. Her eyes were pinched closed and she had an arm securely wrapped around her midsection.
Teddy whined at first that the sun was in his eyes, but now he was fussing about the wind in his face and the water that splashed up over the sides.
“Can you slow down?” Tina shouted over the wind and the sound of the motor.
I nodded and eased off the throttle. “You okay?”
She shook her head. “I get motion sick. I’m fine if we go slow. It’s much worse with high speeds.” She gave me a weak smile. “I’m a terrible passenger on the highway too.”
The speed of the boat made her sick? Why the hell did she still have this boat? I put my hands out toward Teddy, who was sitting on Tina’s lap. “Want to sit with me, bud? I’ll let you drive.”
His cries turned to sniffles then, and he nodded. For the first time since we’d left the dock, he was at least somewhat content. He even cracked a smile or two as I let him steer the boat at a super slow speed while sitting in my lap. Tina still looked a little green, though her color was improving. However, Callie was now miserable.
“Can we go back?” she asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
Tina sighed. “Not yet.”
“But I’m bored.” She huffed. “It’s only fun when we go fast. Or go see the big cliffs. But we can’t do that because you get sick and Teddy cries.”
The cliffs held nothing but terrible memories for me, but maybe it was time to change that. With Callie’s obsession with them, it might be better if I was the one who took them versus someone else. However, the cliffs were all the way over by my parents’ house on the other side of the lake. We’d never get there at the speed we were going.
I looked from one miserable person to the next.
“Why do you even have this boat?”
“Huh?” Tina tilted her head, brows furrowed.
“Teddy hates the wind in his face. The water and sun aren’t his things either. You literally get sick to the stomach…”
I guess it made sense that when she drove and could control the speed, the motion sickness was minimal. But again, the kids were miserable. Tina was great at seeing the positive in everything, but seriously? The cost and upkeep of a boat were not worth it unless they really loved boating.
She nodded to her daughter. “Callie loves it.”
I stole a glance at Callie. Her mouth was pressed into a firm pout. I wanted to call bullshit but bit my tongue instead.
“I loved it with Dad,” Callie mumbled. “He would go fast.”
Zeroing in on Tina again, I raised an eyebrow. Callie and Levi liked to go fast, yet she couldn’t handle the speed.
She shrugged. “I would take Dramamine and deal with it. Teddy was a baby the last time we took the boat out with Levi and didn’t really fuss.”
That still didn’t explain why she was hanging on to the thing. Why torture herself and her kids with it rather than sell it and move on?
I turned the boat around and headed back toward The Dock at a painfully slow pace.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking us back.”
“What?” Tina scanned the boat, then the expanse of water around us with wide eyes. “Why?”
