“No, you’re not leaving. And no, you’re not quitting. And no—you are not giving up on Duncan. Or on yourself. Or on love.”

As she hit the word “love,” her voice broke. But in her dignified way she stood up straighter and took a step closer. “Life doesn’t ever give you what you want just the way you want it. Life doesn’t ever make things easy. How dare you demand that happiness should be yours without any sacrifice—without any courage? What an incredibly spoiled idea—that anything should come easy? Love makes you better because it’s hard. Taking risks makes you better because it’s terrifying. That’s how it works. You’ll never get anything that matters without earning it. And even what you get”—she lifted her chin in defiance—“you won’t get to keep. Joy is fleeting. Nothing lasts. That’s exactly what courage is. Knowing all that going in—and going in anyway.”

There were tears on her face now, but she held my gaze. I thought about everything she’d lost. I thought about what kind of courage it must have taken just now for her to search a darkened city for her missing grandson—to know that anything could have happened, to face down the terror of all of it, but to show up, anyway. To go looking and to keep looking—all through the night and into the dawn.

How exhausted she must be.

And yet, here she was. Standing on the seawall in her housecoat, her eyes red with exhaustion—and stubbornly, insistently, caring about me and all my stupid choices.

This was what it meant to be alive. This was what it meant to let the beauty of it all break your heart. I got it in a new way, looking at her right then. And I got something else, too. This is what it meant to be part of a family.

I wasn’t going to quit. For better or for worse, I belonged here—on this island in this sea-battered old city. These were the people I’d chosen to love—who had chosen to love me, too. I wouldn’t turn my back on them. And they weren’t about to let me turn my back on myself.

“You’re right,” I said then, nodding. I stepped closer and squeezed Babette’s hand. Then I turned to Alice. “You’re right, too.”

“I’m always right.”

Then I looked back the way we’d come, toward the pier at Murdochs. Would Duncan still be there?

Then I looked at Babette and Alice, and both already knew what I was thinking. Then Babette reached out and gave my shoulder a little push just as Alice shouted, “Go!” And that was everything I needed.

* * *

I took off running.

I made it back to where we’d started in seconds, it seemed.

There were still a few cop cars parked on the boulevard. Maybe not everybody had gone.

I reached the edge and looked down the steps toward the beach, breathing hard, hopeful to find him.

But the beach was empty—like none of us had ever even been there at all.

I turned around, still breathing. Where was he? Back at the station? Back at school? I had no idea. I turned in a kind of panoramic sweep, hoping to spot him somewhere.

But that’s when the passenger door of one of the squad cars opened, and Duncan climbed out.

I ran over to him and stopped just short of throwing myself into his arms.

“I’m sorry!” I said.

Duncan just stared, like he was trying to figure me out.

“You stayed,” I said, “and that really matters. You stayed, and I’m so grateful to you.”

He shook his head. “Of course I stayed.”

Then, not sure if this was a statement or a question, I said, “The seizure didn’t … change how you felt about me.”

He shook his head even more. “Of course it didn’t.”

This time, the words—the fact of them, and what they meant—hit me differently. This time, I didn’t deflect them. This time, I let them in.

They swirled in my chest in a way that almost made me dizzy.

I closed my eyes.

Duncan took a step closer. “Actually, if I’m honest, it did change how I feel about you.”

I opened my eyes to find his.

And then he said it almost sadly. “I think it made me love you more.”

“You love me,” I said.

He nodded. “Hope that’s okay.”

And so I reached up around his neck, pulled him to me, and kissed him.

The cops, still waiting to take Duncan back wherever they were going, all honked their horns.

When Duncan pulled back, he looked intensely into my eyes. “So it’s okay, then?”

And then, because joy is fleeing, and nothing lasts, and even what you get, you don’t get to keep, I didn’t waste any more time. “I love you, Duncan,” I said. “I’ve loved you for a long, long time.” I said it to be brave. I said it to be better.

But more than anything, I said it because it was true.

And then Duncan leaned down again, and I stretched up, and even though the cops were waiting, we let ourselves have a simple, easy, perfect kiss.

But we sure had earned it.

Halfway through, Duncan broke away, held a finger out to me like, one second, and then trotted over to tap on the passenger window of the closest cop car. The window rolled down, and Duncan poked his head in.

When he stepped back, the cop cars all pulled away.

“What did you say?” I called.

He shrugged. “I just asked if we could finish up the paperwork later.”

And so he walked me back to my place, and we slept together.

Actually slept.

Because man, oh, man, were we tired. And man, oh, man, what a hell of a day-slash-night. But it was okay. Better than okay, even.

It was, in fact, the most better-than-okay either one of us had been in a very long time.

epilogue

Tina really went through with it. She did divorce Kent Buckley. We’d all worried that the momentum of her old life might make her chicken out, but she did it. And while in theory, a divorce is a sad thing—the real sad thing was the marriage that came before it. The divorce itself turned out to be a happy solution.

What I mean is, things got a lot better for Tina Buckley once she was free of Kent and all his demands. Tina and Clay wound up moving in with Babette for a while, which suited Babette just fine, while Tina went back to school to finish her degree.

Turned out one of Tina Buckley’s wifely duties had been to cook gourmet meals for Kent most nights, so Babette ate very well after Tina came home and started teaching her some skills in the kitchen.

And so did I. Because Tina—of all people—invited me to join them.

It turns out to be a funny thing about moms: once you help their children rescue whales in the middle of the night, they stop hating you so much. Or, maybe, once they get rid of the husbands they should have been hating all along, they can give you a break.

Either way, we made up.

She turned out to be a much nicer person than I’d given her credit for.

Tina did stop Kent from selling off our school. She must have had some really great dirt on him. He didn’t even put up a fight. His behavior at the beach—specifically, assaulting the school principal—also prompted his removal from the board.

Guess who took his place?

The beautiful Babette.

Kent Buckley moved to New Jersey, after that, and he turned out to be the kind of divorced dad who did not make a large effort—or, frankly, any effort—to see his kid.

And while we can all agree that it’s good for boys—in theory—to have a father around, we also agree that it really depends quite a bit on the father.

Which was fine. Clay wound up with a better family, anyway. Between Tina, Babette, and me, he had more than enough loving adults looking after him. I even gave him his own CLAY RECOMMENDS shelf in the library. Not to mention the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which gave him a medal and honored him at their annual fundraising dinner (he wore a little tux), as well as got him volunteering with them almost every weekend.

After Babette took her rightful place on the board, Kent Buckley was quickly forgotten. We moved forward with the Adventure Garden, at last, and built the most astonishing pirate-ship tree house. Babette continued to boss Duncan around—in part because now she really could get him fired—but mostly just because it was fun.

He liked it more than he admitted, I think.

We did wind up making security changes at the school. The goal became to do enough without doing too much. Duncan brought us into the sad, modern age where schools have to think about these things, but he wound up trusting the instincts of the collective wisdom of the faculty when it came to figuring out where to draw the line. He changed the school a little bit, but he also worked to change the world a little bit, too, volunteering for a gun-sense group and trying to make the world safer.

And in the meantime, despite all the worries and tragedies and injustices in the world, we remembered to have fun when we could.

We remembered to have dance parties, and sand-castle building contests, and cookie-decorating competitions. We remembered to do karaoke, and have school-wide movie nights in the courtyard, and take long walks on the beach. We let the kids write stories about the school ghost at Halloween, we played hooky from school on pretty spring days, and we brought back Hat Day.