He nodded. “I started to read it, but it began to rain and I didn’t want it to get wet. It made me feel better, though. Like she was sitting right here, talking to me.”
I reached up and straightened his glasses. “She’ll always be a part of you, you know. And I know I’ll never replace her, but I promise to do the best I can.”
“I know.” He tugged on my arm, turning around to face the water, and it wasn’t so frightening anymore. Courage is doing the one thing you think you cannot do. “You were right about something,” he said.
“About what?” I stood, but held his hand, afraid to let go.
He pointed across the water toward Beaufort, and the glowing lights that softened the darkness on the dock where we stood. “About how it’s never really dark. How there’s always light somewhere if you look hard enough.”
I started to cry again, from relief, and grief, and all the things I had learned in one stormy night. I hugged him to me, still not believing that I’d found him. “I love you, Owen.”
“I love you, too, Merritt,” he said, his voice muffled against my shoulder, but I didn’t let go, knowing that in a few years he probably wouldn’t let me hug him anymore—at least not in public.
Something dropped onto the dock, and when I stepped forward to retrieve it, my toe kicked whatever it was and then we heard the unmistakable sound of something hitting water.
“Was that the journal?” I asked in panic, then realized I still held it.
“No. Just my glasses.”
I looked at him, hoping my parenting skills wouldn’t be judged by my actions of a single day. “Great. Do you have an extra pair?”
“No. I had one, but I lost them.”
Keeping my arm around his shoulders, I led him off the dock to my car. “I guess we’ll go see about a new pair of glasses first thing tomorrow.”
“Or I could get contacts,” he said, looking up at me hopefully.
“We’ll see,” I said, sounding so much like my own mother that I almost laughed.
“Merritt?”
“Um?”
“I think we’re going to be okay.”
“I think so, too.” I kissed the top of his head and opened his car door. “Your bike won’t fit in my car—I’ll ask Dr. Heyward to bring it back.”
He nodded, then tilted his head toward the clearing sky, spotting a single star. “Did you know that when you look at stars you’re looking back in time? That’s because the light from the star takes millions of years to reach the Earth, so you’re really seeing how it looked millions of years ago.”
“Smart kid,” I said, rustling his hair.
He grinned at me, and it was his mother’s smile. Owen slid into the car and I closed the door, looking up just as he had. Loralee had shown us both the importance of looking up, of seeing the beauty and the good in unexpected places. And in ourselves.
The rain had finally stopped, the clouds shifting positions in the sky, making room for more stars that managed to push through the darkness and illuminate the places we were once afraid to see.
chapter 35
MERRITT
OCTOBER 2014
I stood on Gibbes’s back porch under the newly hung wind chime that Owen and I had made, staring out over the marsh. I wore only Gibbes’s shirt—having not quite adopted Loralee’s belief in wearing an elegant negligee to bed—but I did feel incredibly sexy in it. The heat from the coffee mug I held warmed my hands against the early predawn chill as I took a sip, watching as morning rose over Beaufort.
Dawn wasn’t a bright, sudden event there, but more like a slow exhalation. It was comforting and familiar, the soft gold light now a part of me. It had become home, the gray Maine mornings of my childhood a fading memory. I took a deep breath and let them go, finally setting free the girl who’d once emerged from an icy river and never stopped blaming herself.
The door behind me opened and I smiled. Owen was camping with Maris’s family for the weekend, returning in time for the fund-raiser, leaving Gibbes and me alone. His warm hands rested on either side of my waist as he pressed his bare chest against me and his lips brushed the back of my neck.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
“Not anymore.” He kissed me again, and I felt his laugh rumbling against my skin.