“Oh my god.” I suck in a breath.
It’s a hammock.
A week ago, I casually mentioned how I used to lie in our hammock and read on the balcony … and now a hammock magically appears.
I have no idea where he got it or how he pulled this off, but it’s truly one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me.
Tears fill my eyes, clouding my vision as I head outside to check it out. A folded piece of paper is taped to the red canvas cloth, and I open it to find a note scribbled in blue pen and small, meticulous handwriting.
L-
A housewarming gift. Now your cottage is complete.
-T
Chapter 21
Thayer
We’ve been sailing the better part of the day, Westley, Granddad, and I, with no end in sight when out of nowhere, Granddad mutes his radio and clears his throat.
“Boys. Come closer. I want to tell you a story,” he says.
Westley and I exchange looks before making our way to the back of the ketch.
“When I was about your age, there was this young woman by the name of Emeline. She worked at the bakery down the road. Her parents owned it. My mother always loved their bread. Anyway, one day, my mother had a cold and decided she’d send me to the bakery to get that week’s bread order.” He adjusts his aviators, peering straight ahead. “Anyway, long story short, that’s the day I met Emeline.” He chuckles. “Legs up to her neck. Dimples. Dark hair. Always wore this red lipstick that made her look like Snow White, always smiling. Pretty thing. For an entire summer, she was the object of my affection. I was obsessed. Nothing mattered but her.”
Westley and I exchange looks once again and he shrugs. We’re both lost as to where he’s going with this story, but seeing as how we’re stuck here, we have no choice but to humor him with our attention.
“Anyway, that fall, I was going off to Yale and my father made me break up with her,” he says. “Hardest thing I ever did. Broke her little heart to pieces too.” Granddad pauses. “It’s been almost fifty years, and I still think about her sometimes. But a few months later I met your grandmother. And she was twice the woman Emeline was, and I never looked back. Your grandmother was it for me. And I can’t imagine what my life would’ve been like had I married the girl from the bakery down the street.”
“Good story, Granddad,” Westley says. Kiss ass. “I never knew about this Emeline.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. “You’ve never talked about her before. What brought this on?”
My heart races, though I try my best to play it cool. Lila and I have been extremely careful each and every time we’ve met up at the cottage. We do everything by candlelight. We sneak out after the rest of the island is asleep. We erase any and all signs that anyone was ever there.
Granddad shrugs, his hands gripping the steering wheel. “Just felt like something the two of you needed to hear.”
His answer does nothing to quell my suspicions. Granddad is playing coy. I’m well aware of the fact that he’s smarter than he acts, and “manipulative” is his middle name—a fact I always keep in my back pocket.
Chapter 22
Lila
“Hey, we can’t meet up tonight,” I tell Thayer after dinner Thursday night. “Grandma got up in the middle of the night last night to check on me and noticed I was gone. I told her I was outside on the porch and she bought it because apparently she didn’t think to look outside … but I think we should lay low for a while.”
His lips rub together and his brows furrow. “Yeah, Granddad made this weird comment a couple days ago on the boat.”
I gasp. “You think he knows something?”
“God, I hope not.”
Sometimes I love sneaking around and having our own little secret—other times I hate it because at any time, it could be swept out from under us.
“I have to go,” I tell him when I hear my grandma calling for me from the kitchen.
He hooks his hands around my waist and pulls me against him, stealing a kiss that only makes the thought of not seeing him tonight that much more painful.
And then I walk away, trying my damnedest to wipe the ridiculous grin from my face before anyone sees it.
Chapter 23
Thayer
Lila sits cross-legged on a checkered picnic blanket, tying a ring of dandelions into a crown that she places on her head.
“How’s do I look?” she asks.
“Like a dandelion queen,” I say.
She lies on her back, staring up at the puffy white clouds that hover above us in the perfect blue sky. It’s a miracle we managed to pull this off. I packed us a lunch, she brought the blanket, and we took alternate routes to the alcove where we met up at the grassy section just outside the beach.